[Dixielandjazz] Great Jazz Disasters!

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

The great jazz non-disaster I remember was when JAZZ FROM A SWINGING ERA played the large theatre/cinema which for some years served as the main concert hall in Glasgow. The main building had been celebrated for its acoustics, and in times of polluted air (1930s) singled out by the great pianist Artur Schnabel as the only venue in which he had performed on the basis of an assurance that there was, despite it being impossible to see them from the stage, an audience.  One day in the early 1960s Yehudi Menuhin expressed his outrage that the hall was also used for wrestling matches, but that didn't last long. The place burned out weeks later due it was said to a cigarette stub smouldering in rubbish sweepings after another wrestling evening. 

So in 1967 the full cast of the great tour were reassembling on stage, one after another, each for two blues choruses as Earl Hines trilled endlessly (the business was recorded in European venues in the course of the tour).  There was a huge high proscenium stage and a back curtain, and in coming on stage Vic Dickenson suddenly found what might even then have been called a pythonesque ornamental cord a couple of inches in diameter wrapped round just as he was proceeding through the curtain and lifting his trombone to his lips. He kept time, dislodged it and continued his solo after having opened it with a meaningful pause...  A phenomenal achievement.
Back in the old venue, later converted into a theatre and a reception suite - the latter the last place in which I saw Dave McKenna performing -- I went along to hear the Gil Evans British orchestra. In the theatre The bar did well that night, for the electronics used had been misbehaving and we were about an hour late into the theatre, accessed from the same foyer as the suite. As in the Peter Clayton joke where Higgy and his Six Hicks climbed into Pops Foster's bass for a classic recording, it sounded as if the full big band complement had somehow got into the body of Ray Russell's guitar.  The musicians were in their places, and John Surman looked like he was busting a gut on baritone, but inaudibly.  There was a very long interval, during which I overheard a lad who was carrying a huge ghetto-blaster complain that he'd travelled all the way from Aiberdeen --  and got himself a front seat -- and could hear nothing.  I was at the rear and the band could sometimes be heard there. Things were less vile during the second half, except of course people had to leave to get to public transport since the concert was seriously overrunning.  

Here my seat at the back proved unfortunate, for every time the door near me opened, well, that night the suite in which I was later to hear Dave McKenna, Al Grey and others was the venue of a wedding reception.  All of a sudden in the heat of Gil Evans and brass and (alas at times but mostly) electronics, a door opened and a blast of cooler air came into the theatre in the wake of a burst of what is sometimes called Scottish Country Dance Music, and the clatter of wedding guest dancing shoes. Gil Evans, British Band, and the Scottish Charles Ives dance band? 

 I tried to sneak through with minimal disturbance when it was time to run for my bus ---  or perhaps it was the revived  low level train service, which, when it was reopened around 1980, had disturbed the ground between its tunnel roof and the foundations of the building where I'd seen Vic Dickenson, etc., so the theatre was declared unsafe and demolished.  

But I'm not easily depressed!
Robert R. Calder 
 


     On Friday, 3 July 2015, 21:18, Ken Mathieson <ken at kenmath.free-online.co.uk> wrote:
   
 

 Hi Robert and assembled listmates!
The intricate sightless two-step described by Robert below was at a fine 
concert at the Queens Hall in Edinburgh by an all-star West Coast band 
calling itself the Lighthouse All-Stars many years ago. Some years 
before that I had worked with Shorty Rogers at the much-missed Black 
Bull Jazz Club in Milngavie, near Glasgow. He brought a pile of his 
wonderful quintet charts, which we rehearsed in the afternoon, then 
played at the club at night. Between the rehearsal and the gig, Shorty 
and I talked quite a lot and I remember telling him about tenorist 
Johnny Griffin's definition of Jazz: "It's a disease: some people catch 
it and recover, others catch an incurable dose without it actually 
killing them, and then there's the rest! Shorty enjoyed that and years 
later at that Lighthouse All-Stars concert at the Queens Hall, I went 
backstage at the interval to say hello to Shorty. He spotted me and 
shouted across a crowded room: "Hi Ken! How's your disease!" As you can 
imagine that stopped all the talking!

The Queens Hall is well accustomed to hosting jazz concerts, but jazz is 
pretty well unheard of at the Civic Centre in Motherwell, just down the 
road from where Robert stays. It was the unlikely venue for a concert by 
the Harry James Orchestra in the early 1970s and the scene of a 
spectacular incident involving drummer Sonny Payne. His drums were 
perched on a riser right at the back of the stage and, late in the 
concert, Harry announced a drum feature for Sonny. This involved a lot 
of sensational drumming and a bit of acrobatics with sticks being thrown 
into the air and bounced off the floor while the drum pyrothechnics 
continued. One of the sticks bounced up just out of Sonny's reach and, 
in trying to catch it and keep the solo on the rails, he fell off the 
drum stool, the riser and the stage. He disappeared completely from view 
but retrieved the wayward stick in the dark and, ever the showman, 
climbed back onto the stage, then the riser, then got back behind the 
kit while playing complex patterns on the floor as he went. The audience 
gasped at his fall, but the rest of the band were helpless with 
laughter. So disaster was narrowly averted, the audience loved it and 
predictably the band showed not an iota of sympathy, especially when 
Harry back-announced the solo by saying "Keep that in the act, Sonny!".

I think Robert might have come up with a great idea for a thread here 
and I'm sure other listmates must have loads of stories of jazz 
disasters (averted and otherwise).

Robert wrote:

We had also at that concert witnessed at close hand the alarming-comic spectacle of Bill Perkins, who demonstrated why it is unwise to dance wearing loosely located spectacles while stood up to solo on baritone sax.? The dance became more intricate after -- following some alarming bounces and slippages -- the specs eventually fell off and the wonderful Perkins, unable to stand still while improvising (behind a desk and in a very confined space!) had to avoid standing on the specs which were near his feet, and which , because they had fallen off, he could not see.? Fully a match for anything in those lists of Great Operatic Disasters some people compile.? Perhaps the accident added a further edge of nervous energy??

Cheers,
Ken