[Dixielandjazz] Stan Greig

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Stan played piano for a long time with Humph's band -- after Mick Pyne, whose other instrument was cornet. 
Mick could have performed with the other people listed as earlier colleagues of Tony Fisher. 
I'm sure he did play with some of them. His ALONE TOGETHER is mighty impressive and emphatically OKOM. 

Stan was of a generation which grew up with boogie woogie in earshot. 
He was drummer in Sandy Brown's initial Fairweather band.  
A master of tempo was what Wally Fawkes said of him when I heard the Fawkes-Greig unit at Kings Cross.Stan can be seen on YouTube as pianist in a touring Harlem Blues and Jazz band. 
His day job was as a piano tuner, I think in succession to his father but in London rather than Edinburgh.
I remember him as a member of Humph's band doing one of the Ellington-Blanton duets at an Edinburgh gig. Maybe it was "Pitter, Panther, Patter" and interesting though not an ideal performance. The interesting thing was a kind of blurriness of Stan's playing, not crisp articulation but a forward moving flow, which is what he brought to Humph's band. I'm sure the articulation would have been clearer on a newer piano requiring less internal attention of the sort Stan ate by providing. It was intriguing to hear the change from Pyne to Greig at a time when I was hearing more than at any other time Humph's band.
Humph was blessed in having those two to choose 
(and give money to, to cite the famous Ellington retort to Humph on the "gimmick" which enabled him to keep the band together. The original interview, which involved Humph and John Dankworth, was excerpted to include the quip during a BBC hour of John Dankworth from the archives, marking -- would you believe -- the putting up of a blue official plaque to mark the saxophonist/ composer etc's sometime whereabouts. There wasn't exactly a plethora of information about any other musicians, and the captioning as seems usual when the BBC deigns to do any jazz thing on TV seemed to have been contrived by fans of cliche serving an apprenticeship in children's broadcasting 

But they did in the past broadcast back at the time a Dankworth-Clark gig from a tour Clark made. 
Complete with Clark re-telling the Dankworth joke about how a herd of cattle strayed into an ink factory, drank from a vat, and Moo-ed Indigo. 

Less naughty than Rex Stewart's story of "Warm Valley",
ttfn,Robert R. Calder
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