[Dixielandjazz] IAJRC Alex Welsh Scottish Jazz

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Through Questia.org  an online and not free provider I found a sample from an article by Roger Craik. 
Perhaps someone has access to questia (I mean pays for it).  
anyway here is a sample of Roger Craik on a very famiiliar musician 
(I tried to copy the web link but the electronics disobliged


Article excerpt



It is now over a quarter of a century since the death of Alex Welsh. The bands that he led thrilled, inspired and charmed audiences in Britain and overseas for three decades, starting from the early fifties. Fortunately, he and the band in its various combinations have left us with many excellent recordings which confirm just how consistently good they were. Many of those documents are presently available; so perhaps it is a good time to remind ourselves of this legacy.

Alex Welsh was born into a working class Edinburgh family on 9 July 1929. According to John Chilton (1), he attended Broughton Secondary School in the city where he played accordion. He took up cornet in his teens and was sufficiently proficient by age twenty-two to play locally with the future Mick Mulligan Band clarinettist Archie Semple (whom Alex would later hire), clarinettist Sandy Brown and the Nova Scotia Band (illus. 1). The drift towards London of the better Edinburgh professional players had started by the early fifties. Dave Keir, the then leader of the Nova Scotians, was to make the move to Mulligan's band in 1953 and Alex was soon to follow southwards. There is a fascinating tape, from the very early fifties, of a BBC Scottish Home Service broadcast featuring a band under Semple's name with Alex on cornet and Dave Keir on trombone. They play a programme of lively Chicago-style numbers. The die was already cast for the years to come.

THE FIRST CLASSIC BAND

The new London-based Welsh band can be heard in three titles from a concert at the Royal Festival Hall on 30 October 1954 and, again, from the same venue, in January 1955 (2). Various stalwarts of the Welsh band of the period are already in place: trombonist Roy Crimmins, pianist Fred Hunt and drummer Lennie Hastings, with George Melly as well as Alex on vocals. Early in 1955, the classic Alex Welsh front line was completed by Archie Semple rejoining his Edinburgh friend. And so the classic recordings of the fifties commenced.

The band was a roaring success, both musically and financially. With Welsh's driving cornet, Semple, reminiscent of both Ed Hall and Pee Wee Russell, and the whole sound underpinned by Roy Crimmins, with a touch of Lou McGarity. Here was a group to take over and develop the British version of Chicago-style jazz, pioneered by Freddie Randall. How that early band sounded can be heard on the 2000 Lake release (3), "It has to Be...." bowling along like the classic New York City-based Commodore Records outfits of 1944.

But the Welsh band were more than mere imitators. Each of the front line soloists had his individual voice; Fred Hunt was a world class soloist in the idiom, while Lennie Hastings drove things along in a style well worthy of George Wettling and Cliff Leeman.

Up to this point, the band had been known as Alex Welsh and his Dixielanders, but, by the next batch of recordings, from 1957 onwards, it was Alex Welsh and his Band. The repertoire had also broadened to include swing and mainstream classics, while the rhythm was lighter (with Billy Lock, then Johnny Richardson, temporarily replacing Hastings). Notable albums from this period were the two 10" LPs

10" LPs, originally issued on Nixa: From Dixieland to Duke and The Melrose Folio. Re-issued on LP (4), and on CD (Lake LACD 92), titles include, Good Queen Bess and Up Jumped You with Love, as well as a beautiful Winin' Boy Blues.

I remember hearing the band for the first time in 1958 at a particularly rowdy student dance in Edinburgh, where the sheer exuberance of the band sound cut clean through the racket of the audience. Beryl Bryden was massively on vocals and the interval trio was led by pianist Dill Jones - great days!

But the band also had a gentle, lyrical side. Quite the best session from this time if not the best Welsh session of them all - came out in 1960 as Music of the Mauve Decade (5). As the title suggests, the music was meant to recapture the atmosphere of the Chicago gangster era of the 1920s and 30s. …