[Dixielandjazz] Acker

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I am even younger than people who knew the 1950s heyday of Acker, a little young to recall more than the posters for the 1963 jazz festival where Ken Mathieson tells me he first met this clarinettist so much admired by another serious individualist performer on the horn, Earle Warren. 
Acker and Trad I remember being presented as something exotic on the naughty side (George Melly memoirs had not then reached print, and indeed there was a sort of censorship in that medium) with a fake mystique.  Like tacks in the hammers of a piano.  

Did Acker really want the bowler not  his Irish,
where the barber used to place the pudden dish
to deliver an urchin's trim
such as baldness cut out for him  
when he endured abnormal of the music marketeer's wish? 

But musicians have had to do worse things to elude poverty!

Robert R. Calder