[Dixielandjazz] grandparents in the swing era blues?

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Grandparents these days might in Britain be like some Americans in thinking Kenny Ball a better musician than he was, but if you were born sixty years ago Kenny Ball's heyday as a pop star would already have begun receding
I detest the phrase "Fake News" and expressions which parrot the noun "Fact" when the proposition advanced is a non-fact, an un-fact, NO fact.  But a lot of the problem has been of going beyond over-simplification into sheer distortion, like the young fool quoted somewhere about Charlie Parker the "Dixieland saxophonist"  -- well, he had been taught Procrustean non-history, which by choppings off and stretchings fits a few anatomical bits into a bed designedly not for the human body, or soul.  
One year I had a one-day all-day ticket for Edinburgh jazz festival events (20-25 years ago) and passed it over to a young guy who could well be a grandfather by now, who was even more keen on Peter King than on Peter's partner that festival, Red Rodney. My ticket would get him into a late night gig supposedly with the two of them, and before that a fifteen minute slot en route there with the same two. I went back to my digs and heard the fifteen minutes on the radio, after which it seems Red was too knackered and the young lad had an hour of Peter King Quartet  -- not for everybody here, but as a sheer musical phenomenon worth hearing the two of them were completely in tune, playing in unison it was impossible to pick out one man's sound from the other.

Which wasn't my point. The young guy, when I mentioned George Chisholm, said,
HE'S TRAD....
That anecdote pretty well mirrors what a young American said to me aboiut twenty years before, how he had considered going along when he saw a poster advertising as a legend "Louis Metcalf"  -- a real legend, who was recorded again around the time. But every time the poor guy had followed up something supposedly presenting earlier jazz it was the same tourist senile pop nonsense I feel badly about every time I come on a clip of old Sing Miller delivering by now crystallized schmaltz with New Orleans veterans who when the great parade day came probably deserved less to be buried than the sinking of this or that sort of jazz in the third-rate more lucrative of the day it was published. In the Ken Burns jazz series of films I fear Jerry Jerome talking of "it's American popular music"  strays into the same quicksand or slow slow quickschmaltz where as Steve Voce recognised Harry James and many contemporaries were comfortable swimming. And the jazz drowned. A sort of musical though inferior equivalent of the alleged poetry of Pam Ayres, which is worth mentioning since to the great disapproval of many people who will never have known it, Ms. Ayres has this past fortnight published a poem of real technical accomplishment. It was inspired by bleach and the current holder of the post to whose sometime actor occupant I remember Harrysweets Edison dedicating a performance of "There will never be another you"
R.R. Calder
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