JAZZ IN ROOM M

i.m. Anthony (Tony) Barrell

‘Jazz, unlike a bucket of nails, is full of paradoxes’.

Norman Granz, sleeve note to ELLA AND LOUIS

During term time he had an understanding

with the prefect in charge of the tuck shop,

which was on the ground floor of the decaying

annex. His record player was kept

under the counter until each Tuesday

after school, when it would be brought up a floor

to Room M. How he had persuaded

whoever he had had to persuade

to allow his fellow scholars to listen

to jazz at all never mind unsupervised

he never said, and we never asked.

He was Le Grand Meaulnes in that grammar school

of scholarship boys – founded, as part

of the reformation, by Henry VIII,

or, rather, the strategic Thomas Cromwell,

seeing the need for serried offices of clerks.

The annex was a neglected Georgian house

clamped to the substantial sandstone gateway

of the abbey Thomas and Henry dissolved.

The LPs he played were his – mostly big band,

Benny Goodman to Stan Kenton but sometimes

the quintet of the Hot Club of France. He was

the pedagogue par excellence – charming,

intense, generous, a good listener

in every way. We went there to learn.

He was very much our guru,

our rabbi – with a sharp sense of humour –

and at the start of a creative lifetime,

making important things happen for others,

in print, on the radio and TV.

The Head Master, a reverend, would have

considered him ‘anti’ – which translates as

‘willing and able to enable

others to see behind the curtain’.

One Tuesday he played us the album

‘Drum Battle’: Ella Fitzgerald vocals,

Oscar Petersen piano, percussion

Gene Krupa versus Buddy Rich – bandleaders,

erstwhile sidemen with Goodman and Dorsey –

a Jewish American and a Polish American,

on snare, bass, tom-tom, hi-hat, cymbals,

four beats to the bar in Carnegie Hall.

In that shabby room, its long sash windows

filled with views unchanged for centuries

of an English provincial city,

we were jazzmen chatting between solos –

about Lionel Hampton’s purple LP,

the Duke boycotting venues in the Deep South,

Django Reinhart evading the Nazis.

Note: Tony Barrell – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Barrell_(broadcaster)