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)
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By David Selzer
