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David Selzer is a writer of poetry, prose fiction, screenplays and stage plays. He embraces digital platforms to share his work of more than fifty years… READ MORE
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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)
3 responses to “JAZZ IN ROOM M”
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My guide into that world of jazz was my three year elder brother around that time. I remember your larger than life guru of course, but wasn’t aware of your sessions in Room M. How wonderful.
I am reminded too of that dreadful curmudgeon Canon Harvey and of the winter’s day he drove the crew of the first Eight to Wallingford to pace the 1960 Oxford University crew. I had arrived late and so was forced to sit alongside him in the front seat of his Bedford Dormobile, much to the amusement of my fellow rowers. Still stiffly wearing his dog collar, he drove the whole three hour journey in stony silence. I am quite certain that he would have disapproved of your jazz club, as he did of most things until the day…..
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Wonderful
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Barry’s Record Rendezvous on Blackfriars Street, sat just on the Salford side of the Irwell, a river no longer the important border that it had been after Roman times, and now flowing darker than a Black Friar, sluggish and unloved in its canyon, deep beneath the sound of jazz and blues drifting out from Barry’s.
This is where we came – those of us who were interested – to be educated about ‘music’, sadly lacking in my (also) grammar school. Barry was Jewish, and probably a real ‘bopper’ in his day, and what he didn’t know about jazz wasn’t worth listening to. His turn-table was always spinning with some import you couldn’t hear anywhere else, and this was where I first met John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk… so much more of a breath of fresh air than Alma Cogan and The Laughing Policeman who graced Uncle Mac’s Family Favourites on the wireless at the time.
Then there were the Blues from that place of dreams, ‘Chicago (Illinois)’, with their hand-printed LP covers featuring – the very names drew you in – Big Willie Dixon, Sunnyland Slim, Victoria Spivey, Washboard Sam, Snooks Eaglin, Edith Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ethel Smith – such an ordinary name to be belting out such great music – and Roosevelt Sykes et al et al. Barry had them all, and if you weren’t a smoker when you went in, you certainly were in danger of becoming one by the time you came out, the air and the listening booths being thick with nicotine from the fags of older men, internally moving to the music in a way no-one ever seemed to on Top of the Pops.
It was about then I that joined the Sixth Form A-level art group, two years before my time, and here was discovered a heady Secret Society of subversion of school rules by otherwise ‘serious’ Prefects in suits (a dart board was concealed behind a blue Picasso print), a lack of deference to caustic authority (‘the Deputy Head’s a bloody idiot’ by-the-way, Jeff), in a room full of ‘modern’ drawing, painting and sculpture, and all facilitated by Bert Roberts, the only teacher not to wear a gown… And music, the Dansette Record Player going full belt on Friday afternoons with Barry’s records, all rendezvousing with up-to-the-second pre-releases – one heroic youth’s father owning the record shop in Chorlton, this when we heard ‘Love me Do’ before anyone else did, and we simultaneously stopped painting, as one, to listen, followed by a collective ‘WoW!’, with The Head glowering (the expletive riddled description of him, unrepeatable here) at us powerless through the windows, as these were his supposed ‘henchmen’, the lads-in-black who really ran the school.
Thanks for the poem, David … such good memories to have shared with us, and to set the hare running – yet again – of one’s own memories.
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