When I’d finished writing about Sidney Bechet I began a thorough search of my bookshelves to see what other jazz books were knocking about, and came across a Consul paperback from 1962 called, ‘Trad Mad’, written by the now legendary Brian Matthew; who’s still going strong on BBC Radio 2 on a Saturday morning introducing ‘The Sounds of the 60s’, which seldom, if ever, includes any ‘Trad’ Jazz.

Which is surprising when you consider the following sentence from the book, which shows just how wrong you can be:

” The popular music of any particular period can always be summed up by one convenient word or phrase. Think of a number, as it were, and there’s a tag to fit it. Even if we go back to the last century this applies, for the ballads and ditties of the nineties [1890s] will forever be dubbed Music Hall Songs. But to get a little closer to our own times, the late twenties and early thirties provided us with Dance Music, the next decade saw the emergence of Swing, the fifties gave us Rock, and the way things are at the moment it looks as though the sixties may well come to be labelled the ten years of Trad.”

In fairness to Brian The Beatles – whose decade the 1960s quickly became – had hardly been heard of when he was writing the book, with, I guess, less than a couple of weeks to get it ready for a publisher, who no doubt saw a quick buck waiting to be made about a musical boom that had been simmering toward boiling-point throughout the 1950s; and let’s remember ‘Trad’ was the only reason the Cavern Club in Liverpool was opened – The Beatles soon saw them off of course.

But ‘Trad Mad’, written for a waiting market, can now be seen as a source of information about the period – a well written social document if you will. With chapters about Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball, The Temperance Seven, and Chris Barber – plus meaty mentions along the way of Terry Lightfoot, Bob Wallis, and the much lamented Alex Welsh – the book quickly gets the old nostalgia buds going.

Matthew generally writes from a personal perspective, which makes the whole thing come alive, as this little excerpt from the chapter on Acker Bilk demonstrates:

” Such is the power of publicity and so brilliantly has the mythology of the Paramount Jazz Band been built up, that one’s first encounter with these gentlemen off-stage is apt to come as a mild shock. I know it did to me! I knew that Acker came from Somerset, of course, yet I half expected his conversation to be larded with bizarre phraseology devoted to his record sleeves. I knew it was probably stretching imagination beyond the bounds of credence, yet I somehow thought that those natty bowlers and picturesque waistcoats were articles of everyday wear, and not merely reserved for public appearances. I was, therefore, totally unprepared for this gentleman-farmer, peering into a small black note-book (which I subsequently discovered was a sort of literary and musical hold-all) and saying, ‘Ello, Dad. Glad to know yer. Us’ve bin talkin’ about this yer show on the bus, loike, and us thought mebbe it’d be a good idea if you wuz to say.’

” We were in the small control cubicle of the Playhouse Theatre in London, which is used by the BBC as one of their sound radio studios. The Paramount Jazz Band had been booked for a series of lunchtime half hour broadcasts, to be given in front of an audience, and I had been asked to act as part compere along with the maestro himself. Now I have never been an advocate of the ‘That was and here is’ school of announcing, which has always seemed to me to be such a deadly bore as to serve no purpose at all, and this looked like a golden opportunity to devise spoken contributions which would be a real part of the entertainment. To my great delight, not only Acker but all the members of his band and the BBC producer in charge, Terry Henebury, were of the same mind. Furthermore, they had all been thinking for days of angles and gags which would have a direct bearing on what we aimed to do – to give these shows a real character of their own. I can honestly say that those were among the happiest broadcasts in which it has ever been my good fortune to participate and they established a warm friendship which has endured ever since.”

I doubt if Brian had as much fun again when he did a host of similar shows with the army of pop and rock bands that played their way through that very same theatre throughout the 1960s. The sense of ‘fun’ that inhabits the brain of the average British jazz musician (irrespective of their playing style) is legendary, and thankfully never included the throwing of TVs out of hotel bedroom windows, for the simple reason they couldn’t – at least in the 1950s and 60s – afford hotel bedrooms, preferring the back of the band van, or the sofa of a friend, or better still the bed of a pretty member of the audience.

Now, Brian Matthew’s great little book isn’t just full of anecdotal fun stuff, but also gives a detailed account of how certain players came across jazz, how it changed their lives, and how they gave up their ‘real’ jobs to become jazz musicians at a time when jazz musicians were close to being heroes. One of those is the aforementioned Alex Welsh.

” By now Alex had reached the age of fifteen, and it had been decided that he should train for a post with an insurance firm, but two events were destined to change his plans yet again. A friend took Alex along to an Edinburgh jazz club, where the band was led by the clarinettist of local repute named Archie Semple, and he was inspired by what he heard not only to learn all he could about jazz, but to play it too. This ambition was made possible when Alex discovered that a local silver band provided free tuition for aspiring brass players, he enrolled immediately. His first choice was the trombone, but there were no vacancies in that section so he took up his second choice of cornet. Admittedly the repertoire of this band consisted of marches, polkas and military two-steps, but Alex was using his spare time to concentrate on playing jazz, with such good effect that a little later on, he was offered the trumpet chair which had suddenly become vacant in the Archie Semple band. This was a semi-professional group, but they spent their holiday touring in company with the then fully professional Mick Mulligan band, and it was at this time, Alex says, that he realised what fun it would be to earn a living purely by playing music. As a first step in this direction he gave up his job with the insurance firm and obtained work as a travelling salesman, which gave him more time to play jazz alongside other well-known Scots, Dave Keir, Roy Crimmins and Sandy Brown.

” In 1954, the firm of distillers [how good is that for a jazz musician] for which Alex was a salesman transferred him to London, the Mecca of all British jazzmen. At that time there were plans for him to join a new band which was to be formed also including Keir and Crimmins, but they were plans which never came to fruition. A musical policy was formulated which appealed neither to Alex nor Roy, so they withdrew from the group, with the result that the band as planned never appeared in public at all. It had been booked to appear, however, by the National Jazz Federation, at a concert in the Royal Festival Hall, and when the N.J.F. discovered that there was no such band in existence, they asked Alex to put in a pick-up band as a substitute. This he did, and apart from himself and Roy the line-up consisted of Bruce Turner, Dill Jones and Alan Ganley.”

As a result of that concert Alex Welsh formed his own band in 1955 and went on to huge success and critical acclaim. Alex died in 1982 and is still greatly missed.

‘Trad Mad’ is a treasure trove of information about an almost forgotten era, and the huge popularity of ‘Trad’ Jazz. And there can be no doubt that the musics influence on the later jazz scene, and the many aspiring jazz musicians – not only here in Britain, but around the world – was also huge, with a good many of the musicians written about in the book still out there playing.