Leeds jazz in the 60's

[Bert]

Only just discovered Secret Leeds and this thread. I played jazz very badly in the late 1950's/early 1960's in a band that sometimes played interval to Ed's on Wednesday nights at the Tram Sheds . (It was the Leeds Art College weekly hop - Ed's day job then was as a nude model for the students at the College). Ed's line-up then, with Jim Fuller on trumpet, Martin Fox on clarinet, Bernie Wilde on drums and Brian Goldsborough on banjo, was just great - one of the best I ever heard anywhere. Ed was basically a New Orleans style man - he was a great admirer and follower of Jim Robinson and George Lewis - but his band also did great renditions of King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton classics like Cakewalking Babies and Sidewalk Blues. In Rag Week Ed's band always did a street march with the strict rule that they had to stop at every Tetley's House they passed and have a pint of Mild - Ed's favourite - in fact just about his only - drink. There were a hell of a lot of Tetley's houses on the route, but they were always still playing great jazz at the end.I also saw them play at the Cobourg, which was then the Art College local. There was a battered little old musical instrument shop just round the corner from it - I think it was called Shearer's - which Ed and most other Leeds trad jazzmen insisted on patronising in preference to the posh music shop in Leeds - I think it was called Kitchens - in the then County Arcade (now the Victorian Quarter). At one time Ed also played at a pub called the Red House on the Dewsbury Road/Meadow Lane, where I had the misfortune to be arrested and fined £2 for drinking under age when it was raided by the cops during one of his performances. He was a versatile guy, also sometimes to be discovered in quiet pubs off-the-beaten-track accompanying himself on banjo to Irish folk songs.It was Martin Boland's White Eagles Jazz Band that played at the Star and Garter in Kirkstall.The biggest place on the trad jazz scene in those days though was the Bradford Student's Club. I used to watch a band called Casey's Hot Seven play there. Somebody told me he was related to Paul McCartney.It's great to hear Ed is still going strong, although I was saddened to see from another web search that Martin Fox died back in 2001.I was intrigued also to see the reference to the Dusters Convention. This must be Ed's "International All-Comers Dusters Convention Competed for Annually at Whitby-on-Sea". The winner was normally the one judged to have won on points by securing the greatest gasps of 'Jesus Christ', but a friend of mine won it one year by a knockout when all the other competitors stampeded from the pub leaving him on his own. He was very proud and probably still has on his wall the winner's shield Ed presented him with.            

[vjs]

Pleased to see Bert's comments,seemed interest in this area had died down. Bert, you clearly knew the scene well in those days,Ed would probably remember you-he isn't a computer user but does see messages from this site.What did you play? Ed still only drinks Tet's mild!Not sure if you now live in Leeds-sad to see so many of the old jazz places gone-The Coburg now a Cuban tapas bar!Fortunately we still have at least some of the people from that time still with us. vjs

[Bert]

'Play' is probably too flattering a word, but the instrument I made noises on was the clarinet. Ed may have painful memories of me because once when Martin Fox broke both legs in a motorbike accident and there was no other clarinettist available he had no choice but to ask me to stand in for him until Martin was able to play again. I had a disastrous first gig with him playing at an annual black tie ball at Bradford Officers' Mess. I'd turned up to meet Ed and the others for it at the Town Hall Tavern dressed in filthy jeans and an oily sweater 'cos that was the appropriate gear for Bradford Students Club, which I'd assumed to be what Ed meant when he said we'd be playing 'at Bradford'. Ed was in tails and even Jim Fuller had a smart lounge suit on. Ed said 'Don't worry; they think we're all weird; they'll just think you're a bit weirder". After the customary half dozen or so pints of Tetley's Mild, Ed forgot he had promised only to play stuff I knew and only in B Flat or F, and when we all climbed onto the stage at the Officer's Mess promptly tapped us in for something I had never played and in A Flat to boot. Knowing neither the tune nor the key, I spent the whole number, and much of the rest of the night, trying to find a note on my clarinet in tune with any of the notes they were all playing. Disaster became total calamity when Jim suddenly got one of the nosebleeds that sometimes aflicted him - probaby brought on by the stress I was causing him - and went off to find a hospital. He never returned that night, leaving just Ed and me, by now paralysed with fear, as the front line. After that Ed kindly had me over with my instrument from Leeds Central High School to Leeds Art College in the lunchtimes for a week or two to go through some chord sequences with me, and we managed to avoid any more total disasters like that until Martin returned. Even now when, in my mind's eye, I see Martin playing his breathtaking stuff, he has his legs in massive plasters up on chairs in front of him. That's how desperate Ed must have been to get him back.    

[vjs]

Hello Bert,Ed has seen your message and remembers all you spoke of,recalls you but not by name.Don't know if you wish to to identify yourself to him!He said you played with "Homer" Holmes who was at Leeds Coll. of Art-also M.Fox broke one leg not both,tho very badly.Martin is much missed.Sad to say,Martin Boland is now terminally ill-so many of the original musicians gone and no youngup-comers,they all want to do modern. If Wakefield is accessible for you Ed plays there on thursddays inc. Boxing Day-Cheers-vjs

[homer]

If I achieve nothing more before my three score years and ten is up, I'll slip away happy in the knowledge that I played in Ed O'Donnell's band for a year or so in the mid 60's.This thread - I've only just discovered it (thanks Bert) - has rattled memories that I'd forgotten I ever had.Ed O'D's line up at that time, was the statuesque Jim Fuller, Martin Fox, Bernie Wild, 'Wyatt' on bouble bass (I never knew his real name, not many people did) and myself on G banjo.Some of the gigs that come back to me were at the Huddersfield Jazz Club, The Yorkshire Hussar (on the Headrow, I think), The Queens - somewhere up Chapeltown way? The Peel on Boar Lane and the Town Hall Steps during Rag Week. There was a period when Martin Fox and I, plus girlfriends, would drive to Wakefield every week in Martin's unlikely Hillman Imp to join the rest of the band to play the interval in a packed Working Mens Club there.The music was The Best. The guys were The Greatest. And the money - £2 per head on a good night - was untold wealth to a poor art student with a banjo to keep strung. But the richest memory of all is the 'Back Room' bits of business than lay underneath it all.The Dusting Convention for starters. I was the lucky winner that nostril-quivering night in Whitby that Bert mentions above. Then there was the Sunday Luncheon Club: After meeting at the Town Hall Tavern, we would stroll round to Ed's flat in Park Square where Anne would provide an unforgettable meal - every Sunday! Jim Irons, laundry van driver and Head of Finance, would decide the meal's worth and then collect from each of us to pay Anne for being the perfect hostess. We then went through Saturday's paper, chose a film, and headed off for the Sunday afternoon Pictures.There was, of course, The Jug. This item looked exactly like any other 5-gallon plastic container that normally holds photograhic chemicals. But this wa no ordinary container. This was The Jug. Every Saturday evening, it was filled up - usually at the Town Hall Tavern - with Tetleys before setting off for the gig. It was refilled at the interval (I don't remember any Landlord, of any pub, ever batting an eyelid at being askd to 'fill 'er up please'.)It reappeared, miraculously, once the lights went down at the Sunday afternoon Pictures, and the remains of last night's beer was passed up and down the row until it was all gone.I lived for a while in a seedy terraced house in Beeston with the amazingly talented Brian Goldsborough. He was my mentor, banjo professor and after-hours drinking partner. I also spent a whole week convinced that the electrical fault (Goldsborough was an electrician in real life) in the record player in this dump was down to a knot in the flex near the plug!Goldsborough and Martin Fox are larger than life in my recently kick-over memories, and I was really shaken to see on this thread, that they've gone. Bill Bowskill also. Bill took the photograph (in a pub natrually) of me and my wife which is now enlarged, printed on canvas and hanging in the front room of my elder daughter's house in Clapham.Sorry for the essay - I've never collected these thoughts together in the same breath, until now. So... megathanks to this thread and all of you guys above. This is not just Memory Lane for me. This is an 8-lane Memory Motorway.Homer.

[Brandy]

NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICE! lol

[Bert]

Hi vjs. Ed's got it right. Homer (banjo) and I played together in Al Crossland's Jazzband - Al[wyn] being the trumpet player. Above is a pic of us playing interval to Ed at the Tram Sheds in about 1961. Bob Richardson on drums. Think the trombonist's name might have been Alan - I have trouble remembering all proper nouns these days. Can't remember the bass player's name at all. I remember the name of the cakewalking blond in the foreground though - my then French au pair girl friend Nicole. We were not remotely in the same league as Ed (look forward to seeing lots of pix of him from you guys - regrettably I have none), but we still got a surprising amount of work, such was the strength of the trad revival at that time before the Beatles and the Stones killed it off. We used to play interval to the dance bands at the Astoria and Capitol Ballrooms every Saturday night, with the intervals staggered just enough to give us time to take down our kit, load it in Al's car, hurtle across town and set up on the other stage with seconds to spare, all dressed in Acker Bilk-type outfits with straw boaters, the memory of which now makes me cringe. Ask Ed if he can remember a gig at a Conservative fancy dress party at a toff's mansion in Altrincham, Cheshire. I think I suffered the deepest and longest bout of alcoholic remorse of my life after that.The name Ed can't remember is David Cockerham - eminently forgettable! Thanks for the tip on Wakefield. I'm in the Southeast now, but if I can get up there sometime soon I'll be sure to get to the Grey.            

[Bert]

Homer's mention of playing on the Town Hall steps in Rag Week reminds me that that was one of the stand-ins I did too, doing my bit to help work our way through a few cases of Tetley's Family Ale as we played, and going on to take, and abysmally fail, A-Level Geography that afternoon at Leeds Central High School just up the road. When last in Leeds I went to have a look at the old school and discovered it had become a Council benefits office, so instead of kids coming out of the playground gate it had old greybeards coming out with bottles of booze in brown paper bags - just how my old Headmaster Dr Connell warned me I would finish up when he read in the Yorkshire Post of my arrest at the Red House and took away my prefect's badge. He was right about the grey beard and the booze, but not about the brown paper bags.    

[Loiner in Cyprus]

I remember seeing the White Eagles jazz band regularly at the Peel in the early 60s, I think it was on the second floor if my memory serves me right. Also I saw them on a number of occasions at the Star and Garter at Kirkstall. If I stayed to the end, as I usually did, I would miss the last bus, No 44, back to Scot Hall Road and have to walk back.    

[Pashy]

Hi Homer,If you know Jim Irons you'ld probably know Ron Walters and perhaps Dave Haigh or Dave Holdsworth. Ron and Jim both worked for 'Hygenic Laundries' the van could be spotted outside most good Tetleys houses in the 60s and even Armley Cons. Club.also Parkside on Saturday afternoons for hame games.Was jazz ever played at a pub I think was called The Fanshaw?At the 63 Dusters Convention Bernie Wild was declared winner with a couple of beauties but was found to have a bit of follow-through which meant immediate disqualification so on count back Jim Irons won again. The engraved medal was adorned with a silk ribbon of white and two thin brown stripes (kak&white) Hunslets then colours.On many Saturday nights 63/64 after a gig most of the blokes we have both mentioned used to end up at our house on Farnley Ring Road for more booze and jazz, you might have been one of them.I remember Bill Bowskill giving me an old Harmony jazz guitar which I still have.I'm going to attempt to attach some photos of all those blokes of that era but might need some guidance.Keep talking BoysCheers, Andy