Humphrey Lyttleton, Blues Excursion

 The last record on the Playlist schedule, leading up to 1 a.m. as the finale in The Jazz Show, is this but they aren't appearing here in any order. There's loads more still to appear.

One Tuesday evening in 1969, my mother very patiently sat with me while we went through a pile of records in search of the tune I wanted. We hadn't had a record player very long and Aunty Chris had donated a pile of roughly 'jazz' records and I knew there was a good one among them. We played Tommy Dorsey, Syd Lawrence, maybe Glenn Miller and possibly Satchelmouth. No, it's not that. Nope, nope. Hang on a minute....no. 

Eventually we came to a 10 Inch, 33 rpm disc that didn't look likely but there weren't any others left. Yes, that's it. It was Beale Street Blues on Jazz Session with Humph I was after then and we found it. It's a tremendous album. I am no jazz man but Humph's user-friendly retro trad is its most acceptable face. Blues Excursion takes up most of the second side, its lack of urgency giving space enough for Wally Fawkes, clarinet, and Bruce Turner, alto sax, for their excursions as well as Johnny Picard (it says here) on trombone and Humph's signature trumpet. New Orleans was re-created for a British audience by public school, ex-army Humph, in a way that pre-figured the blues being the inspiration for two like-minded art school students who met on Dartford station and decided to form a beat combo and acted out their fantasy quite realistically for the next sixty years and counting. Popular music, and all art, was ever thus, taking something you loved and doing something else with it.

British Trad Jazz was more faithful to its precursors than most, though. The laments of a New Orleans funeral are carried forward, it is syncopated sadness and these gentrified college boys paid respectful homage to the likes of Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet and Bix Beiderbecke. They weren't like the rock'n'roll people by who they were due to be swept aside into the niche they've occupied ever since but they weren't so different.

It was Trad, Dad. And most things turn out to have been so in the end.