[quote]Originally posted by johnfowles:
Quote:
The previous week's chart is interesting in particular Somerset lad Acker Bilk at number 48
That summer I attended the very last Bealieu (Bewley) Jazz festival in England and saw the Bilk band fighting their way onto
the stage I have a vivid memory of the double bass player using it and its spike as a battering ram to clear a way through the rioting fans crowding the stage and no doubt using some choice Anglo Saxon language to boot
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Oops
After I posted that I thought that maybe I had the wrong year for the Beaulieu riots and
did a google search I then found an interesting article in the UK Guardian newspaper on-line at:-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/criti...744505,00.html
Summers: the top 10
Summer of Trad (1960)
Key work: When the Saints Go Marching In, by Mr Acker Bilk and His Paramount Jazz Band
Note the picture above has been added by me to illustrate Bernard (Acker) Bilk as he looks nowadays
No musical trend seems as alien today as the trad jazz revival. But at the start of the 60s, rock'n'roll had waned in popularity. In a musical vacuum, the sound of Mr Acker Bilk and His Paramount Jazz Band was, bogglingly, adopted as a
teenage alternative. Their dress sense suggested that trad-jazz ravers were trying to imitate American beatniks. Somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, however, the signals got confused. Bare feet, jeans and CND symbols were big, but so were bowler hats. Cider replaced marijuana as the drug of choice. The liberating modern jazz favoured by Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady was roundly dismissed in favour of perky readings of When the Saints Go Marching In. Newspapers mocked the ravers' dancing as "jumping from foot to foot like a performing bear".
The strength of feeling against modern jazz caused a riot as the movement reached its zenith in the summer of
1960. Irked by
Johnny Dankworth's modern playing at the July Beaulieu Jazz Festival, ravers began chanting for Acker Bilk. Then they began fighting. A lighting tower was toppled. One game raver scaled the outside of the stately home and, in a protest as bizarre as the trad revival itself, began waving his bowler hat from the battlements.It was all very peculiar, and it wasn't built to last. While jazz fans were thumping each other in Hampshire, the Silver Beatles were in Liverpool, packing their bags for a long residency in a Hamburg nightclub. Events were about to overtake the ravers and consign the trad jazz craze to history
Note trad jazz (traditional i.e. New Orleans style) kept me occupied music wise from my early love of Rock and Roll in its initial "pure' period (Presley/Holly/Everlys) through the later phase before the Beatles changed pop music for ever in 1964.And then in 1966 I discovered Gordon Lightfoot
John Fowles
Don't beat me down, don't beat me down
I've got one life to live and that's all I can give, so don't beat me down
[ May 30, 2005, 13:07: Message edited by: johnfowles ]