Crane River Memories 2 by Julian Davies

Previously published in the Ken Colyer Trust Newsletter of August 1990

Bill Colyer has corrected me on a couple of points in "Crane River Memories 1" in the last issue of the Newsletter. Bill tells me that he was with Ken when he came to find John R T and myself at Longford. He also tells me that, before we had a clarinet in the band and I was still playing brass bass, or the "grunting iron" as it was affectionately known, we had thought of calling the band the "Cranford Brass Band".

People sometimes ask "How did your parents react to your playing jazz?" In those days most parents, including Bill and Ken's father, were strongly opposed. Val, Ken's sister, recently sent me some old photographs of of the Cranes from those days, including one of me playing the grunting iron. It brought back quite a few memories. This was the photograph that appeared in the local paper - my first publicity shot. I was naturally very pleased with with myself and, since it was near Christmas time, I got a few glossy prints of the picture from the newspaper publishers and made them into Christmas cards. I sent one to my father, an enthusiastic lover of music whose interest is as narrow as it is deep. The card was promptly returned with a terse note to the effect that he did not wish to see me involved in playing this dreadful music.

I never really mastered the brass bass. My first one was a sousaphone which I bought for £3 from Mike Daniels, the leader of the Delta Jazz Band. The price was cheap, even for those days, but the instrument was very old and the brass had gone brittle so that it was forever springing leaks. It required maintenance before every gig and was largely composed of solder, which was worth all of the £3. I was never able to get a good sound out of it and eventually Ken advised me to get a string bass.

My parents were recently divorced and I was living with my mother. I was working for EMI at Hayes as a trainee electronics engineer for a little over £2 a week, most of which my mother took for my keep. I was desperate for some decent clothes and persuaded my father to send me £50 so I could get kitted out. On the Saturday morning after the money arrived, John R T and I set off to Charing Cross Road on our weekly hunt for second hand records. In those days there were dozens of second hand record shops in and around Charing Cross Road, and we used to spend Saturday mornings sorting through the boxes inside and outside these shops.

We also used to visit George Beaumont's music shop in Great Newport Street aand it was on that morning and in that shop that temptation came my way - George had a double bass for sale for £45 including a cover. My father was amazingly furious when he heard how I had blown the money, even though I spent the rest of it on a pair of beige hopsack trousers and a pale green sweatshirt which I wore for almost a whole year.

Hopsack trousers were a phenomenon of that period after the war when clothing was still in short supply. They had the quality of holding a crease for as long as it took to get them on. Monty, who was always careful of his appearance, found it difficult to support the embarrassment of being seen with me.

I put paint marks all the way up the neck of the bass where the finger positions should be and started to teach myself how to play it. I studied pictures of Pops Foster and tried to assume his posture. It wasn't until very many years later that I read his biography and discovered why he stood the way he did. He first learned to play when he was only seven years old on a bass his father made him from a barrel, and he must have had difficulty holding the instrument.

The only guidance one had in those days as to what the music should be like, was from listening to 78 rpm records. It was very difficult to hear the bass on these records and often all one could make out was the slap as the string hit the fingerboard, the actual note seldom came through. At least, one could get the some idea of the rhythms one was supposed to produce but little else. I often wondered whether, just as Baby Dodds used the wooden blocks a lot when recording,because that was just about all the early machines could pick up of the drums, a lot more bass slapping may have gone on in recording studios than on the stage. In his biography, Pops states that most jazz was bowed in the early days.

After I had been struggling for about three weeks, I turned up for a rehersal with my sousaphone as usual. Ken said "Can't you play the string bass yet? Bring it along next time." I thought that was a bit rich coming from someone who had spent three years in the Merchant Navy learning his instrument. Nevertheless, I did as I was asked and, thanks to his patient coaching and encouragement, began to make progress.

Some months later, when the band was already on its meteoric rise in popularity, we arrived at a gig in Manchester. The band coach drew up outside the theatre and there stood my father. He had come to hear the band. He sat in the audience among the rapturous fans and listened very seriously. Afterwards he came backstage. I have to confess I was a little apprehensive about how he would react to the bunch of wild characters he found me with. He didn't say much but he was friendly and smiled a lot.

Last Christmas - his 91st - I gave him a copy of Ken's book and explained that it was unedited in accordance with Ken's wishes. He read a few chapters and then put it down. "I am not going to read any more because, as you know, I have no interest in the music or the people involved in its production, but you were quite right not to allow it to be edited, it is beautifully written."

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