Part 1 of a transcript of the presentation given by Sonny Morris at the Ken Colyer Trust Easter Parade, 2000

Previously published in the Ken Colyer Trust Newsletter Summer 2001

Introduction by Dave Hancocks: We are gathered here to have a "chat" by a legendary figure in British jazz. What can we say about Sonny? He said, "Don't say very much at all".
· First of all: a family man for nearly 50 years. Miriam is not too well nowadays, and I'm sure we all send our love to her.
· A former member of the Household Cavalry, but he's not brought his horse today.
· In his time, a very fine footballer.
· An expert in the insurance business.
· A man with very firm principles, a great sense of humour and, particularly in his younger days, a real tough nut, I can tell you - verbally and physically!
· Very, very highly regarded by all his jazz peers: admired and respected. It has to be, of course, the one and only, legendary Sonny Morris.

Sonny:
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, welcome, thank you for coming in out of the rain. I'm just going to talk about my connections with Ken Colyer and the Crane River Jazz Band. It started really when I first met Ben Marshall in 1938, at school. Because of the slight difference in our ages we weren't together very often in those days, but over the years we kept in touch and, when I was in the army, Ben used to write to me and tell me about his musical activities. He told me about a visit he'd made to hear George Webb and his Dixielanders, and that he'd been quite impressed and told me what a good band it was. They were doing some dance gigs. When I came home I also went to hear George Webb's Band and, by that time, the personnel had changed and they had Humphrey Lyttelton on trumpet.

Ben also told me he was forming a band with Ron Bowden on drums. Ben was going to play the guitar, Ralph Dolimore was the piano player (I don't know if you remember Ralph Dolimore: a fine piano player who eventually went on with Geraldo and Ted Heath; unfortunately he died very young, but he was a marvellous musician), and a trumpet player named Reg Burgoyne. By the time I came home, Reg Burgoyne had left Ben's band and Ben asked me if I'd like to buy a trumpet. So I paid him two-pounds-ten shillings for this trumpet.

One day Ken Colyer and Bill Colyer called on Ben at his home and said they'd like to form a band, and Ben said, "Well, we've already got a trumpet player (I wasn't really a player then, I was still learning); so Ken said, "Well, let's have two trumpets." And that's how the two-trumpet line-up came about in the first place. In actual fact, some of the rumours about who formed the Crane River Jazz Band are quite wrong: Ken didn't form the Crane River Jazz Band, he joined it. Actually it wasn't the Crane River Jazz Band then; just a bunch of guys playing about. We used to go over to the fields and practise, and we used to draw big crowds because over the fields there was a great herd of cows and they used to come over. I believe the milk yield went up quite considerably, so it wasn't all bad news.

Eventually Bill Colyer went to see the landlord of the White Hart at Cranford - a young man called Clary - and arranged for us to do some rehearsals and practise in that hut. In the meantime, Bill had gone to see John R T Davies and his brother Julian, down in Longford, and asked if they were interested in joining up. Well, they arrived with a lorry-load of instruments. As you probably know, John R T is quite eccentric in many ways and he had this great armful of instruments. Julian had a Sousaphone. John decided he could play the trombone. So we had a 4-piece brass band with one guitar and we played a few numbers with that line-up. Then John R T suggested Ben try the banjo to try and cut through the brass, so that's what Ben did and why he took up the banjo. Then Cy Laurie was asked to come and join us; at the last minute he couldn't make it, so he sent Monty Sunshine. Monty came along with his metal clarinet, we had a good time, and he joined the Band.

We started rehearsing regularly on a Tuesday night at the White Hart and people used to come and hear us. Eventually it got so popular that we decided to open another night, a Friday night, and that was really the beginning of the Crane River Jazz Band as such. We still hadn't named ourselves and we still used to go over to the fields and practise by the river and that's how the River Crane became part of our jazz history. We carried on playing and built up quite a following. We played on a stage about 6 inches high, and it was so busy there that we had to put a rope across the stand to stop people crowding onto us. Anyway Ted Swift decided to organise things: he formed a club and we had rather a large following.

In the meantime Ken and Bill used to come to my house with an old Dansette record player and some records. Among the records was Bunk Johnson's One Sweet Letter from You, and I think we're going to hear a piece of it now:

Musical interlude

That's one of the battered records - one of four 78 rpm records - by Bunk Johnson and his Band; this really was the music that made me want to try and play what I'm trying to play now. This was a regular occurrence: Bill and Ken came to my house very regularly and played many different types of jazz records. But it was the Bunk Johnson Band that really appealed to me. That was really my introduction to jazz. I'd always been interested in music - started to play the violin at 7, but you'll be glad to know that I gave that up! I used to listen to lots of dance music on the radio. You're almost too young to remember this, but the American Forces Network broadcast every night, and played all the swing records: the Count Basies, Duke Ellingtons and all that sort of thing, and I was very interested in that but didn't know anything about hot jazz until I heard these Bunk Johnson records. So we'd played all this New Orleans music on record - not that there was a lot available in those days - but we decided that we would try to play that kind of music.

Basically, it's mainly ensemble music and that's what we tried to do. And that's why Ken led us in that way and he used to like to say that he'd taught me everything he knows and everything I know. It's not quite true but he did teach me that the great thing is to listen to what the other men in the band are playing, instead of just blasting away and not really making anything cohesive. It was the ensemble sound that we aimed for, and we try and do that still in our band (sometimes!)

One of the things we used to do was to go to John R T Davies' house in Longford and rehearse in his bedroom. As you probably know, John is a great artist on the recording side - he does the digital transfers. He was into recording even in those early days and we used to make records there. I think probably the very first recorded skiffle music in England was made there in 1950 but was never issued until much later. It was Ken playing the guitar and singing, John R T Davies playing the guitar, and Bill Colyer playing the brushes on a suitcase; they recorded Muddy Old River - as I said, probably the first skiffle music recorded by a British outfit in this Country:

Musical interlude

I don't know if you've noticed, but Ken had a different accent then. He went to New Orleans, as you know, and came back with his new accent. Ken was born in Yarmouth, in Norfolk - I don't know if you know that - and he spoke like a Norfolk fellow. Another thing about Ken Colyer: he often said he was born too late, in the wrong country, and the wrong colour. He wanted to have been born so that he could have played in New Orleans in the '20s. But I don't think he realised what it would have meant to be coloured in those days. But that was one of his wishes. He wanted to be a jazz musician, and that's all he was ever interested in. Incidentally, a lot of people misunderstand Ken and call him narrow-minded. He wasn't narrow-minded, he was very single-minded but he had a very wide appreciation of all sorts of music, particularly the blues, the country blues. I don't think a lot of people realise this. He was single-minded in that he knew what he wanted to do, but he still listened to other kinds of music.

Ron Bowden was with the Band for quite a long while. Eventually he decided to leave, because he wanted to play more modern music. We went along for quite a while without a drummer at all; in fact we never had a regular drummer again after that. We used one or two: one was a lion-tamer (he wasn't a lion-tamer actually, more a lion-keeper at the zoo at Regent's Park), Cyril Louth. We also used George Hopkinson, who was with Humph's Band at the time. Eventually Pat Hawes joined the Band. Pat used to sit-in on occasions. At the time he was in the RAF (in those days we were all servicemen or ex-servicemen, except for Ken who was an ex-Merchant Navy man) and Pat would sit-in with us when he came on leave. We used to play regularly at the Camberwell School of Arts, where Monty was an art student. Eventually when Pat left the service, he said he would join the Band and stay with the Band.

One thing to mention: a lot of people believe that Ken was the originator of British jazz, but of course he wasn't. Georgie Webb was probably one of the first, and there were other bands. Mike Daniels had a wonderful band in those days and was a fine trumpet player. Mick Mulligan had a band and was another good trumpet player (he had a singer - I forget his name! He's an art critic now). We weren't the first, but we were the first, I think, to try and play in the....I suppose it was the Revival of New Orleans jazz. Bunk Johnson wasn't recorded until the '40s with George Lewis. Some of the musicians like Jim Robinson had been recorded earlier with Sam Morgan and people like that. So what we were doing was Revival music really. The Ory Band was a Revival Band because he wasn't recorded much with his own band until the Revival period. The Ory Band did play a lot of old songs....I expect you've noticed!

One of Ken's main interests at that time was Mutt Carey who played with the Kid Ory Band. There are two tracks now: one is of Kid Ory's Band with Mutt Carey and then to show you, as near as I can, the influence that Ken had from Mutt Carey, there is a recording of Ken playing the same tune. Here we go with Blanche Touquatoux (I don't know what it means - but it sounds good!)

Musical interlude

That was Ken Colyer on Blanche Touquatoux, following Kid Ory's Band, and I think there's quite a strong influence from Mutt Carey. You may not agree, of course, but that's your own free choice, as my old man would say.

Eventually we became quite popular and we were in great demand all over the Country. We used to go to Sheffield, to a place called the Civic Restaurant, run by a nice fellow called Colin Graham, who was a newspaper reporter. We were quite regular visitors to Sheffield, and we used to travel by train a lot which was obviously expensive with 7 of us (8 of us really 'cos Bill was with us). So we decided to get a bandwagon. We found a coal lorry with a flat back and John R T Davies discovered one of those wooden ambulance bodies they used in the services. Ken and Bill's brother, Bob, became our first roadie and we decided we'd take a trip to Sheffield in our brand new bandwagon. There were no seats in this thing so we had deck chairs.....can you imagine....? deck chairs on the back of the lorry! There was a little flap at the front of its body, and a flap at the back of the cab. We had a piece of string right through for signals. I was somehow elected to be co-driver, Bob Colyer drove and we set off to Sheffield. We got as far as Stamford; as you go into Stamford there's quite a steep hill, where the brakes failed, then the engine failed. Stuck there, we went into The George and had a drink while Bill arranged for a coach to take us the rest of our way. That was the first and last trip on our bandwagon, and we never had a band wagon after that. We used a coach driver named Johnny Swinton who never ever seemed to speak, chain-smoked, and had no heat in the coach at all. It was a Bedford coach with the engine inside. We used to take the cover off the engine....that was the heater!

CONTINUED IN PART 2

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