Sounds Like London Read online

  ‘London, is the place for me

  London, this lovely city

  You can go to France or America, India, Asia or Australia

  But you must come back to London city …’

  Captured by Pathé News, against the rusting hull of the former troopship, this cheerful, assured performance of “London Is The Place For Me” is still dusted off as an easyfit encapsulation of the start of mass immigration from the Caribbean into the UK. And, indeed, of the immigrants themselves – happy-go-lucky souls, never too far from spontaneous song. Neither assumption is particularly accurate. Not entirely the carefree, spur-of-the-moment songster he might seem, Kitch was already a big star all across the Caribbean, and had written the song during the four-week voyage for exactly this moment. For that matter, West Indians had been present in London in significant numbers since the First World War, while the Windrush itself had brought over a considerable number of Jamaican settlers the previous year. Kitch and fellow Trinidadian calypsonian Lord Beginner made the decision to pay the £28.10s passage on the Windrush precisely because they knew there was a healthy African-Caribbean music scene in London, and they could find a relatively wealthy black audience.

  As a symbol of specifically musical immigration into the UK, however, Kitch’s quayside concert is priceless. For a calypso so vividly to reference the capital was a defining moment. This wasn’t simply music performed and consumed in Britain, on a strictly insular level, by immigrants and reverent aficionados; it was music that while remaining faithful to the Caribbean was adapted to fit its new setting, and found itself in a creative environment that was prepared to make efforts to accommodate it. Much like the passengers on the Windrush, who came in, got their feet under the table, got to know the neighbours, and mixed it up a bit with them. One reason the ship has assumed such significance is that 1948 marked the start of the process whereby Caribbean immigration made a cultural impression on the UK, as arrivals began to see the country as a long-term home. While staying true to who they were, they were changing how they did things, and the world in which they found themselves would never be the same again.

  WHEN DISCUSSION TURNS to West Indian musicians who were active in London before the dawn of ska, the story usually begins with the beboppers of the 1950s: the likes of Joe Harriott, Wilton Gaynair, Harry Beckett and Dizzy Reece. Caribbeans had, however, been at the forefront of British jazz for almost as long as British jazz itself. Their influence is one of the great untold stories of the London scene of the 1930s and 1940s. By adding elements of their own countries’ music, players from the colonies were responsible for much of the originality in early British jazz, which otherwise, essentially, imitated jazz from the US.

  In 1948, passage on the Windrush from Jamaica to the UK cost £28.10s; the voyage has come to symbolize the start of mass immigration from the Caribbean. From the left, passengers John Hazel (21), Harold Wilmot (32) and John Richards (22) lead a style offensive on the capital.

  The very first black band to make its mark in the UK, the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, brought West Indians into the British jazz world in 1919. Put together by composer Will Marion Cook in New York the previous year, the 27-piece African-American band arrived in London to fulfil long-term contracts first at the Philharmonic Hall in Great Portland Street, and then at Kingsway Hall in Holborn. Along with the all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band, who came from the US for an extended stay at around the same time, the SSO can be credited with introducing jazz to the UK. Such was its quality that it included operatic soprano Abbie Mitchell, pianist/conductor Will Tyers, and clarinet legend Sidney Bechet – who first encountered the soprano saxophone in London, seeing one in the window of a Shaftesbury Avenue music store and buying a specially modified version.

  This versatile black band made an immediate impression on straight-laced Edwardian London, then recovering from the First World War. The Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, invited the SSO first to play at Buckingham Palace, and subsequently to headline a grand ball at the Albert Hall to mark the first anniversary of Armistice Day. With demand high, the band stayed on beyond 1920. Over the ensuing years, its original American members drifted away, to be replaced by London-based musicians who hailed from Barbados, Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica, Antigua, Haiti, Sierra Leone and Ghana.

  During the 1930s and 1940s, London’s better swing and rhumba bands were either entirely or largely West Indian – even if these British colonials frequently pretended to be Cuban, because the most fashionable dance rhythms came from the island. More than one musician of the day has maintained that Caribbean players were sought after for their trademark combination of exuberance and discipline, vital for the very swinging-est swing – a trait that later manifested itself in ska. Above all, though, as citizens of the British colonies these black players had the right to work in the UK, whereas from 1935 onwards the Ministry of Labour made it difficult for US musicians to get permits. UK bandleaders could thus pass them off as Americans, thereby greatly increasing a band’s glamour factor at a fraction of the cost of the real thing and with minimal bother.

  A veritable flood of Caribbean musicians were therefore flowing into London long before the Windrush hove into view. Big bands like Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson and his West Indian Dance Band, Frank Deniz and his Spirits of Rhythm, and Leslie ‘Jiver’ Hutchinson’s All-Coloured Orchestra were in huge demand for ballrooms and wireless broadcasts. As both musician and socialite, the smooth, well-spoken Hutchinson was a particular favourite of the aristocracy. It was not unusual for him to accompany the hard-drinking Prince of Wales back to York House in the early hours to continue carousing. Recordings by the higher-profile early British black bands can be found on Topic Records’ anthology, Black British Swing.

  At the same time, any number of small groups, pick-up bands and informal, shifting house bands were appearing in nightclubs of all sizes, all over London. Besides such well-known venues as the Café de Paris in Coventry Street, the Florida Club in Bruton Mews, the Embassy Club in Mayfair and the Hammersmith Palais de Danse, the West End also held a remarkable number of black-owned establishments, even before the Second World War. Soho was home to the Caribbean in Denman Street; the Nest in Kingly Street; and the Fullardo, and later the Abalabi and the Sunset, in Carnaby Street. Just outside, and somewhat tonier, were Edmundo Ros’s high-society haunt the Coconut Grove on Regent Street, and the Paramount Ballroom in Tottenham Court Road, under the apartment block Paramount Court. The latter is now an upmarket strip joint, but back then it was a big plush ballroom, owned by a Jamaican immigrant.

  At the Royal Albert Hall, in 1942, Guyanese conductor, composer and clarinettist Rudolph Dunbar became the first black man to conduct the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

  ARGUABLY THE MOST NOTEWORTHY of the pre-war West Indian influx was Guyanese clarinettist Rudolph Dunbar, who arrived in 1931. Dunbar had studied his instrument at Columbia University’s Institute of Musical Arts (later renamed the Juilliard) in New York; was involved in the Harlem jazz world of the 1920s; learned conducting and composing from Phillipe Gaubert and Paul Vidal, respectively, in Paris; and had been taught classical clarinet by Louis Cahuzac, considered the world’s leading soloist of his time. Once settled in London he fronted his own dance orchestras – the All-British Coloured Band and the Rumba Coloured Orchestra – and played alongside fellow Caribbeans including Cyril Blake, Joe Appleton and Leslie Thompson. As a sideline, he became the first black man to conduct the London Philharmonic when he led them in front of seven thousand people at the Royal Albert Hall in 1942. Dunbar also conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in 1945, and conducted in Russia, the US and Poland. Whenever he could, he’d perform works by black composers.

  Being Guyanese, however, Dunbar was in the minority among London’s overwhelmingly Trinidadian musical contingent. Because Trinidad had its own unique music scene, centred on calypso, its players tended to be more evolved. Double-bassist Al Jennings came over in the 1920s, and led his own bands through the 1930s
and 1940s, most notably at the Kit Kat Club in the Haymarket – in the basement of the building that until recently housed the Odeon cinema – and at the Hammersmith Palais. He returned to Trinidad after the war, where he formed the All-Star Caribbean Orchestra, only to bring them back for a long-term residency in London in 1947.

  Clarinettist Carl Barriteau moved to London from Trinidad in 1937, and played with bandleader Ken Johnson. After Johnson was killed when a German bomb scored a direct hit on the Café de Paris in March 1941, Barriteau, who suffered a broken arm in the incident, formed his own West Indian Dance Orchestra. As well as entertaining British troops on ENSA tours, he performed nightclub and variety-hall gigs, and broadcast extensively on BBC radio.

  Sax man Freddy Grant, who also arrived in 1937, made quite an impact on London. He was Guyanese, but might as well have been Trinidadian, having spent a long time in jazz and calypso orchestras on the island. After playing jazz with Appleton, Dunbar, Blake and Hutchinson through the 1940s, he prospered with his own bands, including Freddy Grant and his Caribbean Rhythm, Freddy Grant and his West Indian Calypsonians, Frederico and the Calypsonians, and Freddy’s Calypso Serenaders, many of which employed the same personnel. During the 1950s, while working the calypso angle in dancehalls, the supremely talented Grant hooked up as a sideline with Kenny Graham’s Afro-Cubists. He also formed a partnership with Humphrey Lyttelton as the Grant/Lyttelton Paseo Jazz Band, recording calypso-ish takes on jazz and blues favourites.

  Acclaimed Nigerian composer Fela Sowande provides a vivid example of wartime London’s cultural melange. The acknowledged founding father of Nigerian classical music, a Fellow of the Royal College of Organists and choirmaster at Kingsway Hall, he could be found duetting with Fats Waller on the piano in London clubs, and was a regular in Grant’s bands, playing calypso to audiences who assumed he was West Indian.

  BETWEEN THE LATE 1920s and the mid-1940s, a black intelligentsia started to find traction in London. The city became a gathering point for African and West Indian students, professionals and political dissidents. Organisations like the League of Coloured Peoples, the West African Student Union and the Union of Students of African Descent all set up shop, exchanging ideas and experiences from around the world. Much of what was discussed in London was to influence the break-up of the British Empire. Groups in the capital maintained strong links with nascent trade unions in the colonies, and many who studied in London attained political office on returning home. There was also a considerable degree of interplay between the black students and the English intellectual hipster-types who were to become the beat generation. Soho became one of the very few genuinely multi-racial, multicultural areas in Britain, where black lawyers, waiters, students, dancers, seamen, doctors and actors rubbed shoulders with cockney market traders, jazz fans in from the suburbs, pimps, prostitutes, debutantes and landed gentry.

  Trinidadian singer Sam Manning arrived in London in 1934 as calypso’s first international star. His influence was much more than strictly musical. Manning had spent the 1920s in New York, recording his trademark jazz/calypso hybrids and featuring alongside Fats Waller in the original performances of the jazz musical Brown Sugar. That was where he met his partner, the show’s producer Amy Ashwood Garvey, who had formerly been married to Marcus Garvey. The couple founded the Florence Mills Social Club, a jazz nightclub and restaurant in Carnaby Street. Named after the legendary black American cabaret star, it became a gathering place for London’s Caribbean and African intellectuals, and students of the growing Pan-Africanism movement.

  Given Sam Manning’s prominence as a singer, he’s often, understandably, credited with introducing calypso to London. Both in Trinidad, however, and when it first reached Britain, calypso was regarded as being as much about the playing as the singing. Indeed, the very first example of recorded calypso has no vocals: in New York in 1912, Lovey’s String Band, a ten-piece Trinidadian fiddle, guitar, banjo and upright bass outfit, cut a danceable instrumental called “Mango Vert”, which was taken to be a different style of jazz. By the time the music crossed the Atlantic in the 1930s, calypso was mingling with Latin and big-band swing as an integral part of dance-orchestra repertoires all across the West Indies, with singers seen as more or less optional extras.

  Things were much the same in the UK, where players integrated quickly and relatively painlessly into the established ballroom scene. Two main factors were at work. Calypso being a deceptively complex music to play well, the musicians were of a very high calibre. In addition, dance orchestras were smoothing themselves out closer to Glenn Miller than Count Basie, with barely enough South American flourishes to justify the maracas, so this injection of Caribbean flavour spiced things up in an easy-to-follow, appropriately exotic way.

  Meanwhile, London’s serious jazz clubs too were taking on Caribbean influences. With one branch of jazz busily repositioning itself from swing to bebop – complete with asymmetric phrasing, walking basslines and pork pie hats – the music’s broader fanbase welcomed the coming of calypso, thanks to the influx of Trinidadian players, as a blessing. As played by the new wave of jazzmen, calypso’s far more straightforward rhythms helped to keep bebop’s feet on the ground, while still having enough to keep things exciting.

  Trinidadians Lauderic Caton and Cyril Blake, respectively a guitarist and a trumpeter, were particularly significant in both these worlds. Caton, an electronics enthusiast, built some of the first electric guitars seen in London, and is credited with introducing the instrument to British jazz, while Blake had been a member of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra. Together they formed the backbone of the house band at Jig’s Club in St Anne’s Court, between Wardour Street and Dean Street. As Cyril Blake and his Jig’s Club Band, their artful calypso-infused jazz turned Jig’s into one of London’s hottest clubs. Despite its insalubrious reputation, it wasn’t unheard of to come across the elegant likes of Fats Waller and Duke Ellington, each of whom employed Caton at some point, down at Jig’s. The pair also played alongside the likes of Coleridge Goode and Dick Katz, and in the dance bands of Bertie King, Ray Ellington and Leslie Thompson, and the ever-popular West Indian All-Stars.

  Away from the mainstream, in the black dancehall world of the late 1930s, these various trends came together as hot jazz, which absorbed Latin and swing to osmose into jump jive and that newfangled rhythm & blues, all served with a generous side order of musical calypso. On this scene, the bebop revolution was far less evident – the emphasis at this point was on dancing and straightforward entertainment.

  In the upmarket venue, the Paramount Ballroom, the crowd was ordinary working black London, supplemented by visiting servicemen (West Indian and American), merchant seamen on leave, a smattering of African students and musicians looking to hang out. Apart from a scattering of English women, there were virtually no white people; this ballroom scene didn’t draw the bohemian or slumming aristos found in the Soho or Notting Hill clubs, where interracial fraternisation seemed to be the latest rage.

  The Paramount was much more straightforward: everyday black folks who had probably had enough of white people for that week, and wanted nothing more on Friday or Saturday night than to relax with people who looked like them. White women could get away with it, even if they risked the wrath of the disproportionately few black women there, but these dancehall crowds were liable to be openly hostile to unfamiliar white men.

  With its entertainment policy, too, following West Indian rather than West End traditions, the Paramount became a totally swinging place to be. Like working people everywhere, the audience wanted a wild night out – but it had to be worth the price of admission. The Paramount’s owner, himself a Jamaican immigrant, understood that if his clientele had paid two shillings to get in, he’d better give them a half-a-crown show, and recreated the excitement of dancehalls back home with a dash of London luxury. The musicians reciprocated, too. The stage at the Paramount gained a reputation as somewhere they could really cut loose, in front of a noisily appreci
ative crowd – something that often came as a relief after ‘day jobs’ in more sedate mainstream situations. While the Paramount never enjoyed the profile of some of the later, more cerebral Soho clubs – because this was jazz for dancing – it was always a fertile arena for exchanging ideas. With big-name visiting players frequently turning up after hours, it hosted all manner of sitting in, showing off and experimentation.

  Situations like that, all over London – albeit smaller – served to keep many of the West Indian players below the radar. Working in the ‘corn-fed’ dance bands, they were never considered jazz enough, while by doing their serious playing at less glamorous venues they missed out on the attention they might have otherwise have attracted.

  Because it was both big, and open until five or six in the morning, the Paramount was ideal for the many men who had jobs but nowhere to live – ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs’ – and could be arrested for vagrancy if caught dossing on a park bench or in a doorway. With staff turning a sympathetic blind eye, they could snatch some shut-eye on a banquette, then have a wash in the gents.

  Calypso singers were always part of this London scene, especially in the ballrooms. The first to make a real mark were George Browne and Edric Connor, who arrived from Trinidad as early as 1943 and 1944, respectively. Browne was a bass player who regularly gigged with Caton. During his first year in London, he had a huge hit with the tropically festive number “Christmas Calypso”. As calypso grew ever more popular, he turned to singing full time, and changed his name to Young Tiger.

  Connor, a singer, actor and music-business mover and shaker, brought over the first Trinidadian steel band to play in Britain in 1951; set up London’s first black talent agency in 1956; was the first black actor to perform with the Royal Shakespeare Company, in 1958; founded the Negro Theatre Workshop, one of Britain’s first all-black drama groups, in 1963; appeared in numerous films and TV dramas; and still found time to cut several albums. His discography includes one of the first-ever official football records, 1956’s “Manchester United Calypso”: