ALEXIS KORNER. Ronnie Scott's Club.
`JARS` ISSUE 146, JAN - FEB 2004
ALEXIS KORNER
It is easy to
forget, at a time when many jazz festivals routinely - and increasingly
uncontroversially - include everything from so-called `world music` to
classical/jazz fusions, R&B and freely improvised jazz, that the
coincident explosion of bebop and traditional jazz in the late 1940s
created a bitter ideological divide among jazz listeners. Lines of battle
between the `Mouldy Fygges` and modernists were drawn. The banjo was the
obligatory talisman of the traditional bands, and from 1949, Alexis Korner
played that instrument (along with piano, guitar and mandolin) with the
skiffle groups of Chris Barber and arch-traditionalist Ken Colyer. Later,
however, Korner was to be the catalyst of a new and vital movement in the
history of British jazz - rhythm and blues - when traditionalists and
modernists joined hands, initially at the Marquee, in Wardour St, in
London`s West End. A SECRET AND LETHAL WEAPON One of Korner`s musical associates at this time was
saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith, and in his autobiography, The Safest
Place in the World (Quartet, 1989), he recalls: `Under cover of
music-making, ideological struggle - wordless as arm wrestling, but no
less intense for that - filled the little Fulham cellar (the Troubadour,
Old Brompton Road). It should have been No Contest from the start,
considering the sheer weight of numbers on the boppers` side, but it
wasn`t. the Lone Blueser was deploying a secret and lethal weapon: an
armour-plated personality with such an inbuilt level of
embarrassment-resistance that whatever silent brickbats and vibes came his
way he remained cheerful and relaxed.` A RADICAL CHANGE Korner was to deploy this weapon to great effect over the
coming years. Another early associate, pianist Johnny Parker, had until
then played with the likes of Harry Brown`s Inebriated Seven, Humphrey
Lyttelton, Monty Sunshine, Beryl Bryden`s Backroom Boys and Mick Mulligan.
He recalls that Korner`s Marquee band, Blues Incorporated (Dick
Heckstall-Smith, the harmonica player/guitarist Cyril Davies, bassist Jack
Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker were the other members) were `heavily
influenced by Muddy Waters and were quite loudly amplified for those
days`. Their popularity at the venue soon waned, however, when after a
disagreement between Davies and Korner, Davies left and was replaced by
alto saxophonist Graham Bond. Parker remembers: `This marked a radical
change in the band`s musical policy: overnight, Big Bill Broonzy had given
way to Charles Mingus. It took me some time to try to figure out what was
going on, but Alexis told me he wanted us two to play basic blues and the
two saxes to play freely over the top - all very well, but we lost our
audience.` Such confidence in his own judgement and singleness of
purpose kept the band going throughout the formative years of the British
R&B boom - saxophonists Alan Skidmore and Art Themen, and modern-jazz
drummer supreme Phil Seamen were all involved in the various
manifestations of the group - and they regularly packed the legendary
Flamingo Club with American servicemen, from whose ranks they recruited a
singer, Ronnie Jones. Parker says, of this unit: `It was the most
original, exciting - simply the best - band I ever played with, but it cut
no ice with the general public. It wasn`t blues, it wasn`t trad, it wasn`t
bebop.` Categories, though, were unimportant to Korner: he saw
music as a seamless garment, and in his uniquely influential subsequent
career as a journalist, broadcaster and musician, he was as likely to
champion the music of Bessie Smith as that of Ornette Coleman, George
Russell as that of Elmore James. Interviewees, from Bob Harris to Ruby
Turner, in Alexis Korner and Friends (Classic Pictures, DVD6004X) queue up
to pay tribute to his willingness to give his time and attention to them,
and to his knowledge of and enthusiasm for music of all sorts. If any one
man can be said to have planted the seed of the tolerance and open-eared
eclecticism that characterises the current British music scene, it is
Alexis Korner. JIM GODBOLT An interview with Alexis Korner will be featured in
George Melly`s six-part `Memories of the Blues` (Radio 2, 9.30pm,
commencing 10th February). Copyright 2003 `JARS 
ALEXIS KORNER
( photo: David Redfern -
http://www.musicpictures.com/ )