limited "Bootleg Him!" only in Japan (Dec 2005)
This is from the inner
sleeves of Japanese limited edition of “Bootleg Him!”
Rolling Stone, July 8th, 1971
“Alexis Korner, Father Of Us All”
By Andrew Bailey
Queensway, between the
The night before, Alexis had played a
solo date at the concert hall in
From his position at the center of a genealogy of contemporary British music, Korner can look out at a complex universe of musicians and movements which have been influenced by him. On the outer limits are Led Zeppelin and Jesus Christ-Superstar. Packed close in orbit are the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards sat in with Korner’s band Blues Incorporated, when Charlie Watts was the drummer.
And then there’s Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, Graham Bond, Lee Jackson of the Nice, Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, Terry Cox of Pentangle, Manfred Mann’s Paul Jones, Andy Fraser of Free, Victor Brox, and Long John Baldry. On the jazz side there are a score of musicians who spent time with Korner but whose names mean little outside the tight British jazz scene, except perhaps for Dave Holland, bass player with Miles Davis; Alan Skidmore, who have both since achieved recognition in Europe.
They all found in Korner a warm refuge of emotional stability and respectability at a time when the environment wasn’t ready for their music.
Korner is probably as far removed from
the classic blues background as is possible. His father was a cavalry officer
in the Austrian Army during the First World War. His mother was Greek-Turkish.
After being shuttled between relatives in
“War at that age,” Korner remembers, “was pretty marvelous, romantic for an 11-year-old boy. Just super fireworks. And if you see a few dead bodies, they don’t look like bodies. Just one of the images you have of glamor and honor at that age.”
“My father was 58 when I was born, and he was already getting tired. I can only remember odd things about him. He used to tell me about the Russian Revolution. He’s been through a great deal of that. And I remember him describing Caucasian yogurt … you grab a knife and cut it up in chunks, that sort of thing.”
His father was of the old Viennese school. He expected to be entertained by the whole family, though he didn’t play an instrument himself. “I had piano lessons from the age of five,” says Korner. “I played OK, but my father really was convinced that I should become a virtuoso violinist, who would never, of course, dream of becoming a professional. A brilliant 19th century dilettante was what he wanted.
“It was in 1940 that I came across a record by Jimmy Yancey. I can’t say how important that record is. From then on all I wanted to do was play the blues. Blues and jazz pulled me away from what was left of my family. I was brought up in the latter part of the war by my mother’s family. They were ship-owners, that sort. People I don’t get on with at any level, I don’t like their reasons for living, I don’t like their objectives, I disagree with their means of getting there. The only thing that saved me from becoming like them was this music. And that record gave me a way out of it all.”
“You start campaigning for things and, you know, you say we’re going to make blues into a big music and this that and the other …”
Korner couldn’t have chosen a worse
time to try and sell the gospel. It was just a few years after the war. In
“You felt OK about that,” said Korner, “because you knew you were right. And all the cats, when we worked together, we always knew were right.”
“At the same time as we felt this almost missionary thing, we were also completely without any sort of aesthetic worry about it; we weren’t giving up anything for our kicks and everything else that went with them at the same time. So it wasn’t quite missionary zeal. If you like you were serving God and man at the same time and enjoying both.”
“During the war we lived in a place
in north Ealing in
“In those days between the ages of 12 and 18 you meant nothing. You were the extra place at the side table if someone came to dinner. You were too big to be petted and fondled or thought pretty and you were too small to work and you were of no interest to anyone, and you had a chance to learn – this is what’s missed today. If people had started looking at me under a microscope at the age of 13 I think I would have collapsed. Teenage markets and pressures and finance and everything like that, I couldn’t stand all that. I’ve had enough of a job coping with it at the age of 43.”
“I suppose basically I had always intended if it were possible to make a living out of playing blues. But I never admitted it to myself. Because I don’t suppose I could have given a logical reason for it ever becoming possible to do so. I wanted to be able to play guitar, I wanted to be able to make music hurt.”
“I can’t explain why one wants to pass a particular sort of pain onto other people, but you do – without asking why you do it. I say I’m a compulsive musician, but it’s also a bloody good way out of having to do anything else.”
In the late Forties, Korner had a blues quartet inside Chris Barber’s Jazz Band, which played about half an hour a night on band gigs.
“It had a very bad five-piece rhythm section which consisted of guitar, banjo, piano, bass and drums. I was only in it because I played in the break-off group. It’s like the singers in the old Palais bands who used to be given rubber-stringed guitars and sat in the rhythm section, completely inaudible. They stuck me next to the banjo, and an unamplified guitar next to a banjo doesn’t sound like anything.”
“But I couldn’t quite get in with that after a bit because I happened to like Charlie Parker as well as Joe Oliver and it made it a slightly difficult situation in the Barber band because at that time it was very, very traditionally minded. You did not mention people like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and that area of musicians. You talked about Johnny Dodds and you talked about Louis Armstrong and you talked about Joe Oliver. I loved Bebop, as it was then a great blues feeling in it.”
“We played very small grotty clubs, because that was the only place you could get jazz bands into. And I was considered as a jazz man rather than as a blues player. Because there were no blues players – you played one sort of jazz of another sort of jazz. And I began to get worried about that because I didn’t feel I was a jazz player, and the reason I didn’t feel I was a jazz player was because to me setting moods was more important than improvising. And if the same phrase in the same place created the right effect, I was perfectly prepared to use it every time. I wasn’t worried that I wasn’t improvising.”
“To me, that is the basic difference between the two. A jazz man needs to express himself in terms of sound, he must be identifiable from other jazz men. But in blues, if you find the right sound I feel it’s justifiable to keep it exactly the same every time, because it’s the overall mood you’re creating that’s more important than personal improvisation.”
When the British traditional jazz band
leader Ken Colyer came back from
A track, “Rock Island Line,”
from the Barber bands’ first album was a hit in
“People are being unfair if they look back on skiffle too frivolously,” said Korner. “Every musical movement that is big enough, a popular movement, has got to produce some good musicians who wouldn’t have had the incentive to start playing without it.”
“It produced the Vipers, the first Colyer-Barber skiffle group, it produced Donnegan, Nancy Whisky, it produced such horrors as ‘Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-o’ and ‘Sail Away Ladies.’ It had a lot to do with producing Tommy Steele and that entire area … Tin Pan Alley came up through the skiffle, very much indeed. It produced Big Jim Sullivan (now playing with Tom Jones) who had never played the guitar and would never have bothered to had he not come up in skiffle.”
“And it helped bring blues players from the States. People
started hearing songs by Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy. And then they started singing Broonzy
songs. At that time the interest in Negro folk music wouldn’t have been
enough to bring over even cheap blues players. So skiffle can also be thanked
for being the basis of the blues movement. Long before the R&B movement got
going here the blues players had been coming over through skiffle. In the end
the skiffle purists wandered away and the ground was paved for the
It was Chris Barber – who had
helped create the Trad craze – who finally put it down by bringing over American electric
blues players like Otis Spann, John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. Till that time
the only blues following in
In the begging of the Sixites
Korner formed the first Blues Incorporated and Thursday nights at the Marquee
in Soho, then home of the National Jazz and Blues
Federation, became the home of British R&B. Jack Good produced the first
album, from a live set at the Marquee. There wasn’t too much challenge
from American R&B on disc. It wasn’t until 1964, for instance, that
the Chess label with Chuck Berry was issued in
“There was still a purist feel around,” says Korner. “It wasn’t intended, but I suppose that sort of missionary thing about popularizing jazz was very strong cause we always had a very high proportion of jazz men in the band. Ginger Baker was a jazz player, so were Dick Heckstall-Smith, Graham Bond and Johnny Parker. From different schools perhaps, but all jazz players.
“We all felt that jazz could be popular music if it were properly presented. That hasn’t really ever happened. Most of the British jazz musicians have killed it stone dead, by perpetuating its exclusiveness. In time, many of them found they couldn’ make a real living here, and they mostly went abroad.”
“Technically, Blues Incorporated was the first professional British blues band. We were playing electric stuff by then and Cyril and me were getting thrown out of perfectly respectable jazz clubs for doing so.”
Cyril Davies split from Korner and formed his own band, the All Stars. From then on Blues Incorporated was kept fresh with a steady infusion of personnel. Anyone who was around joined when they could. Eric Burdon, Long John Baldry, Ronnie Jones (a black GI), Paul Jones. There was a “nervous” Charlie Watts on drums, Dick Heckstall-Smith on saxophone, Jack Bruce on bass. And for six months in 1961, Mick Jagger.
“Mick got in touch with me at the start of the blues scene. He wrote me a letter and sent me a tape of some stuff he’d done, and he became a founder member of the first professional, or three-quarters professional Blues Incorporated. The first skiffle EP record that I made was called skiffle, but I didn’t want it to be called skiffle. We weren’t a skiffle band, we were a blues band, and we had many rows with Decca but they still insisted on calling it skiffle, but the second EP they agreed simply to call Blues Incorporated. By the time Mick got in touch with me, Cyril Davies and I had been playing blues stuff up at the Round House, a pub in Soho, which we’d got going as the London Blues and Barrel House club for a couple of years.”
“Charlie was still working in an
advertising agency, he was too scared to go pro with us, so we started
auditioning drummers and we got Ginger in instead of Charlie, and it was
shortly after that when Cyril and I agreed to part company.
Bondy [Graham Bond] came in to replace Cyril. We
played
“It developed into what was the strongest jazz rock and roll reed section that’s ever played here – Heckstall-Smith and Bondy, who wasn’t playing organ then.”
Ginger Baker also left, and Phil Seaman
came in. “People say that Seaman’s hangup
is that he looks so much like Ginger. I’ll tell you what Ginger’s
real hangup was, everyone used to say he looked like
Phil Seaman. It’s a sign of the times. Phil Seaman was the major jazz
drummer when nobody knew Ginger, and jazz was a much more popular music in
“The band kept changing and replacing itself, and I dissolved the band eventually because, after many, many years, I found I had nothing more to say with the band.”
Nearly everyone who passed through Blues Incorporated became established in their own right. An exception was Duffy Power, who has faded out almost completely.
“Duffy was greatly admired by a few people, and has always been dreadfully ignored by everyone else. He has always been for me a major performer. Duffy is one of the most important singers ever to have worked here, and I include American singers as well. A major singer and writer. He’s very very difficult to keep up with. I tried four or five times. Then he wouldn’t get up any more in the morning to make the gig, so what can you do.”
“Commercially, Blues Incorporated was at its peak in 1962 when we played the Rothschilds’ ball and all that sort of stuff. I’m sure that one of the reasons why so many great musicians chose to work with me was because there was simply no alternative. There wasn’t another R&B band that played regularly twice a week to at least a thousand people. But we never thought of ourselves as being popular, in the sense that the Tremeloes or some group like that is. We didn’t play the pop ballrooms and so I don’t think that the development of pop music had much to do with us.”
A lot of Korner’s purist followers thought he’d had an aberration when he decided to lead the house band on a children’s TV program called 5 O’clock Club. This was after Korner’s band had been the backing group on Gadzooks!, one of the first British rock and pop TV series. “5 O’clock Club was very important,” said Korner, “because we made more converts through it than through all the specialist gigs put together. But in a way, it turned out to be the kiss of death as well; one, because people assumed that as we were doing television we were too expensive, and two, because once you became associated with a children’s show you’re finished anyway.”
“We kept the trio going out of the band. Danny Thompson and Terry Cox and myself used to play a lot of gigs up and down the country.”
It was around this time that Korner,
using his broadcasting experience, started to sing as well as play guitar. He
cut his first singing album, New Generation of Blues in1968. The band once more
became a cult and musicians would arrive at gigs for occasional sessions. One
was a
In the spring of 1968, Korner toured
“At one point my daughter Sappho was
singing, Nick South was on bass, and it shifted around a lot, but there was
always Peter and I. On the last tour we did as a band, we used Zoot Money on
piano and vocals. We were doing a lot of gospel stuff, and we changed the sound
around, sometimes it was a very bluesy tour, sometimes jazzy. One quartet which
recorded a very good live album, one live side at a concert in
“That particular concert was practically a climax of what it possibly the best tour musically that I’ve ever done in my life, and it has a very strange ethereal quality for me, because it was the most tremendous bit of personal communication that I’ve ever had with 2000 people. We had them all sitting on the stage because there was no room in the audience and we let them smoke, which in a German concert hall is absolutely out of question.”
Brian Jones heard about what Korner and
Thorup were doing in
Korner’s voice, hoarse and
rumbling, is familiar to nearly everybody in
“When I look back and reflect on how things have changed I can’t help but laugh. Years ago I wanted to play Chuck Berry songs with jazz musicians but they thought it was inferior. And then I wanted to play Motown with blues players but they thought it was demeaning, so it’s only now that I’ve had a chance to play pop.”
“I must have been heavily schizophrenic all my life. The me who hears what the other me can’t play is the dominant one. I guess music, particularly the blues, is the only form of schizophrenia that has organised itself into being both legal and beneficial to society.”
Along with John Mayall, who in 1962 formed the first Bluesbreakers after being shown by Korner that blues bands could be viable propositions, Korner can look back and see what has happened in British blues. He doesn’t believe there has emerged a proper British form of blues. “I suppose the parallel development in American blues to the British movement has resulted in Johnny Winters. The British feel of blues has been hard, rather than emotional. Far too much emphasis on 12 bar, too little attention to words, far too little originality.”
Korner had made his next big decision. He’s
preparing to go to