Under construction being developed, last update.
(so as not to confuse our international audience the dates from now on will be in this form, elsewhere they may still be in English style dd/mm/yyyy format.)

February 15, 2004

This will be a voyage of discovery, as much for me as for you. The ramblings of a 63 year old twit. I will be adding to it as memory and time allows. It will, at first, be jottings from memory, roughly chronological but not guaranteed to be so. It will develop in its own haphazard way as I get to grips with it. I hope to tidy it up as I go along, spelling, punctuation and grammar as well as it will at times be - stream of conciousness type of stuff, so here goes!

Music for me started roughly when I started school at 13 in 1953, it wasn't that I wasn't aware of, and listened to music before then (mainly on radio) but until the beginning of the "Rock and roll era" it was just there in the background and I didn't take much notice of it. At school, at last, we had "personal" access to radio and did not have to listen to what our parents listened to. And then, joy of joys, I acquired my own record player (electric - not wind up) a massive box with a turntable and inbuilt speakers, played 78s, 45s and 33 1/3 lp's, you had to turn the - 'needle'- crystal pick up, over for the lp's I remember, and they wore out pretty fast, that's when music entered my life - for sure. My first record I remember buying was by Tommy Steele, I think it was 'Singing the Blues' followed swiftly by 'Blue Suede Shoes" by the "King", but I had limited funds and at school borrowing was rife. So here are a few of the artistes we listened to I hope it doesn't become too much of a list. More an historical (pun) record.
In the mid-fifties some of the new music - Jazz - was banned in the UK, but doing the rounds at school were a number of illegally imported steel cored "wax" discs of New Orleans Jazz and Blues, I cannot remember the artists now.
But from that introduction I got to love jazz first and foremost at the time, with Artists like Jack Teagarden, Louis Armstrong, Big Bill Broonzy, Dizzy Gillespie, Bix Beiderbecke, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, to name a few that bounce into my mind and then locally Ken Colyer, Humphrey Lyttleton, Chris Barber but Skiffle with Lonnie Donnegan was around as well.
When the artistes started to have concerts in London I went to see Benny Goodman, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Cleo Laine with Johnny Dankworth.
And then there were Django Reinhardt and Stephan Grapelli, we moved to more modern jazz with Dave Brubeck,Sydney Bechet the MJQ and