The jazz trumpeter John Chilton led the Feetwarmers — the professional backing band for the singer George Melly — all around the world for the best part of three decades. Whereas Melly was a showman who thought nothing of knocking back a double brandy between songs, the bespectacled Chilton was a more self-effacing presence — he would usher the fedora-wearing Melly on stage as “the Dean of Decadence”.
He had a keen eye for humour. During a spell as a publicity manager for another band, the Swinging Blue Jeans, at the height of the Cold War, he sent a press release conjecturing that the group might go to Russia. It was front page news in papers the next day.
Until the 1970s Chilton had been playing semi-professionally at the rundown but popular New Merlin’s Cave pub in Clerkenwell and enjoying a fruitful sideline as a meticulous writer of jazz history. Then, in 1973, Melly — The Observer film critic after an incarnation as jazz’s enfant terrible in the Fifties — started singing informally with Chilton’s band. Fuggy and tatty, the Victorian establishment was, in the words of one musician, “an elephant’s graveyard for old pianos”. Melly (obituary, July 5, 2007) would wander in from the street to perform still carrying his moped helmet. They often played on Sunday lunchtimes, a slot that became popular with customers who turned up with their children. Chilton dubbed it “the Pudding Club” and, to keep everyone happy, the band struck a deal with the police to ensure that pints could still be served in a separate room.
Chilton also ran a bookshop with his wife, Teresa, in Great Ormond Street and had no thoughts of playing full-time jazz. However, with Melly and the band’s pianist, Collin Bates, he was asked to appear at Oxford University Jazz Club. “We had just bought hot dogs from a large and raucous vendor, wearing heavy make-up and carrying on like a pantomime dame,” recalled Melly, “when one of us suggested quite casually that we went pro again.”
Melly and the Feetwarmers were promoted by the former Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, who produced their album Nuts at Ronnie Scott’s. He took them to New York and the Reading Festival, where George Harrison once turned up as their anonymous roadie.
Advertisement
They became something of a phenomenon. Watching the stripey-suited Melly prancing in front of the jazz quartet — “like a middle-aged Mick Jagger,” wrote a critic — singing the raunchy songs of Bessie Smith ought to have been ridiculous. Instead, it touched an affectionate nerve with the public.
“He was fixated by the callouses on Louis Armstrong’s hand
Their recording sessions also passed into legend. The band’s exorbitant bar bill offered a clue to why they had to return, sober, to redo the entire album — and Taylor later printed a copy of the offending bill in the LP liner notes.
The band and Melly embarked on a hectic schedule of recordings and broadcasts, including two runs of their own primetime series on BBC television. Their annual Christmas residency at Ronnie Scott’s became “almost as much of a fixture as the tree in Trafalgar Square”, wrote The Times.
Chilton’s diligence in finding repertoire — occasionally writing it himself — and working as director, kept the act fresh. One critic described his playing as “exploring the bones of the music”.
To those who knew him, this was no surprise. Chilton was already one of the world’s leading authors on jazz. No fact was too small to be overlooked, and no obscure record would go unheard. His Who’s Who of Jazz — a biographical directory of early jazz musicians — became a byword for accuracy. He also wrote biographies of Billie Holiday, Sidney Bechet and Coleman Hawkins.
Advertisement
Few stories illustrate Chilton’s diligence better than his attempts to construct an accurate chronology for Bechet’s travels in the 1920s and 30s. He proved beyond all doubt that the New Orleans-born clarinettist had been a pioneer of taking jazz to Russia. Armed with a copy of the musician’s passport, he went to the Chinese embassy in London to see if he could ascertain a date for Bechet’s visits there. He was somewhat nonplussed when the officials fell about laughing before revealing that the beautiful Chinese calligraphy in the document read “Chicken Chow Mein and Foo Yung”. Bechet had copied it from a menu, so as to brag that he had travelled to Shanghai and Hong Kong.
John James Chilton was born in London in 1932. His father was Thomas Chilton, a music hall singer and tap-dancer. When Chilton was 12, a school football match was cancelled. Returning home, he put on the radio to hear I Thought I heard Buddy Bolden Say by Jelly Roll Morton, featuring Bechet. “I fell in love with jazz there and then,” he later wrote. He began playing the cornet while living at Yardley Gobion in Northamptonshire after being evacuated during the Second World War.
After National Service, he briefly worked at The Daily Telelgraph archiving copy and managed to attend a press reception for Louis Armstrong. He was fixated by the callouses on his hand from where he gripped his trumpet. Chilton formed his own band, working at Butlin’s in Skegness, and joined the mainstream Jump Band led by the saxophonist Bruce Turner in 1958.
A few years later the film-maker Jack Gold made his first documentary, Living Jazz, about the band. As well as capturing the romance of jazz clubs, such as Chelsea’s Six Bells, it presented a gritty, realistic portrait. Scenes — in which Chilton was prominent — showed instruments strapped to the roof of an ageing Ford Zephyr as the band made its way to provincial gigs through appalling weather, sustained by unpleasant snacks that passed for fast food in the 1960s.
After leaving Turner in 1963, Chilton played in a variety of bands and accompanied visiting American stars. In 1967, having married the photographer Teresa Kendall, the pair opened the Bloomsbury Bookshop, close to their home. The tiny premises became a treasure trove of secondhand music books. Chilton described a visit from Graham Greene, who signed a copy of Our Man in Havana. “Some while later I read Greene’s The Human Factor and saw that he had named a character (who appears only once) Chilton.” The shop also gave him the opportunity to pursue his research, between serving customers, many of whom dropped in to discuss early jazz.
Advertisement
The couple had a daughter, Jenny, who is a teacher, and two sons, Barney, who is a magazine editor, and Martin, who is arts editor of The Daily Telegraph online.
After going on the road with Melly, Chilton found research opportunities were limited. He foreswore alcohol and kept up a formidable work rate, publishing biographies of Coleman Hawkins, Louis Jordan, Roy Eldridge and Red Allen. In 1983, he won a Grammy for his liner notes to a set of records by the trumpeter Bunny Berigan. He was named Jazz Writer of the Year in the 2000 British Jazz Awards. He retired from accompanying Melly in 2002.
In his final years, despite the onset of Parkinson’s disease, he cared for his wife, who died in 2014. He played around London with the clarinettist Wally Fawkes (aka Trog the cartoonist). He also wrote his autobiography, which, with typical humour, was entitled Hot Jazz, Warm Feet.
John Chilton, jazz trumpeter and author, was born on July 16, 1932. He died on February 25, 2016, aged 83