JAZZ musicians are marvellous storytellers. Not only do they weave improvised inventions on their instruments, but after hours, on the bus, in the bar or even sitting on stage as the instruments are being packed up, out come the tall tales, the pointed anecdotes and a selection of shaggy dogs. So it was an inspired idea of John Dankworth’s to round off the 55th anniversary reunion of his pioneering British bebop band, the Seven, by keeping five of his original line-up on stage to recount their memories of this trailblazing group.
In those days, John Dankworth, CBE, was plain “Johnny”, there were no motorways, and a full-time jazz band had to pay its way by playing every gig that came up across the length and breadth of the land. There were hair-raising taxi rides, tangles with country ales of formidable strength, evenings of old-time waltzes or eightsome reels, and vaudeville shows with second-rate impressionists and tired comedians.
As the stories tumbled out, even the reticent saxophonist Don Rendell recalling long-vanished Bradford ballrooms with wit and aplomb, the Fifties came back to life with all the vividness of the band’s music that had kept us enthralled for the previous two hours.
The Dankworth Seven had one of the most distinctive sounds in British jazz, mixing the pastel colours of the Miles Davis Nonet with the fiery bebop solos and challenging rhythms that Dankworth had heard firsthand in New York while playing his passage on transatlantic liners.
He and Don Rendell ripped into their solos on the opening I Hear Music with youthful vigour, wrapped in a characteristically knotty arrangement, and immediately the original Fifties charts, preserved, as John put it, on yellowing Dead Sea scrolls, worked their traditional magic.
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Seven Not Out was played at the perfect relaxed tempo for this open-air concert in the Dankworths’ annual Garden Season, tucked between the Stables Theatre and their house in an elegant semicircular tent, and the long, leisurely notes of Guy Barker’s trumpet solo lingered over the rosebeds.
Then Dame Cleo Laine added to the summer atmosphere with a poised Easy Living, while the percussionist and singer Frank Holder whipped up the pace with a frenetic Latin beat on Baba Lou. Dankworth himself reminded us of his peerless alto saxophone sound with an easygoing Lover Man, and the entire company came on for Dizzy Gillespie’s School Days creating a consciously nostalgic conclusion to a balmy afternoon that had even managed to keep the damp weather at bay.