Jazz
The Rumbotham Saga
By KENNETH ,t LLSOP
His natural gift for injecting a new poignancy into Poet and Peasant and the old Methodist hymns was quickly recognised, and he was enrolled in the Cogging Mill Silver Band. Within a year he was not only playing regularly also in the Rother- ham Temperance Brass Band, but had also been caught up in the rumbustious proletarian life in the chapels and tap-rooms of the Sheffield area.
The slump silenced Sam's horn, for in the Thirties there was no money to spare for frolics in the industrial North. Then, in 1950, an Arts Council folklorist team were scouting for regional talent for the Festival of Britain. By chance a home-made record of Selections from the Indian Love Lyrics, made by the lckles Cogging Mill Silver Band in 1924, and which included a solo by Sam in Tale Hands I Love,' was found in a Fulham Road junk-shop (by what strange chance had it drifted thither?) and the team raced up to Rotherham.
By this time, Sam, nearing seventy, was eking out a grim existence on his old-age pension in a back-to-back house behind the tram depot. He was fixed up with a new set of dentures and a new cornet, and, with a group of his old mates fitted out in blue serge suits, was presented in a programme of West Riding traditional music at the Festival Hall.
It was the long-play record Yorkshire Pudding, with the impressionistic painting of fog-shrouded Rotherham Labour Exchange on, the sleeve, that set in motion the whole silver-band revivalist movement in the United States. Stemming from a few Greenwich Village collectors who already had the precious Indian Love Lyric discs, dozens of amateur silver bands have sprung into being in the cellars of Manhattan and San Francisco.
Here, before congregations of teenage converts, the simple, soulful phrasing of Sam Rumbotham, uncorrupted by technique or training, is faith- fully followed in such perennials as 'On Ilkley Moor Baht 'At' and the Moody and Sankey song- book. The art-form of the humble steel-men, ig- nored and forgotten in the country of their birth, and their happy, heartfelt authentic folk-music, created against the colourful working-class life of pre-war Rotherham, have been rescued from oblivion and turned into a legend.
That parable-in-reverse is not all that far- fetched. For the past fortnight audiences in eleven British cities have been acclaiming six elderly coloured men shipped over from America by the National Jazz Federation, the George Lewis New Orleans Jazz Band.
These, described by myth-whacky commenta- tors—particularly of the ballad-and-blues Marxist-Tribune sociological school—as 'im- mortals' and 'giants,' are George Lewis himself (clarinettist, fifty-nine), Avery Kid Howard (trumpeter, fifty-one), Big Jim Robinson (trom- bonist, sixty-seven), Joe Watkins (drums, fifty- three), Alcide Slow-Drag Pavageau (bassist, seventy-one) and Joe Robichaux (pianist, fiftyish). Their distinction is not that they are, as has been stated, the only surviving old-style New Orleans band, but the only travelling one—there are still a few others doing gigs in the old home town, part-timers with white hair bushing from' under their Lipton-period yachting caps, hired to blow in a convention of Chrysler car-salesmen at the airport or do a lorry-borne programme 'through the city centre for an advertising promotion.
Still, the Lewis group is the only means by which the world outside Louisiana can assess how the genuine article compares with the multitudes of two-beat facsimiles that have proliferated in Britain since the war. The essential badness of the music, assessed by any normal critical 'stan- dards, does not seem likely to affect the minds of the brain-washed last-ditch traditionalists, whose applause has been tumultuous—those who here follow the gospel as preached by the Ken Colyer, Acker Bilk, Alex Walsh and Mick Mulligan bands, who regard even Armstrong as a deviationist, especially after his published jibe at 'New Orleans old-fogeyisrn.'
To a point, one is sympathetic with the en- thusiasm of the Seventh Day Adventists .of jazz. for there is a real fascination in the Lewis music. Purist' has become something of a sneer, but their music really is pure, straight from an anthropological womb, uncontaminated by the hurtling rush of development that, outside the Mississippi Valley, has in four decades produced
a' new global popular music and, in its stricter form, has evolved into the refinements and com- plexities of Sonny Rollins and John Lewis.
All this has washed unnoticed around the diminishing first-generation amateur %jazzmen who stayed behind in New Orleans after the big exodus north in the Twenties. Lewis, a Creole (French-and-colour), who taught himself to play on a ten-cent fife at the age of seven, worked with such street-parade bands as the Black Eagle and the Eureka. He was humping cotton bales on the wharves when, in 1942, the Revival began, and researchers unearthed him to accompany Bunk Johnson, an aged trumpeter who had been similarly `discovered' driving a lorry in the New Iberia ricefields, on some Origins of American Music field recordings. Pavageau, a house-painter who actually played with Buddy Bolden (an un- recorded trumpeter who on the Dead Sea Scrolls of jazz looms large and misty, a kind of Teacher of Righteousness figure), Howard, a pit orchestra sideman, Robinson, who was taught the trombone in the 1918 US Expeditionary Force, Watkins, a parade drummer, and Robichaux, who looks startlingly like the late Jelly Roll Morton, another New Orleans monolith, right down to his gold- flashing grin—all were similarly swept forward into the spotlight in the romantic quest for a meaningful past that arose out of the New Deal era of social soul-searching and guilt-atonement towards a vilely treated minority of citizens.
So this tour of the George Lewis New Orleans Jazz Band inevitably pricks into motion an am- biguous confusion of emotional responses. Simply at the level of musical appreciation, there is an inescapable absurdity in trying to take seriously the rough-and-tumble of conflicting keys, cock- eyed pitch and wrongly played notes, but within the whole curious historical context it is an obligatory experience. And, finally, if you can temporarily put out of mind all the solid and dazzling advances of jazz during the past thirty years, there is an enjoyment to be had out of the oblivious, primitive lustiness of their perform- ances similar to that you can get from an old silent film.
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