The Brits Go to Town

England’s obsession with jazz began in 1919, the day the Original Dixieland Jazz Band came to roost in London. The group remained there for over a year, and their success led to a flood of American groups into the U.K., so much so that the crown banned their presence on the island after 1924. Exceptions were made only for Paul Whiteman, who played there in 1926, and Louis Armstrong, who played there in 1932; the ban was finally rescinded for Duke Ellington, who arrived in 1933. Ellington’s impact on British musicians was enormous and long lasting; long after he’d abandoned the whole cause of “tone parallel” Black, Brown, and Beige, a team of British arrangers attempted to reconstruct a practical score of the lost work in the early 1970s. Even before the Duke’s records began to arrive upon England’s shores, however, Britain’s composers were incorporating the sounds of jazz into their works. The earliest to try, it appears, was a very well-known composer noted for a more genteel approach than that of the jazz hybrid.

William Walton and Constant Lambert

William Walton (1902-1983), along with Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten, is one of the towering figures of 20th century English classical music, and most of his music fits that description. He is sometimes even viewed as a reactionary, but he most certainly was not one. As a young man he was seen as quite radical, and his song cycle Façade (1923), while popular with listeners of a more proletarian stripe, was regarded as an affront to high culture. Part of the shock was due to Edith Sitwell’s nonsensical, irreverent texts, delivered by Sitwell via megaphone through a grotesque clown face at the June 12, 1923, premiere; the audience never saw the speaker. Perhaps this was just as well, as Sitwell’s brother Osbert remembered, “At the end my sister was warned not to leave the shelter of her dressing room until the crowd had dispersed, or she might meet with injury.” Walton’s music was equally irreverent in keeping with the texts — sometimes presenting collisions of musical forms that don’t seem to go together, for example a “Tango Pasodoble,” or “Scotch Rhapsody.” Walton’s use of jazz was likewise subjected to such tongue-in-cheek transformation, as heard in the fox trot “Old Sir Faulk.” While he returned to Façade many times to create suites and to refashion various parts of it for use in different contexts, Walton never returned to the use of jazz, or to the sound of Façade itself, in any of his subsequent works.

Edith Sitwell, voice; William Walton, conductor - Walton: Façade - “Old Sir Faulk” (recorded 1929)

Constant Lambert (1905-1951), who served both as one of the reciters and conductor on the first recording of Walton’s Façade, made in 1929, was a different matter entirely. A gifted, irascible conductor and a composer whose talents, like Walton’s, were advanced well beyond his years, Lambert’s output, which began in a more neo-classical vein in the manner of Stravinsky, from about 1927 to 1931 is almost completely dominated by the influence of jazz. His Elegiac Blues in Memory of Florence Mills (1927) was written, like Duke Ellington’s Black Beauty, to honor the memory of the fallen singer to whom it was dedicated, who performed in England in 1926. It demonstrates total immersion into Ellington’s style, yet retains a flavor of individuality. More ambitious was The Rio Grande (1929), a work for chorus, piano, and orchestra written in the symphonic jazz vein, which Lambert recorded the following year. Around 1931, Lambert experienced a crisis of self-confidence that led him away from composing for several years; when he returned, he’d re-adopted the neo-classic vein that distinguished his early works, though in a manner somewhat more conservative in style. Like Walton, from this point he never returned to the jazz vein, though he never lost his enthusiasm for jazz itself, particularly the music of Ellington.

Richard Rodney Bennett, piano - Lambert: Elegiac Blues in Memory of Florence Mills

Constant Lambert, conductor; Hamilton Harty, piano; Hallé Orchestra - Lambert: The Rio Grande

There were a number of other English composers of standard concert music working to some extent in jazz in the 1920s, but the level of documentation of this activity remains poor; apparently, it has never been studied. There is mere mention that Peter Warlock (a.k.a. Philip Heseltine, 1894-1930) composed some pieces for Carroll Gibbons’ Savoy Orpheans in the mid-1920s, and that Gibbons himself composed an extended work for concert use, as did band leaders Fred Elizalde and Ray Noble — but there is no more information about these pieces known. However, in 1929 the next major British entry into the field of filtering jazz through the classical perspective made his debut on records as leader, Spike Hughes. Although his contribution to jazz would be more considerable than that of Walton or Lambert, he too, would swiftly leave the field behind him.

Spike Hughes (1908-1987)

Patrick “Spike” Hughes was a bassist whose interest in jazz dated from 1924 when he saw touring African-American groups in Vienna. Arthur Briggs’ Band so impressed him that he wrote some arrangements for them, which Briggs played. After a stint in the Piccadilly Players led by Al Starita, Hughes started his first band and was introduced through William Walton to Decca recording director Philip Lewis, who engaged them as the Decca “house jazz band.” Even at this point, Hughes’ music was strongly influenced by Duke Ellington, and the records sold well, though mostly overseas, particularly in Holland. After completing a tour there, Hughes discovered that Lewis had been sacked at Decca and he was without a contract, so for a time he worked in other bands, peddled arrangements, and ultimately took a job as an anonymous music critic for Melody Maker, writing about “hot records” –- he would keep this position for 13 years. In 1931, Hughes composed A Harlem Symphony and dedicated it to Ellington; it was not successful, but this effort, along with others, helped raise Hughes’ profile. In 1932, Sir Frederick Ashton commissioned a jazz ballet from Hughes, High Yellow, and Hughes threw practically all of his existing jazz compositions into the score to fulfill the requirement. That same year, Hughes’ subsequent score for Noël Coward, Words and Music, proved a success, and Hughes decided to use the considerable sum of money he’d earned to take a vacation in New York.

In New York, Hughes met promoter John Hammond and publisher Irving Mills, who managed to place Hughes’ composition Six Bells Stampede at a session with Benny Carter’s Orchestra in March 1933. Realizing that his contract with Decca would expire if he did not return to London, and not wanting to leave New York just yet, Hughes contacted Decca and asked them if they would be interested in recordings he would make with an American orchestra, and they assented. In April and May 1933, Hughes recorded 14 pieces on records insensitively billed as “Spike Hughes and his Negro Orchestra” on English records; this was Benny Carter’s Orchestra, including Benny Carter himself, under Hughes’ direction. Hughes’ charts were extremely advanced for their time, and the musicians, good as they were, did struggle with them. As trombonist Dicky Wells recalled in 1971, “No one in the outfit had the idea that he had so much hell in that valise until we started rehearsing. It was a good thing he had a gang like he had — these were cats who could see around a corner.”

The “hell” in that valise included Firebird -– probably the first successful merger of jazz with the music of Stravinsky –- and pieces bearing such unpromising, un-jazzy titles as Donegal Cradle Song, Arabesque, and Air in D Flat. Nevertheless, even these are remarkably transparent, harmonically colorful, and highly complex compositions that, in the hands of the Carter band, swing like mad. The resultant records were successful on both sides of the Atlantic, with some titles remaining in Decca’s catalogue for years. Unfortunately, for Hughes, the trip to Parnassus with the cats in Benny Carter’s band was enough –- he couldn’t bear to return to England and its jazz bands, just to hear his music played badly once again. Hughes later commented, “As a composer, as a band leader, as a performer, anything that came later would have been an anti-climax.” Other than Six Bells Stampede, none of the scores Hughes created for jazz ensembles have survived –- it is surmised that he emptied his “hellish” valise into the Atlantic Ocean on his return voyage to England. Perhaps he wouldn’t have been so rash had Hughes realized what he’d just achieved. Spike Hughes had moved forward the concept of the “jazz composer” –- someone who wrote instrumental music, in an advanced style, specifically for use by expert jazz ensembles, in a big way. Moreover, Hughes did so practically as soon as his hero Duke Ellington had introduced the concept and had made it viable; Hughes’ A Harlem Symphony and Ellington’s first extended work, Creole Rhapsody, are exactly contemporary. In 1934, Coleman Hawkins recorded his first advanced chart –- the wild and harmonically unstable Queer Notions –- with Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra, a piece that pays more lip service to Spike Hughes than it does to Duke Ellington.

 
Spike Hughes: Harlem Symphony, Part 1

Spike Hughes: Firebird

Spike Hughes: Air in D flat

Fletcher Henderson - Hawkins: Queer Notions

 
 
 

Reginald Foresythe and Sidney Phillips

Reginald Foresythe (1907–19??), a British pianist of West Indian extraction so obscure neither photo nor death date could be found for this article, was another writer of classically informed, advanced charts in the early Swing period. Foresythe spent much of the late 1920s in California working on early talkies, and he spent some time in Chicago. However, Foresythe did not record until 1933-34, in England, then in New York in early 1935 with a band boasting the young Benny Goodman. After returning to England, Foresythe became something of a world traveler, recording in Italy and, according to some sources, Bombay. The wide geographical distribution of his activity makes his work difficult to assess; the last thing definitely known about Foresythe is that he served in the RAF during World War II. Unlike Hughes, whose jazz compositions went no further than Benny Carter’s band, several of Foresythe’s pieces were picked up by other artists; Earl Hines utilized Deep Forest as his band’s theme, Hal Kemp recorded Dodging a Divorcee and Fats Waller made a riotous version of Foresythe’s Serenade for a Wealthy Widow. The penchant for bizarre, cartoonish titles, so important to the “Egghead School” exemplified by Raymond Scott, seems to have begun with Foresythe, whose worklist includes such numbers as Berceuse for an Unwanted Child, Meditation in Porcelain, and Revolt of the Yes Men. Foresythe also recorded one extended work with the BBC Concert Orchestra in 1935, Southern Holiday. His Lullaby, recorded in 1935 with the “New Music” orchestra including Goodman, shows that Foresythe was in advance of harmonic procedures we usually associate with jazz composer Thelonious Monk.

Earl Hines’ Orchestra - Foresythe: Deep Forest

Fats Waller and his Rhythm - Foresythe: Serenade for a Wealthy Widow

Hal Kemp’s Orchestra - Foresythe: Dodging a Divorcee

The New Music of Reginald Foresythe: Lullaby

Sidney Phillips (1907-1973) is much more of a known quantity than Foresythe, though the modernistic charts he composed belong to a limited part of what proved a long career in English jazz. He first gained notice in 1923 as member of a popular continental group ultimately known as The Melodians, and when they disbanded in 1930, he moved into arranging. In 1933, Phillips joined the orchestra of Bert Ambrose, writing between 100 and 200 charts for Ambrose’s band, for decades a mainstay in the English popular music scene that played jazz with some proficiency in addition to a wide variety of Latin music and purely popularly oriented material unique to Britain. Phillips contributed a number of advanced compositions to Ambrose’s book, including Message from Mars (1936), which, in the context of this study, is a mini-masterpiece of the form — wildly experimental in the first section yet swinging in the second. Message from Mars proved popular and even added to the book of the Hal Kemp Orchestra in America. After he left Ambrose in 1937, Phillips led his own orchestras again, and by the 1950s, had moved back into a traditional jazz format, through which he remains best known in England.

Ambrose and his Orchestra - Phillips: Message from Mars

While the contribution of English musicians to the dialogue between classical music and jazz in the 1920s and 1930s seems of paramount importance to the field of this exchange, the lack of resources inhibits a further understanding of its big picture for now. Nevertheless, the work of Hughes, and Foresythe in particular, would have a decisive influence on the “Eggheads” –- conservatory graduates who entered into the field of jazz –- that shaped the next phase of the conversation.