BRITAIN’S best small bands will play weekly for viewers, beginning on Thursday. The series, presented by Granada, is called Bandstand and the first four programmes will star Mr Acker Bilk and his Paramount Jazz Band at one end of the studio and the Ray Ellington Quartet, with Valerie Masters, at the other.

“Each week we’ll have at least one guest. The first will be Don Lusher, the modern trombonist in the country,” director Dave Warwick told me. “The week after, it will be harmonica player Max Geldray, an old friend of Ray Ellington. Then we’ve booked a veteran star, trumpeter Nat Gonella, followed by Johnnie Gray, a good tenor saxophonist with a flair for comedy.

“We will have comedy only where it is involved in the music, as it often is with Ellington. We won’t go in for comperes with a lot of comic patter. The bandleaders will do the announcing and will be encouraged to develop their own personalities.”

Warwick, a blond, outspoken man from Southport, will book jazz and near-jazz groups of all kinds. He knows the subject well because for years he was a dance band drummer and vibraphone player, but he found the going hard as a drummer because the market was glutted — “by about 20,000 people who had learned to play in the Services, fooling around with small groups in NAAFI canteens.”

Whenever he directs a band programme – he did seven of a Humphrey Lyttelton series, Here’s Humph and a dozen Ray Ellington Shows — he does a bit of drumming, strictly for fun, by sitting in with the bands during run-throughs. He looks forward to a reunion with the Lyttelton band later in the Bandstand series.

Others he hopes to have on the show eventually are the Tony Crombie Quartet, Georgia Brown (“a talented singer who recently returned from America, where she has been making records with jazz stars”), trumpeter Kenny Baker, the Dill Jones Trio, Joe (Mr Piano) Henderson and singers Dick Francis, Rosemary Squires and Maxine Daniels.

“Ray Ellington’s original pianist, Dick Katz, has become a manager. I’d like to get him back on one programme to do a solo spot,” Dave Warwick said. “I’d also like to see Ray Ellington’s original girl vocalist Marion Ryan, come back and do a song with Valerie Masters, the girl who replaced her.”

Although there will be a good deal of jazz, Bandstand will not be aimed entirely at teenagers.

“In America, jazz appeals to an older public,” Dave pointed out. He believes Bandstand may make some adults take a stronger interest in it.

“I’ve noticed that teenagers who like jazz even “educate” their parents by pointing out some of the good things to listen for,” he said.

“If you take a well-known number — say, I’ll Be With You In Apple Blossom Time – and play the first eight bars straight you can then go into the most advanced modern jazz idiom and people will appreciate it. But if you start off playing intricate jazz, you won’t hold the audience.”

Some of the guest musicians Granada hope to feature are not necessarily big stars, but they are all well-known in the music world.

“I don’t suppose Don Lusher, for example, means much to the mass of viewers, but every serious fan in the country knows about him,” said Dave.

The programme may not be confined to jazz and dance groups. There may be a gipsy band, or a Trinidad steel band.

“Our policy is flexible,” concluded Warwick. “We don’t know yet whether to concentrate on bands of contrasting styles or groups of the same sort. We would like to hear from viewers about their musical preferences.”

The post For Britain’s best small bands – a weekly… Bandstand appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

One Man’s Music, a new Granada series featuring songs of the world’s great popular composers, starts on Monday with the work of Jerome Kern. Cleo Laine sings each week, backed by her husband, Johnny Dankworth, and his orchestra. Here David Griffiths writes about one man’s music — Johnny Dankworth’s

THE year was 1944, the number was Duke Ellington’s Mood Indigo, the band rejoiced in the name of Freddy Mirfield’s Garbage Men … and the occasion was the finals of a national dance band contest.

At the microphone: a 17-year-old clarinet player with the lean good looks of a juvenile Frank Sinatra.

A trade paper review said of the show: “Most credit goes to the youthful clarinet player who thought out an original solo for himself instead of using the conventional one of Barney Bigard’s. (Bigard was Ellington’s star clarinettist.)

“He played with a taste and technique that would have been a credit to a professional instrumentalist.”

So began the professional career of Johnny Dankworth, who later confessed: “The truth is, I just didn’t know Bigard’s solo. I had to improvise!”

By 1949 Johnny was himself a judge at music contests, and he was described as the “noted alto sax and clarinet player of the Ambrose Orchestra.” Ambrose was then playing at a London night club.

In those five years the musical outlook of the young Dankworth had undergone a profound change.

He had become a Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music, and worked in “Geraldo’s Navy” — the bands operated by Geraldo on Cunard liners.

Johnny worked on the Queen Mary. Between voyages he spent days in New York listening to the giants of modern jazz, particularly alto saxophonist Charlie Parker.

“I marvelled at his genius then, as I marvel now,” said Johnny.

“Everything I had heard up to that time was involved with Benny Goodman. Parker changed my thinking.”

Such thinking, in those days, was considered dangerously avante-garde among the entrenched musicians of the swing era. Dankworth found few commercial outlets for his kind of jazz.

But his big chance came. One day he had a call from Ted Heath. “I could hardly believe it,” said Johnny.

At the time Ted had a highly successful series of Sunday afternoon swing sessions at the London Palladium.

“I think Harry Parry was to be that Sunday’s guest star, but was taken ill. Somebody suggested me as a replacement.

“I was deliriously excited. I had to borrow one of my father’s suits.

“Jack Parnell — then playing drums for Ted Heath — was very kind. He offered to lend me one of his.

“Ted introduced me as ‘the young clarinet star’! Within a couple of bars I made the most ear-piercing squeak!

“But Ted was very nice afterwards, and suggested I form my own band.

“So I signed on six young musicians and asked Ted about bookings. All he had was one Palladium date! Not Ted’s fault, of course. I had been misled by my own youth and publicity.”

The Johnny Dankworth Seven made its debut at a 1950 swing session. Fellow musicians were delighted, but the paying public were apathetic.

“FANS BAFFLED BY DANKWORTH’S MASTERPIECES,” said a trade paper. A zealous agent stuck the item in Johnny’s cuttings book … leaving only the last two words of the headline.

But after 10 weeks Johnny called the boys together. “It’s all over,” he told them. “No jobs, no money.”

“We won’t let that bother us,” they replied. “We’ll stick together.”

The Seven survived, even made a little money. Then in 1953 Johnny took the step that often spells disaster. He formed a big band.

What’s more, he made money. Not much, and not often, but just when things were looking black, something always turned up. One example was Johnny’s hit recording of Three Blind Mice.

Today, a reasonably prosperous Johnny Dankworth lives with his wife Cleo Laine at Nether Hall, Bletchley — an hour and a quarter’s drive along the M1 from London’s Tin Pan Alley.

“Cleo and I always wanted to live in the country,” he told me. “And we could do so much more with our money there than we could in the centre of London, where a flat would cost as much as our Bletchley house. And we wanted to bring up our family away from our centre of business.”

It was Johnny who discovered Cleo when he reluctantly agreed to give her an audition with his Seven. He could hardly believe his ears — and his good fortune — and promptly hired her for the group and, subsequently, for the orchestra.

Though they often pursue separate careers (she as an actress as well as a vocal star) they join forces when possible, as in this series.

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FIND film of typhoid germs wriggling around under a microscope.

Find film of baby boxes — new machines for the automatic handling of infants.

Get a shot of banknotes being burnt.

Those are typical assignments handled by George Lys, film librarian of Granada’s World in Action, on Tuesdays.

The germs — needed for last year’s programme on Zermatt — were eventually located after Lys had rung round most of the London medical schools.

Westminster Medical School had just the film.

The baby boxes film never did arrive.

As for the burning banknotes, they must surely be one of the oddest episodes in British television.

The World in Action camera team tried to stuff real notes down drains. They tried to chuck them off Westminster Bridge. But in both cases the authorities stepped in and said “Not Allowed.”

Lys tried to find film of banknotes burning.

He used to work on the Rank “Look At Life” cinema series, and remembered a sequence of Bank of Scotland notes being burnt, but Ranks said they had been forbidden to use this film, except in that original context.

The Bank of England had no such film.

So the World In Action team, tiring of this vain attempt to chuck their money away, decided to make their point (that money was being wasted on defence) in another way.

But the finished World In Action film has never been publicly shown – except for a brief excerpt screened by the BBC — because the ITA stepped in and banned it as lacking balance.

George Lys, a lean, keen, energetic 40-year-old, has seen many millions of feet of film pass before his eyes during the past 25 years.

His memory, he says is unexceptional. But stored in his head is invaluable knowledge of how to get shots of all kinds.

Any historical material, any sequence that the hard-pressed World In Action camera team haven’t time to go out and shoot for the next programme, it’s George’s task to get — fast.

Most helpful of all sources to him is the United States Information Service. The Russian Sovexport Films are also extremely obliging.

Car firms and the big airlines provide ungrudging assistance. “We asked TWA for a shot of a jet in flight,” said George. “They didn’t have one, sent a camera up within a few hours and flew the film straight to us.”

One of the oddest, most valuable sources, for last January’s programme on the Lakonia sinking disaster was a passenger.

“We sent a questionnaire to the victims asking if they’d had lifeboat drill, and so on.” George explaihed.

“One man had taken some 8mm. film of the abandonment of the ship. We had it enlarged to our 16mm. size and it turned out to be very good.”

George’s job also involved the cataloguing, for possible future use, of all film taken for World In Action.

“There may be 10,000 feet shot for a programme, of which about 950 get used. The rest is filed.

“When we use film crews in the States we sometimes get crazy guys filming everything in sight.

“For the feature on Jean Shrimpton modelling in America, we ended up with 22,000 feet, and 93 of them got on to the screen!”

So that he knows exactly what he’s got and where it is, George prefers to work without an assistant, though I should mention that, as part of World In Action’s policy of using the best available equipment, he does employ a robot.

It is “the world’s first fully automatic splicing machine” for glueing film together!

The most frustrating part of George’s job is having to work in an office from which his reporting and researching colleagues are constantly flying off to exotic places in search of news.

George, who’s just returned from a family holiday in Poole, said: “I haven’t been abroad for 15 years and you can imagine that this job makes me long to fly out to see the world in action for myself.”

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