HENRI SALVADOR’S formula for show business success is lots of sleep. “I like nine hours sleep a night plus another three hours in which to wake up properly,” he said.

Stocky, dynamic Henri is one of two French acts giving a Continental flavour to Granada’s Chelsea at Nine on Thursday. He has been a top-liner on the continent for more than 10 years, and a star in South America before that.

It is only in the last couple of years that he has become known in this country but the Queen saw him in Paris a long time ago.

“When she was Princess Elizabeth,” said Henri, “she came to the Carrere club. I ran the band and was the cabaret. She must have enjoyed herself. She was to stay half an hour. She left after five hours.”

Everything Henri does is polished. He sings romantically or skittishly, dances expertly, and has few equals as a mime comedian (usually with a background of noises he has made and recorded beforehand).

Henri, aged 42, is a native of the French West Indies [French Guiana – Ed]. When he was three, his parents moved to Paris. He spent his childhood in a poor neighbourhood. Often the family moved — suddenly. He made money at an early age, shining shoes or selling newspapers (“usually second hand ones”).

At school he could not concentrate. He decided to learn to play an instrument and become an entertainer.

“I liked drums, but they were too bulky to carry round. Clarinet tickled my lips. Trumpet bruised them. Guitar. I fell in love with the shape — like a woman! Light to carry, too.

“Soon I found I could play the guitar well, and got a job with Ray Ventura, a leading French orchestra leader.

“I used to fool around at rehearsals and make everyone laugh. Some of the boys suggested I become a comedian. I worked up some “business” and Ray Ventura let me do it when we went to South America on tour.

“I became a star there. I left the band,” he told me in his breathless, enthusiastic way, using good English, which he says he learnt phonetically.

“When I got back to Paris, I went to a music hall owner and told him I was a star in South America. He said so what. I said I could become a star in Paris. He shrugged. I asked him for a chance — only 30 minutes to close the first half. He laughed. But in the end he gave me my chance.

“I kept my promise. I became a star overnight. That was in 1946. Since then, my job is to stay a star. That is why I work 12 hours a day, rehearsing and thinking up new material.” Unusual sounds inspire his songs and comedy. He memorises them easily (“That’s how I learn languages”).

His noisy diner sketch was a product of keeping his ears open in a restaurant, and imitating what he heard on a sound recorder.

English audiences have thrilled him. “So quick, so complimentary. They feel like flying over London without an aeroplane.”

When he can sneak away from business for an hour or two, he likes fly fishing. “I am a natural lazy man, coming from the Indies,” he admits. “Sitting by a river is fine with me. If I catch a trout, I’ll be so happy. If not, maybe I catch a tan.”

Actually, Henri is not lazy as he tries to make out. He burns up a great deal of energy when he is entertaining and replaces it with plenty of sleep and by sucking glucose and sugar.

“I wouldn’t be able to get on a stage without a sugar lump,” he told me.

Also from France come Les Ballets Modernes de Paris with one of their hits, Dans la Rue. It is the tale of a night in a big city, complete with a street-corner fight applauded by “shady ladies” and high-spirited night clubgoers returning home.

The ballet is run by a married French couple, Francoise and Dominique Dupuy. Last year they triumphed at the Edinburgh Festival with the ballet The Seventh Sacrament.

Francoise says: “That was a serious ballet but this time we will give a lighter show.” She adds: “I am very happy to go to London, since I like the town and I know the people appreciate good dancing. Also, I want to buy a lot of cardigans and cashmeres. And have a good time.”

The seven dancers in the troupe come from all over the world. A new recruit is an 18-year-old Swiss, small and shapely Marie Aubert. From Germany there is Karin Waehner; from Uruguay, Paul Darnot, and from France, Michele Andren and Roger Ribes.

Their choreographer is British — Deryk Mendel who worked in English ballet before the war and afterwards settled in Paris with the Champs Elysées Ballet before joining them.

Says Mendel: “Our technique will be new to British audiences, it may shake a few old people who are not used to modern dancing.”

Music for Dans la Rue comes from America composed by jazz genius Duke Ellington. It is part of his A Drum is a Woman which he recorded, and presented on US television, in 1957. One singer was Margaret Tynes, and she is coming to Chelsea at Nine next week to recreate her part.

Margaret Tynes has had a distinguished career both as Broadway show singer and serious operatic soprano. She was in more than 200 Broadway performances of Finian’s Rainbow and was leading lady to Harry Belafonte in another show, Sing, Man, Sing. She has sung in Moscow in a show presented by Ed Sullivan, played Lady Macbeth in Verdi’s Macbeth with the Montreal Opera Company in Canada, worked for the NBC TV Opera Company, and had five and a half years with the New York City Centre Opera Company.

Two other Americans, both comedians, also appear in Chelsea at Nine: Orson Bean (a return engagement) and Jack Wakefield who was born in Brooklyn, New York, but who made his name in Canada before returning to triumph in New York

Talking of Canada, the show will be compered by Canada’s Bernard Braden.

The post The Continent comes to Chelsea appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

Ask a jazz lover to name his favourite jazz “giant” and he is likely to pick Duke Ellington — certainly Johnny Dankworth would. Here Britain’s top jazz orchestra leader, composer and pianist writes about America’s world-famous jazz orchestra leader, composer and pianist, who will be seen in Duke Ellington and his Orchestra on Wednesday, and says why Ellington has been such an important force in the world of jazz since the late 1920s

ALTHOUGH the name of Duke Ellington is one that most people in this country with any interest in music of any sort will have come across a great deal, it has a magic for the jazz enthusiast which is not so easy to explain.

Why, to most jazz fans, is the Ellington band far and away the most important group of jazzmen in the world today?

The answer lies obviously in the personality of its leader.

Great men break the very rules that most of us have to follow so very assiduously. And Duke has broken almost every one in the rule book which dictates the actions of the successful jazzmen.

He has been on the jazz scene now for upwards of 35 years and during that time his style has remained virtually unaltered. The ebb and flow of fashion, which exists in jazz as it does in nearly every form of self expression, has precious little effect on Ellington, who prefers to steer his own course in his very personal way.

This makes it difficult to see why those who applaud the fashionable in jazz still approve of the unchangeable Duke.

Duke also has not followed the obvious path of a bandleader by selecting the most brilliant jazz individualists of any generation and turning their virtuosity to his advantage. Many of the best-known Ellington sidemen have turned out to be quite ordinary when taken out of the framework which their mentor designed for them. And the band has never been famous for precision and dynamic range in the Count Basie sense of those terms.

The Ellington band’s unmistakable sound is largely achieved through the individuality of its leader’s writing. But even when playing rather dull music by other arrangers its identity remains.

The reason is surely that the Ellington band is a collection of soloists rather than a team. Each man will only submerge his musical personality enough to make things work.

The result is a sound which theoretically doesn’t make sense.

The saxophone section is anything but well-matched or well-balanced from the tonal or dynamic point of view, but the sound, always dominated by baritone saxist Harry Carney (of 37 years’ service), is bulbous, surging and immediately identifiable.

Of the brass the same could be said but here the special trumpet and trombone “growl” effects originated by Bubber Miley and “Tricky Sam” Nanton in the 1920s have been religiously retained by their successors.

Ellington has never presented himself as an instrumentalist leader like Benny Goodman, the Dorsey brothers, Woody Herman and so many successful jazz bandleaders have done — although he has always been technically capable of it.

The key to Duke Ellington’s success is that Duke Ellington’s instrument is his orchestra. And because over the years he has made it into a so much more expressive, adaptable and well-controlled instrument than any one man could ever make his saxophone, his trumpet or his piano, his position at the head of all jazzmen is so unchallenged today.

On meeting the man and working alongside him as I have done, it is easy to see those qualities which make his music superlative. His relaxed manner makes his 63 years seem like 40.

One could easily imagine him as a successful doctor, or even a diplomat, and certainly his gentle manner and his gift for choosing the right word at the right time would have served him well in either capacity.

Duke’s easy-going nature is apparent in his dealings with the orchestra, where discipline is almost unknown. One of the musicians once said to me: “It’s not so much like being in a band as belonging to a club.” But if the club’s rules are broken (as occasionally they are) there is no blackballing for the wrongdoer.

One Ellington orchestra-wife, who evidently admired the Duke as much as most women seem to, said to me once after two Ellingtonians arrived late on the stand: “Duke’s a great psychologist. When the guys arrive late, d’you know what he does? He don’t say nothing, not a word. And those guys feel so awful!”

So awful, I noticed, that the same thing happened the following night.

But such happenings do not reveal Ellington’s capacity for hard and arduous work at his music. He and staff arranger Billy Strayhorn often work long into the night, even after a concert, in order to prepare new scores.

Duke’s reputation for prolific output of new scores has remained undulled in spite of his advancing years. Nevertheless he tends to sleep as much as he can — some times for 12 hours at a time.

Were it not for the sheer love of his band, Ellington would certainly have given it up years ago. Likewise, some of his musicians, who could probably earn greater incomes elsewhere, stay with Duke as much for kicks as halfpence.

I once asked him why his musicians stayed so long with him (he currently has three who were with him in 1932). “Because they can afford me.” he replied.

The post Duke Ellington appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.