The Temperance Seven

Jazz came to me in the late 1950s when I heard Chris Barber’s clarinettist Monty Sunshine playing Sidney Bechet’s ‘Petite Fleur’ on the old BBC Light Programme. I was hooked. There was something about this music, and the deep timbre, passion, and vibrato of Sunshine’s playing that took me over completely – it was like a window into another world, the musical equivalent of inheriting a handful of old photographs.

I wanted more, and over the next few months I spent all my paper-round money on LPs and EPs, one of which was by The Temperance Seven, a nine piece band ( one over the eight, get it?) created in 1957 by a mad-cap ensemble of British art college students who were busily re-creating jazz from the first third of the 20th century. What they played was very different to the New Orleans inspired stuff Monty Sunshine and Chris Barber were producing. It was a much more elaborate and directed kind of music that had a feeling of much earlier times – almost Stephen Foster in places – but with a beat Foster had never dreamed of; it also had hot solos, and the wonderfully idiosyncratic vocals ( “You, you’re driving me crazy”) from the dour faced ‘Whispering’ Paul McDowell, who later became a TV actor, appearing in just about every sit-com going.

Pastiche all of this may have been ( although, listening to those records some fifty years on there is now something genuinely original about them) but it was an important pastiche that helped rekindle the fading careers of many American musicians whose heyday had been the 1930s.

I remember going to a Temperance Seven concert in 1961, on the end of the pier at Southsea, and being treated to one of the finest and most enjoyable musical ‘lectures’ ever. The band played everything from early orchestrated ragtime before charging through the seminal arrangements of the Duke Ellington, Paul Whiteman, Ben Pollock, and Fletcher Hendserson orchestras, finally coming to rest in 1934 and the Fletcher Henderson arrangement of ‘Bumble Bee Stomp’ for the newly formed Benny Goodman Orchestra. Not only was it a delight to hear music that was just about as close as you could get to the originals, but to also hear John R.T. Davis and other members of the band tell stories about the composers and arrangers, and the original bands.

After that concert I wanted to hear the original stuff and began to collect Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman records with a vengeance, recordings that led me to the works of Count Basie and Jimmy Lunceford, Woody Herman and, well, just about everybody.

For me it was the start of a passion.