pure.ulster.ac.uk€¦  · Web viewBecoming a Follower of the Merseysippi Jazz Band – An Approach from Ethnography, Autoethnography and Social World Analysis: A Study in Resocialisation*

Becoming a Follower of the Merseysippi Jazz Band – An Approach from Ethnography, Autoethnography and Social World Analysis: A Study in Resocialisation*

Abstract: This article is a study in the interrelations between ethnography, autoethnography and social world analysis as applied to a musical event – a weekly jazz residency – attended by the elderly. It illustrates selected ‘dying embers’ of New Orleans revivalist jazz in the UK with reference to the author’s resocialisation into ‘classic’ New Orleans revivalist jazz by members of Liverpool’s Merseysippi Jazz Band, the longest established New Orleans revivalist jazz band in the UK.

Keywords: autoethnography, ethnography, social worlds, New Orleans jazz revivalism; Merseysippi Jazz Band

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe, 1845.

Introduction

This article is set within two main sets of substantive literatures, namely that of the literature on New Orleans jazz revivalism in the UK, from academic popular music and jazz studies perspectives, and that on the elderly and music, from the standpoint of ethnography and participant observation (Atkinson and Hammersley, 1994). More generally, it may be seen as a contribution to the role of popular music in the everyday life of elderly people (Unruh 1983; Bennett, 2001; Smith, 2009); and to a social worlds approach to sociology, cultural studies, and popular music and jazz studies (Becker, 2008; Finnegan, 2007; Martin, 2005; 2006; Unruh, 1979; 1983).

The relevant literature on New Orleans jazz revivalism in the UK has grown remarkably in the last few years. From a very small base up to 2007 (Goodey, 1968; Frith, 1988; McKay, 2003; 2004; 2005; Moore, 2007), we can now add Shipton (2012), those of the Equinox Popular Music History Series edited by Alyn Shipton (Heining, 2012; Gelly, 2014; Chris Barber, with Alyn Shipton, 2014), as well as my own studies (Ekins, 2009; 2010; 2012; 2013). The narrative turn in contemporary social sciences and cultural studies has ensured that life history, ethnographic and participant observation studies have become a major feature of studies of music and the elderly. Work on ageing, nostalgia and popular music(Bennett, 2001) has become more nuanced as the ethnographic turn has predominated, and it is noticeable that in special journal issues such as ‘As Time Goes By: Music, Dancing and Ageing’ (Fairley and Forman, 2012), it is the ethnographic component that predominates.

*I am enormously grateful to the Merseysippi Jazz Band and to the band’s followers for welcoming me so warmly to their weekly residency at the Liverpool Cricket Club between November 2009 and May 2011, particularly to those who were my ‘key informants’. I am also indebted to Sara Cohen who was the inspiration behind the article and to two anonymous reviewers. Finally, I thank Fred Eatherton and Robert Greenwood for their comments on the penultimate draft of this article.

However, it must be said that the ethnographic component in the academic literature on New Orleans revivalist jazz is often very thin. Moreover, in both of the relevant literatures being considered –on New Orleans jazz revivalism and on ageing and music – theory and methodology are undeveloped at best and non-existent at worst. It is these gaps in the literature that I address in this article.

The theoretical contribution of this study is an exploration of selected interrelations between ethnography (Stock, 2004; Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007), autoethnography (Ellis and Bochner, 2000; Anderson, 2006) and social world analysis (Strauss, 1978; 1982; 1984; 1992; Clarke, 2005; Martin, 2006) as set within a social interactionist (symbolic interactionist) approach (Becker, 2008; Blumer, 1969; Prus, 1996; 1997) to popular music studies (Cohen, 1993; Stock, 2004; Hesmondaigh and Negus, 2002) and jazz studies (Martin, 2005). The recent substantive focus of the study is ethnographic/participant observation work I carried out at a public jazz ‘event’ (Stock, 2004), namely the weekly residency of the Merseysippi Jazz Band (MJB) held at the Liverpool Cricket Club, Aigburth, Liverpool, UK, on Monday evenings, between 8.30pm and 11.00pm.

This public jazz event is sponsored by the Liverpool Cricket Club which provides a room, filled with tables and chairs – together with the use of an adjacent club bar room (see Appendix 2). Microphones, amplification and speakers are also provided. At the very occasional special event, such as the band’s 62nd anniversary party that I attended, the band has the use of an additional adjacent room where free Lancashire hotpot may be served. I attended as a participant observer at seventeen of these sessions between November 2009 and May 2010, and on eight occasions between January 2011 and May 2011. I followed up my reflections on these observations in email and Facebook communication with a number of relevant key informants in the period spanning 2011 to 2014.

The Merseysippi Jazz Band has been a fixture of the Liverpool jazz scene, indeed, the Liverpool music scene, for so long that few older Liverpudlians would be unaware of their existence; similarly, for those familiar with New Orleans Revivalist jazz in the UK. For an international audience unfamiliar with New Orleans jazz revivalism in the UK, I refer the reader to Gelly (2014: 29-30) on the range of bands and typical venues in the 1950:

At the beginning of the 1950s, New Orleans revivalist jazz bands sprung up all around the United Kingdom: Sandy Brown and his Band (Edinburgh), the Yorkshire Jazz Band (Leeds), the Saints (Manchester), Mick Gill’s Band (Nottingham), the Second City Jazzmen and Ray Foxley’s splendidly-named Levee Loungers (Birmingham), the Merseysippi Jazz Band (Liverpool), the Avon Cities Jazzband (Bristol), the Clyde Valley Stompers (Glasgow). In the fullness of time, there was scarcely a major waterway in the Kingdom without its eponymous jazz band, and when the major ones were all spoken for, the merest trickle might be adopted – as happened in the case of the Crane River Jazz Band. Nor did the ancient universities remain aloof. Oxford boasted the Salty Dogs, while Cambridge, in a display of recondite learning, fielded Tony Short’s Varsity Sackdroppers. Around each of these grew up a ‘scene’, a loose knit community of like-minded people. Trumpeter Dickie Hawdon (1927-2009), who was de facto leader of the Yorkshire Jazz Band at this time, recalled their sessions at the Adelphi, in central Leeds, as ‘a very big deal – packed out every Wednesday night’ . . . Performances almost always took place in hired rooms or halls, the vast majority of them attached to pubs, inns or hostelries of various kinds. This was the way social events had been arranged in Britain for generations and it suited everyone

quite well. To a large extent it still does . . . When veteran American musicians began touring widely in Britain in the 1960s many of them were quite charmed by the whole set up.

From its earliest days the MJB was often singled out for special praise (Leigh, 2002). Boulton (1958: 78-79) sets the context well:

The 1948 boom in amateur-jazz making was akin to the guitar-twanging craze of ten years later in that a great deal of noise was made with very little music of quality to show for it. But a handful of players did contrive to produce good music and good jazz . . . John Haimes’ short-lived Jelly Roll Kings, the early Cy Laurie Four, the Merseysippi Jazz Band and the Saints Jazz Band were all, in some measure, pioneers.

In regards to the 1950s audiences, it should be said that in the moral panics of the period (Cohen, 2002), traditional jazz was variously associated with rebellious youth, beatniks, smoky jazz clubs, art students, the intelligentsia, left wing politics, and so on (McKay, 2004; 2005). Godbolt (1959) estimates that in the 1950s there were some two to three thousand young ‘Britishers’ who were playing in the revivalist style, all of them initially amateurs. Most of them had their own particular following. The majority of the MJB followers that I researched are from this early-mid 1950s teen generation. My oldest informants were teenagers at the time of the beginnings of UK jazz revivalism in the early-mid 1940s.

I am particularly interested in what my ethnographic work tells us about selected aspects of what might be seen as the ‘dying embers’ of traditional New Orleans jazz revivalism in the United Kingdom. The average age both of musicians and audiences within this jazz scene/social world is now probably well into the 70s. In addition to the revivalist pub and club scene, the jazz festival scene and ‘jazz holiday’ weekend scene now flourish. Gelly (2014: 139) refers to ‘The Second Coming of the trad boom, which flourished in Britain throughout the 1980s and 1990s into the present century.’ This ‘remarkable phenomenon’, Gelly notes, entailed an elderly audience returning to the music and musicians of their youth ‘invisible to everyone not directly involved’ in order to attend early spring to late summer festivals of trad and allied styles in places as far apart as Bude in Cornwall, Keswick in the Lake District and Whitley Bay in Tyne and Wear.’ This is not to say that no younger musicians and their entourages attend these events. They are, however, very much the remarked upon exception. When I attended the Bude jazz festival in 2005, 2006 and 2007, for instance, there was a flurry of enthusiastic talk about the young New Orleans jazz revivalist musicians, Richard and Russ Bennett, and the even younger ‘Baby’ Jools, who were recent additions to the festival and ‘jazz weekend’ circuit.1

A number of regulars at the MJB sessions are in their 80s. Indeed, during my period of participant observation, the last remaining original founder member of the MJB – pianist

1Just Jazz: The Traditional Jazz Magazine, the 40 page monthly magazine that covers these various scenes, has had a print run of 5,000 since its inception in 1998. Its current subscription list is 2,500 (Pete Lay, editor, email 23rd July 2014). Just Jazz occasionally features photographs and re-issue CD reviews of the MJB and its members, although the MJB have long since ceased accepting regular nation-wide festival bookings. Ageing, death and dying on the UK traditional jazz scene are topics frequently referred to in Just Jazz.

Frank Robinson – died at the age of 85 <http://www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/liverpool-news/regional-news/2011/01/04/friends-pay-tribute-afte-death-of-merseysippi-jazz-band-pianist-frank-robinson-50061-27928188/ > . Moreover, the MJB claim to be the longest established jazz band in the UK and, arguably, are the oldest traditional jazz band in the world, in terms of longevity, having been formed in 1949. They, therefore, provide excellent case study material in matters of ageing, popular music and jazz.

The Merseysippi City Jazz Band and the ‘Authenticity Wars’ in New Orleans Revivalist Jazz

Carr, Fairweather and Priestley (1987: 416) provide a useful definition of New Orleans jazz ‘revivalism’:

The conscious return, by a new generation of jazz musicians, to an earlier style or form of jazz. The term is most generally applied to the re-adoption of New Orleans jazz (either in its sophisticated Oliver/Armstrong incarnation or in the more basic styles of George Lewis and Bunk Johnson) by young musicians in the late 1930s in the USA and the early 1940s in Great Britain and Europe.

By the early-mid 1950s, the worldwide New Orleans jazz revivalist movement (Bell, 2008; Boulton, 1958; Carr, Fairweather, and Priestley, 1987) that developed in the 1940s had split into two major groupings – those that Hadlock (2000: 311-315) refers to as the ‘formalist’ grouping and the ‘naturalist’ grouping. Following Hadlock (2000), the Oliver/Armstrong stream is ‘formalist’; the Bunk Johnson/George Lewis stream is ‘naturalist’. The ‘formalists’ included bands like the Merseysippi Jazz Band who based their style on recordings made in the early-mid 1920s initially, in Chicago and then in New York, by black migrants from New Orleans, most notably those recordings made by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven, and Jelly Roll Morton. These ‘race records’ originally intended for a black audience (Potter, 1999) were appropriated by young white enthusiasts (Panassié, 1942).

The Lu Watters’ Yerba Buena Jazz Band, in San Francisco, formed in 1939, were the first young white revivalist band to revive this Chicago-based New Orleans jazz that came to be termed ‘classic jazz’ (Goggin and Cluke, 1994). The Yerba Buena Jazz Band featured two trumpets in their front line (with clarinet and trombone), following the King Oliver Jazz Creole Band which featured King Oliver and a young Louis Armstrong on trumpets. The MJB were fervent admirers of both the King Oliver Creole Jazz Band and the Lu Watters’ band and for almost all of their history up to 2007 identified strongly as a ‘two trumpet band’. The death of their first trumpet player John Lawrence in 2007 led them to becoming a more orthodox one trumpet band, in recent years. A suitable replacement for Lawrence could not be found.2 The ‘formalists’, as Hadlock (2000: 311) puts it, ‘were as concerned with repertoire as with maintaining spontaneity and agreeable counterpoint’. They ‘found pleasure

2 The death of John Lawrence on first trumpet (MJB, 1950-2007) meant that John Higham on second trumpet (MJB, 1970-today) became the band’s single trumpet player. John Higham likes to joke that the names of his ten favourite musicians are Louis Armstrong (Bielderman, 2009: 5). Higham told me that it was Humphrey Lyttelton playing Dallas Blues at Picton Hall, Liverpool, in 1949 that first inspired his career as a revivalist trumpet player (personal communication, 2011).

in multiple-strain pieces by Oliver, Morton, and other sophisticated early composers’, including the early Duke Ellington (pp. 311-312).

The ‘naturalists’, on the other hand, followed the music of the New Orleans musicians who had not migrated to Chicago in the 1920s. These were the musicians who had stayed in New Orleans – the ‘stay at homes’ (Godbolt, 1989: 13) – who were first recorded in New Orleans in the early 1940s by young (white) enthusiasts (Hazeldine, 1993; Raeburn, 2009). In particular, the New Orleans bands formed around the legendary Bunk Johnson and George Lewis spearheaded what became an alternative sound with an accompanying alternative ideology (Hazeldine and Martyn, 2000, identity and following (Pointon and Smith, 2010). The ‘naturalists’, as Hadlock (2000: 311), puts it, ‘leaned toward simple songs upon which they could build rolling polyphonic ensemble, often reaching peaks of excitement without any solos at all.’ The young ‘purist’ English trumpet player and bandleader Ken Colyer became the leader of the naturalists in Europe (Pointon and Smith, 2010), particularly, after he returned to London from New Orleans in 1953, having played and recorded with many his New Orleans heroes (Colyer, 2009).3

Autoethnography, Ethnography and Social World Analysis

According to Kling and Gerson (1978: 26) a social world consists of ‘common or joint activities or concerns tied together by a network of communication’. From the standpoint of a social world analysis, the ‘social world of revivalist New Orleans jazz’ emerged in the late 1930s and early 1940s and by the early to mid-1950s was segmenting into two main subworlds (Strauss, 1984) each with their own body of recordings, bands, books, entrepreneurs, leaders, and so on. The separation and development of the two subworlds received a particular fillip from the beginning of the 1960s onwards, when ‘second wave revivalism’ began (Ekins, 2005-2009), inaugurated by a spate of ‘naturalist’ recordings in New Orleans (Stagg and Crump, 1973) and the opening of Preservation Hall in New Orleans which provided a steady source of work for the last remaining ‘old style’ (naturalist) New Orleans musicians (Carter, 1991). These developments led to the two revivalist ‘subworlds’ being set apart still further as the 1960s progressed. Throughout this period, ‘classic New Orleans jazz’ (formalists) was contrasted to what during the 1960s became known as ‘contemporary New Orleans jazz’. Enthusiasts of this latter music had the whole of contemporary New Orleans and contemporary New Orleans jazz to draw upon and sustain their interests and activities, whereas the followers of ‘classic jazz’ such as the MJB tended to remain rooted in a subworld of old recordings, scholarship of the 1920s and early 1930s, and ‘revivals’ thereof.

From 1961 to 1972 I participated in this ‘second wave’ (naturalist) revival variously as an enthusiast, record collector, trumpet player, bandleader, and record producer in Birmingham (England), London, and in New Orleans. With hindsight, therefore, I am able to draw on my experiences to provide what might be termed an ‘autoethnography of memory’ of the period. Moreover, as somebody who trained as a sociologist between 1971 and 1979 and worked as a full-time academic sociologist from 1980 until my retirement as an Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Cultural Studies in 2009, I am in a position to consider that

3Hadlock is well aware that central figures of the revival such as Bunk Johnson and Sidney Bechet could move with ease from formalist to naturalist settings. The same might be said of some contemporary revivalists, although not many.

autoethnography of memory from the standpoint of sociology, cultural studies, and – since 2009 – popular music studies and jazz studies.4

My doctorate was on George Herbert Mead (Ekins, 1978), the founding father of the sociological perspective of symbolic interaction. Later, my empirical work using a whole barrage of ethnographic and qualitative research methods for over three decades was in the substantive area of transgender (Ekins, 1997, Ekins and King, 2006; Ekins and King, 2010). From 2000 onwards, and from 2005 onwards, seriously, I returned to the social worlds of revivalist jazz after a complete absence of participation in those worlds from 1976 – 2000. I had been ‘away’ for twenty four years. Quite soon, I was able to pick up where I had left off and make contact with virtually all of my old friends and acquaintances from the 1960s that were still participating in New Orleans jazz social worlds. Now armed with training in sociology I was equipped to contrast and compare my authoethnography of memory with contemporary social world analysis of revivalist jazz worlds.

I was first sensitised to the significance of the MJB in the history of jazz revivalism when I attended the Keswick Jazz Festival, England in 2007. At the same time, it dawned upon me just how selective and focused social world participation may be. An informant in his 80s, who had lived in Liverpool all his life, told me that he had followed the MJB since shortly after its inception in 1949. He had met his wife at an MJB event, soon afterwards, and the couple continued going to MJB events up to the time commitments to their young family kept them at home. Once their family had ‘fled the nest’, as he put it, the couple returned to MJB events, continued buying MJB records (now CDs), and so on. Now, as a widower, he could reminisce about his good MJB times with his wife. He seemed to have no particular knowledge or interest in the history of jazz, or, indeed, any other band, although he did comment that ‘the Merseys was a revivalist band who followed Lu Watters’. His jazz world was almost exclusively an MJB world. However, he wasn’t what Unruh (1979) refers to as an ‘insider’ to that world (see below). Rather, he was a ‘regular’ who ‘has made participation in a social world a regularised and routinised activity’ (Unruh, 1979: 119).

The study of regulars has been the staple of many ethnographies and community studies. For Unruh (1979: 119), they are

characterized by their: (i) orientation which is one of habituation; (ii) integration into the world of everyday experiences; (iii) relationships of familiarity with other participants, and (iv) attachment to the social world and commitment to its on-going functions.

I, on the other hand, throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, was one of those social world participants who became an ‘insider’. Insiders, for Unruh (1979: 120), are those who know the intimate details and workings of a social world. They are

characterized by their: (i) orientation to a social world which functions to create one’s near total identity; (ii) experiences which are focused on the creation of the world for others; (iii) intimate relationships with participants; and (iv) a commitment to the world’s activities which necessitate in engaging in recruitment of new members.

Between 1961 and 1963, I bought records by both ‘formalists’ and ‘naturalists’. In 1964, I sold my ‘formalist’ records and focused almost exclusively on the ‘naturalist’ subworld. I continued primarily within this subworld when I returned to revivalism in 2000. Thus when I had the opportunity to carry out ethnographic/participant observation with the MJB I 4 I completed an MA in Popular Music Studies, School of Music, University of Liverpool, in 2011.

approached it autoethnographically as a study in resocialisation: socialisation, that is, into a ‘formalist’ world with which I was largely unfamiliar. In addition, most of my informants in this formalist world I was encountering for the first time were originally variously socialised into the revivalist jazz worlds of the 1950s, the period of first wave revivalism. I, on the other hand, was initially socialised in to the second wave revivalism of the 1960s.

In terms of theory, as a social interactionist (symbolic interactionist), I followed symbolic interactionist Leon Anderson (2006) and situated my work within ‘analytic autoethnography’ which is research in which the researcher becomes ‘(i) a full member of the research group or setting, (ii) visible as such a member in published texts, and (iii) committed to developing theoretical understandings of broader social phenomena’ (Anderson: 2006: 375).5

Becoming a Follower of the MJB

Entering the Field: Setting the Stage, Beginning Resocialisation

Anyone with internet access has instant access to the virtual world of jazz in Liverpool and the North West of England. In particular, one site – ‘Fred Burnett’s Jazz North West’ – is specifically devoted to traditional jazz (http://www.btinternet.com/~jazzworld/tradjazz.htm). Its home page announces

Welcome to my world of Traditional Jazz. The pages which follow are a tribute to the musicians who have dedicated themselves to playing the music of New Orleans and Dixieland in the North West of the British Isles.

Anyone seeking a Monday night venue is referred to the MJB residency at the Liverpool Cricket Club. This was my route to the venue. A local person without internet access might have been drawn to the session by the weekly advert placed in the Liverpool Echo. Again, those familiar with traditional jazz clubs anywhere in the UK would be familiar with the monthly ‘Jazz Guide: For All That is Best in the World of Traditional Jazz’ which includes the MJB listings.

On my first visit to the club I was met with a scene which was soon to become quite comforting. There is no one on the door, no admission fee. The visitor just walks in. No one stands; everyone sits – except the band’s trumpet, clarinet, trombone, bass and banjo/guitar players. As I was soon to learn, almost all the regulars sit in the same seats or place every week (see Appendix 2 for layout of room, featuring bandstand and tables). There is no dancing, no photography, no audible mobile phone use, and virtually no talking when the band is playing. Everyone seats themselves in such a way that they can intently watch the musicians. A young person might think they have stumbled on a jazz concert for old people in a retirement home. However, the old people are all drinking: mostly pints of beer for the men and often soft drinks or wine for the women. There seems to be no movement anywhere in the audience, apart from tapping fingers and legs. Everyone is grey or white haired; many look very frail. The average age would seem to be well into the 70s. There are some 40

5Anderson (2006) distinguishes his favoured ‘analytic ethnography’ from ‘evocative ethnography’ which draws on postmodern sensibilities and whose advocates distance themselves from ‘realist’ and analytic ethnographic traditions. See special issue, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, (35): August 2006.

people, a ratio of 2 males to one female, sitting by tables of various sizes. Some sit in groups of mainly couples; some sit as couples – mostly a man and woman; one or two males sit on their own. There are brief moments to talk to your neighbours in between tunes and a longer opportunity to chat in the single half hour break. At the end of the session there is little or no lingering. The audience speed off home. However, the audience do clap very appreciatively at the end of each number; and after most solos. As they go home many can be heard saying what a good night it was: as one informant put it ‘the best free night out in town.’ They have all enjoyed themselves – some, immensely so – in a mostly quiet, reflective and routinised fashion.

After my first two visits, I decided that this was the place I would do my ethnographic study. In my first phase of data collection I struck up conversations with neighbours, those buying drinks at the bar outside, those I met on the bus going to gig, and those waiting for a bus at the end of the gig. I mostly introduced myself as someone over from Northern Ireland for Mondays and Tuesdays doing a course in popular music at the University (Liverpool University). Only later and with selected informants, as seemed appropriate, did I say I was writing an essay about some of my experiences at the club. My main tactic to keep the conversation flowing in what were essentially dozens of short unstructured interviews was to say I did not know anything much about this sort of jazz but I did know about other sorts. I was new to Liverpool, pretty much new to everything here, and so on (the naïve participant). Not surprisingly, many of my ‘informants’ were only too pleased to enlighten me, often at great length within the fairly short times available. Certain themes almost always came up – the longevity of the band; the various places they had played at, the various jazz venues the informant had been to, including the pre-Beatles Cavern: mostly information about people, places, and the music peppered with anecdotes.6 Quite soon, I had cultivated a small number of ‘key informants’ who would answer my more detailed probing, as and when I wished. I was soon introduced to what one of my key informants referred to as ‘the secretariat’ – Unruh’s (1979: 120-122) ‘insiders’: mostly the group of band members’ wives and ex-band members’ widows that sat at two adjacent front tables nearest the band. I got to know the band, initially, by striking up conversations with them as I was buying some of their CDs. I furthered informal unstructured interviewing in subsequent weeks by bringing in with me some book, magazine or record that I had come across which featured the MJB. This strategy always provided a talking point and many people were keen to approach me and talk about my new ‘find’. It also provided me with information about participants’ involvements in the world of the MJB. Many were familiar with Leigh (2002), but even the keenest of fans may not have known about Bielderman (2009), for instance. Often I exchanged magazine articles about the MJB, from various periods of their history.

The Band: Educating, Entertaining, Preserving

During the first phase of data collection, I secured the necessary contacts to pursue further informal chats (unstructured interviewing) as and when I wanted – remember that the

6The MJB were the first band to play the Cavern on its opening night in 1957 (see Appendix 3). With the slightest encouragement from me, informants would regale me with Cavern tales. The up and coming Beatles played interval sessions to the MJB in the early days of the Cavern, always a good source of tales.

majority at the event are either ‘insiders’ (about sixteen people, including the band) or ‘regulars’ who come to the session most weeks or, in many cases, every week. For my second phase of data collection I focused, principally, on the band and their music. During this second phase, I sat on my own, mostly – but well positioned so that passers-by to the bar and exit would pass me, providing a good opportunity to meet new people or renew previous acquaintanceships (see Appendix 2). I felt free to write in a small notebook the various tunes that were played, John Higham’s spoken introductions, band pre-tune patter, snippets of conversations I heard around me, and so on. Otherwise, I wrote up my notes as soon as I got back to my Liverpool hotel some forty five minutes after leaving the gig.

It is not usual in jazz circles to refer to the member of the band who introduces the numbers as a compère. But John Higham, the band’s trumpet player who makes the announcements, does function as a compère. Higham is a retired General Practitioner – as many informants told me almost immediately. He also runs ‘a tight ship’ as another informant put it. He sees to it that the band starts on the button of 8.30pm, finishes the first set promptly at 9.30pm has a strictly 30 minute break only, and plays the final set from 10pm-11pm. One commentator (Bielderman, 2009: 5) sets the scene, thus:

Dr John . . . Obviously well educated, and a man to be trusted implicitly, his bearing inspires total belief in all who meet him. . . An absolute natural as the band’s compère, his creative announcements range from the incomprehensible to the interminable, especially if given the slightest encouragement. Listen to his jokes by all means, but whatever your reaction to his brand of humour don’t laugh or display any fascination without being fully prepared to take the consequences.

The ‘naturalist’ Ken Colyer would famously kick off most numbers without any introduction at all. The joke was that the band never knew what Colyer was going to play and sometimes Colyer didn’t know himself (Pointon and Smith, 2010). In the interests of spontaneity, the band had to pick things up quickly as they got under way. The MJB approach is the total opposite. John Higham either announces to the band what they will play next, or there is brief banter between the band members finalising what they are going to play, the key, the order of choruses and so on. Then Higham turns to the audience and to his microphone and introduces the number. Almost always he refers to the composer of the piece, the musician or band who first recorded it. Often he gives the date of the recording, further details about it, and accompanies his introductions with a brief joke or jokey aside. Many of these jokes and asides refer to old age – forgetfulness, decrepit bodies, and so on. In short, we have a compère who is simultaneously educating, entertaining, and preserving, in the language of contemporary cultural heritage. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the MJB were the winners of the BBC Jazz Cultural Heritage Award in 2003 <http://www.btinternet.com/~jazzworld/mersey.htm>.

Sociologically speaking the audience are being (or have been) socialised into a world of ‘classic jazz’ (formalist) in an entertaining way. A newcomer who returned to the sessions for more than a week or so would soon realise that the same names kept coming up repeatedly, namely, those of King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, and Bix Beiderbecke. Moreover, the attentive observer would notice that almost always the recordings spoken of were from the early 1920s through to the early 1930s. From my perspective as a researcher being socialised into an alternative revivalist jazz world, I was able to follow up on the various leads that Higham was providing. Indeed, I meticulously built up a classic jazz CD collection by following Higham’s ‘educating’ (see Appendix 4).

Nevertheless, lest the tunes themselves should be construed too seriously, Higham peppers the evening’s programme with novelty numbers, again mostly from the 1920s and 1930s. Often these numbers feature different members of the band – another of Higham’s ways of introducing variety into the programme. The attentive observer soon realises that the band’s repertoire is very extensive and its knowledge of the recording histories of that repertoire is very sophisticated. Moreover, as jazz numbers from the period very often have a barely disguised reference to sex and sexuality, the scope for humour and double entendre is extensive – as in the trombonist’s speciality novelty number ‘My Baby’s Wild about My Old Trombone’ (sung by a very elderly retired primary school head teacher trombonist). Indeed, once sensitised to the implicit sexuality, the audience soon realise that many, if not most, of the titles played by classic jazz bands refer to sexuality – as in ‘I Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None of my Jelly Roll’. Needless to say when a title had been historically refined, when, for instance, ‘All the Whores like the Way I Ride’ became sanitised as ‘All the Girls Go Crazy About the Way I Walk’, Higham is provided with yet another opportunity to provide a jokey introduction to the number and demonstrate his knowledge of the classic tradition at the same time. I was reminded of the BBC mission ‘to inform, educate and entertain’.

The Audience: Characteristics and Types of Participation in Social Worlds

In the previous sections, I sought to introduce major facets of social world analysis and to highlight the basic educating, entertaining, and preserving role of the MJB event. I turn now to the audience, more specifically. Here I will group my observations around the characteristics of the MJB social world and the extent to which various audience members participate in the social world of the MJB and the social world of classic jazz, indeed of jazz worlds more generally.

As I have implied, already, this MJB social world is regularised and respectful. The majority of the audience are in their seats before the first number. They do not talk during numbers. Most follow a highly regularised pattern which extends often to their drinking patterns. I could almost set my watch to the drinking patterns of a father and daughter couple of regulars, for instance. The daughter made two visits to the bar. On the first visit she bought her father’s first pint of beer and her single orange juice. On her second visit to the bar, she bought his second pint with an accompanying whisky with two orange juices for herself – just before the interval. One of the few male regulars who always came on his own – a fanatic of both the band and of his particular brand of Christianity – downed his first two pints of beer on their own in the first half of the session, followed by a further two pints accompanied by two glasses of red wine in the second session.

But how knowledgeable are the participants about what aspects of the social worlds they are participating in? I am concerned with types of participation and for this purpose my informal interviewing style and casual conversations continued until I had ‘saturated’ the types (Glaser, 1978: 91). It was not my purpose to quantify the participation.

Here it is instructive to detail and apply Unruh (1979) further. For Unruh (1979: 115) ‘a social world must be seen as an internally recognizable constellation of actors, organizations, events and practices which have coalesced into a perceivable sphere of interest and involvement for the participants’. As we have seen, the revivalist jazz world is a segmented world. Moreover there are segments within segments, as the informant illustrated whose jazz world was exclusively an MJB world. Degrees and types of participation within

and between segments vary. When I mentioned the name of Ken Colyer to one MJB enthusiast ‘regular’ who followed several Liverpool traditional jazz bands (he would regale me with tales of Liverpool’s Blue Magnolia Jass Orchestra, in particular) he looked blank and replied ‘no that’s not a name I’ve heard of’. On the other hand, one my most significant key informants told me of the times he had enjoyed Ken Colyer at the Cavern in the 1950s and at the 100 Club, in London, decades later. He was well aware of the ‘authenticity war’ but enjoyed participating in a range of jazz worlds. A number of my informants were fans of Acker Bilk, Chris Barber and Kenny Ball, the ‘stars’ of the 1959-1963 ‘trad fad’ (Ekins, 2011). Nevertheless, from the standpoint of the Liverpool Cricket Club ‘event’ MJB preoccupations did predominate.

Unruh (1979) distinguishes four main social types of participant in social worlds: strangers, tourists, regulars and insiders. To a degree I, as a researcher, was a stranger who became a regular. Strangers approach an already established social world with an attitude of objectivity and detached indifference. In terms of their characteristics they are naïve and detached in their commitment to the world. I met no other ‘strangers’. Similarly, I met no ‘tourists’ (Unruh, 1979: 118-120). All the non-regulars I spoke to turned out to be participants within revivalist jazz worlds elsewhere – often quite prominent names in those worlds, as musicians, promoters or authors. Finding themselves in Liverpool for the evening, they had sought out traditional jazz and located the MJB session.

Concluding Comments

Framing this article in terms of my re-socialisation into ‘classic’ New Orleans revivalist jazz has enabled me to focus on that subworld of New Orleans revivalist music that has been most neglected in the popular music and jazz studies literature. Virtually all of the relevant substantial popular music and jazz studies work focuses on the version of New Orleans jazz revivalism spearheaded by Ken Colyer, following Bunk Johnson and George Lewis, inter alia (Goodey, 1968; McKay, 2003; 2005; Moore, 2007). Certainly, there has been no extensive such focused work on the ‘classic revivalist jazz’ tradition favoured by the MJB, far less on the devotion and loyalty to the favourite music of their youth of such a specific localized and elderly jazz subworld. More importantly, for me, however, is that by combining the autoethnographic with the ethnographic I was able to utilise the literature of social world analysis in a new substantive area and pursue my own autoethnographic theoretical and methodological concerns, simultaneously, albeit at the expense of thicker ethnographic description and analysis. I will leave for another occasion a more detailed comparison of my relevant experiences in the 1960s and 1970s – and, indeed, over the subsequent lifecycle – with those of my informants.

The issue of ‘dying embers’ is a complex one that essentially revolves around the nature and status of change and renewal in New Orleans jazz revivalism. To set the scene with greater clarity and simplicity, I have chosen to focus on those MJB sessions where all the band members were playing, with no musician deputising, and with no special guest. Occasionally, one of the band members’ absences necessitated a deputy. Quite frequently, every six weeks or so, a ‘star’ guest was featured. Indeed, these guest nights constituted something of a ‘high day and holiday’ and the attendance was always much higher – sometimes over seventy people, as opposed to the usual forty, or so.

When there are substitutions and special guests, the ‘formalists’ like the MJB have a dilemma. The King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton and Lu Watters numbers typically demand detailed knowledge of the particular tunes’ strains and arrangements. Visitors rarely have the necessary competencies,7 another issue touching on ‘dying embers’. The band’s strategy for dealing with this was to drop the more complicated arranged numbers and feature mostly a mixture of tunes of either the 12 bar blues format or of the Tin Pan Alley popular song variety, including many jazz standards. With these numbers, the band could play a chorus or two together while the guest picked up on things, followed by a string of solos variously featuring the visitor. Some of the special guests, such as John Barnes on reeds and Roy Williams on trombone, both of whom I heard as guests with the band, have played with the MJB many times. They are highly competent jazz musicians who are able to fit in with any traditional jazz band at short notice. Moreover, musicians like these soon stamp their authority on the proceedings.

Musically, these are very different sessions, but all the evidence suggests that the audience take particular enjoyment in both the ‘high day’ and what is often the very high level of expertise in the guest’s playing. There are few, if any, ‘purists’ left now amongst the MJB followers. In any event, John Higham maintains the continuity of the weekly sessions by making sure that many of the band’s usual speciality numbers are included – selecting those that do not involve tight arrangements.

Most guests, like John Barnes and Roy Williams, are of the same generation as the band (see Appendix 3). However, occasionally, there is a young up-and-coming very talented young guest. The young trumpet player Jamie Brownlow is typical in this regard. Unlike in the 1940s to 60s where the youngster enthusiasts were typically self-taught musicians who had learned to play by following their favourite records, contemporary youngsters are almost always music-college trained. They frequently come from jazz musician families. They are technically highly competent. However, they are rarely steeped in tradition whether of the formalist or naturalist type, far less are they concerned with jazz ‘authenticity wars’. Some informants in the MJB social world are so glad to see and hear the youngsters that they are not too concerned by their different approach. As one informant in his 80s put it – after proudly telling me he had listened to Jamie Brownlow on You Tube in preparation for the session – as long as we have these young people coming along ‘our future is in safe hands’.

However, there is a tension here in the responses of many informants. While admiring the technical competence and energy of some youngsters, those informants wedded to ‘the old days’ sense that those days are surely coming to an end. It must be said, too, that the recent retirements or deaths of several of the band’s most long standing members has undoubtedly affected the ‘purism’, quality and overall sound of the band8. For now, the MJB 7 The exception was the special guest trumpet player Dennis Armstrong, currently living in Bristol, who is a King Oliver Creole Jazz Band expert. John Higham could barely contain his excitement that at last the MJB could revert to being a two trumpet band in the King Oliver/Lu Watters mode. The band played its most ‘classic’ (formalist) session that I heard. They had a brief ‘rehearsal’ in an adjoining room before the start of the session and Higham often joked that they ‘might not get it quite right’. There were, indeed, some mishaps.

8 For instance, the MJB clarinetist between 1949 and 2009 was the particularly impressive Don Lydiatt. Lydiatt retired from playing in 2010 and died on 30th November 2011. Dave Dixson took his place on reeds and it is no disrespect to Dave Dixson to note Dixson’s obituary comments: ‘As the one who was trusted to take his place, I still wonder if I will ever get near to filling the enormous gap that Don left when he retired from the Merseys . . . I . . . often heard him and knew him to be amongst

are just about hanging on. When John Higham and Peter Fryer go, it may well be a different story. ‘Dying embers’, again?

Scratch the surface and there are two rarely separated issues: one is the question of the ‘dying embers’ of the sort of ‘classic’ revivalist jazz favoured by the MJB for decades, indeed, the ‘dying embers’ of the band, itself; the other is the question of the ‘dying embers’ of traditional revivalist New Orleans jazz, in general. In their identification with the MJB, the different issues tend to be fused by my informants. No mention was made, for instance, of the sort of contemporary ‘hip’ young bands that incorporate traditional jazz styles into their varied repertoire such as Kansas Smitty’s and the Gramophone Jazz Band. Far less, the sort of student band that approached me when I was preparing the final draft of this article: bands that incorporate Kenny Ball tunes such as ‘Midnight in Moscow’ into their repertoire!

At the beginning of my course I was a classical tuba player who dabbled in some electric bass but during the course I have started to study jazz bass playing and even play tuba in my band Mr Rathbone’s Talking Machine which takes influence from trad jazz’ (Danny White, email, 12th May 2014).

Moreover, despite the periodic talk about the dearth of new musician and audience blood entering their world of traditional jazz, the general atmosphere of the Liverpool Cricket Club gig is ‘let’s enjoy it while we can . . . we’ll leave others to ponder the dearth and the deaths after we’ve gone’. ‘Dying embers’? Maybe, but who knows and who cares?

I have been concerned to explore selected interrelations between ethnography, autoethnography and social world analysis, in relation to selected aspects of revivalist traditional jazz worlds in Britain. Set in the context of autoethnographic memory and observation of the current revivalist scene, more generally, it is evident that the segmentation apparent in the revivalist jazz worlds of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s has persisted to this day. However, while those segmented worlds of over 40-50 years ago were primarily youth worlds, thriving on the excitements of music seen as ‘alternative’, these same segmented musical worlds have long been the preserve of those elderly and old people who have remained committed to their past ‘old fashioned’ musical socialisations. A regular weekly revivalist traditional jazz event such as I observed, of which there are hundreds of others the length and breadth of the UK, provides much scope for more detailed study of the social worlds of old people, of nostalgia and music, of the long term significance of the musical socialisations of youth, to name just three intriguing and interrelated areas of enquiry. But time is running out to mine these particular ‘dying embers’. The Grim Reaper is calling daily.

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APPENDIX 1

MERSEYSIPPI JAZZ BAND

PERSONNEL AND INSTRUMENTATION, 1949-2011*

TRUMPET/CORNET

Wally Fisher (1949-1950)John Lawrence (1950-2007)Pete Daniels (1952-1970)John Higham (1970-today)

TROMBONEDennis Gracey (1949-1950)Frank Parr (1950-1956)John Haworth (1956-1957)John Parkes (1957-1980)Pete Fryer (1980-today)

CLARINETEvan Patrick (1949)Don Lydiatt (1949-2009)Dave Dixson (2009-today) (and soprano, alto, tenor saxophone)

PIANOFrank Robinson (1949-2010)Malcolm Hogarth (2011-today)

BANJO/GUITARKen Baldwin (1949-2006)Dave Rigby (2006-today)

BASSDick Goodwin (1949-1964)Derek Vaux (1964-1977 / 1997-today)Bob Ross (1977-1982)Robin Tankard (1982-1997) (and tuba)

DRUMSKen Metcalfe (1949-1950)Ken Tinkler (1950)George Bennett (1950-1954)Trevor Carlisle (1954-1964)Tony Carter (1964-1965)Tony Crofts (1963-1965)Noddy Noble (1963-1965)Aynsley Dunbar (1963-1965)Brian Roberts (1963-1965)Mike McCombe (1967-1982)Pete Darwin (1982-today)

SINGERSEdna GallagherPam PetersVal Barlow

Clinton Ford (1957 and occasionally thereafter)Jill Martin (1958-1977)Jan Sutherland (1977-1982)Julie Dennis (1983)

*This listing is an adapted and updated revision of ‘Band Personnel 1949-2009’ in Bielderman (2009: 21)

APPENDIX 2

Layout of Venue (Room hired from Liverpool Cricket Club for weekly band residency)

Bandstand

Hhh p

Bar room My regular seat during first and second phases of data collection

Final phase of research: me with key informants’ table

APPENDIX 3

Selected Photographs (courtesy of http://www.jazznorthwest.co.uk/mersey.htm and http://www.jazznorthwest.co.uk/mersey60.htm)

Frank Robinson with the certificate of enrolment into the Merseybeat Hall of Fame, 16 th Feb 2009He was the last surviving founder member of the band. He died on 30th December 2010, aged 85.

The Merseysippi Jazz Band at The Cavern, Liverpool, 1957

Merseysippi Jazz Band personnel in 2006 (4 members* died or retired 2006-2011) L to R: John Higham (from 1970), Derek Vaugh (1964-1977 / from 1997), Peter Fryer (from 1980, Pete Darwin (from 1983), John Lawrence* (from 1950), Frank Robinson* (from 1949), Ken Baldwin* (from 1949), Don Lydiatt* (from 1949)

The Merseysippi Jazz Band at their Liverpool Cricket Club residency 60th Anniversary Party, 16th Feb 2009

John Barnes, 60th Anniversary Party, 16th Feb 2009

Roy Williams, 60th Anniversary Party, 16th Feb 2009

APPENDIX 4

Resocialisation

The classic jazz (formalist) CD collection that I bought on the basis of John Higham’s ‘educating’

introductions to the Merseysippi Jazz Band’s repertoire, November 2009-May 2010 and January-May

2011.

Bix Beiderbecke (1903-1931)

Bix Beiderbecke, The Bix Beiderbecke Story, 4 CD boxed set, Proper, Properbox 66, P1362, 1363, 1364, 1365

The Very Best of Bix Beiderbecke, 2 CD disc set, EMI Gold, 7243 8 74467 2 4

George Webb (1917-2010)

George Webb’s Dixielanders, Lake CD, LACD128

Graeme Bell (1919-2008)

Graeme Bell & his Australian Band, The Historical Prague & Paris Recordings, 1947-48, 2 CD disc set, Lake LACD262

Humphrey Lyttelton (1921-2008)

The Best of Humphrey Lyttelton, 3 CD disc set, EMI Gold, 7243 5 83280 2 8

Humphrey Lyttelton, Bad Penny Blues, 1955-1956, Lake CD, LACD238

Humphrey Lyttelton, Just About as Good as it Gets! The Original Jazz Recordings 1948-1956, 2 CD disc set, Smith and Co. Sound & Vision, CD, SCCD 1142

Jelly Roll Morton (1885-1941)

Jelly Roll Morton, 5 CD boxed set, All available recorded work 1926-1930, JSPCD Jazzbox 903, JSPCD 321, 322, 323, 324, 325

Jelly Roll Morton: The Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax, 8 CD boxed set, Rounder 11661-1898-2

The Chronological Jelly Roll Morton 1939-1940, CD, Classics 668

Joe ‘King’ Oliver (1885-1938)

King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, The Complete Set, 2 CD set, Challenge Records, RTR 79007

King Oliver and his Orchestra, Call of the Freaks, The Complete Victor Recordings, Volume 1, CD, Frog DGF 64

King Oliver and his Orchestra, Call of the Freaks, The Complete Victor Recordings, Volume 2, CD, Frog DGF 65

Louis Armstrong (1901-1971)

Louis Armstrong, Complete Hot Five & Hot Seven Recordings, 4 CD boxed set, Definitive Records, DRCD11178

Lu Watters (1911-1989)

Lu Watters’ Yerba Buena Jazz Band, Complete Goodtime Recordings, 4 CD boxed set, 4GTJCD-4409-2

Lu Watters and his Yerba Buena Jazz Band, Doing the Hambone at Kellys, Jasmine, CD, JASMCD 2571

Ma Rainey (1886-1939)

Ma Rainey, ‘Mother of the Blues’, 5 CD boxed set, JSP Records, JSP7793

Original Dixieland Jazz Band (recorded the first jazz record in 1917)

The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, ‘The 1935-38 Return’, HEP Records, HEP CD 1084

Sidney Bechet (1897-1959)

The Essential Collection: Sidney Bechet, 2 CD set, LC 12869

The Sidney Bechet Story, 4 CD boxed set, Proper Box 18, P1169, P1170, P1171, P1172

For Merseysippi Jazz Band recordings (vinyl, tape and CD) see Gerald Bielderman, Merseysippi Jazz Band Discography, Zwolle, The Netherlands, 2nd edition 2009.

The pioneer young white ‘classic jazz’ (formalist) revivalists, so important to the MJB, were Lu Watters (San Francisco), George Webb (London), the early Humphrey Lyttelton (London), and Graeme Bell (Australia).