Jazz: The Trad Hatters

“It’s strictly trad, dad.”

That U.S.-hip-sounding line, strangely enough, is as British as “jolly good,” or “raw-ther.” It describes a musical fad that has washed over Britain. “Trad” is traditional jazz, the 1920s variety now in booming revival, and fans are streaming to hear it at stomp centers from Scotland’s isle of Arran to an old dance hall on Eel Pie Island off Twickenham in the Thames, where Henry VIII once twitted his mistresses while eating the best eel pie in the kingdom. Bankers, clerks and beardless youths, secretaries, bus conductors, doctors, bricklayers, teachers—the traddists are a class-dissolving cross section of the nation.

Growing out of the Dixieland revival in the mid ’50s, the trad jazz boom has soared in the past year. A dozen new clubs are formed each week, new bands constantly spring up, trad numbers are all over the British hit parade, and even the stately BBC has begun to show its hips: a new TV series began last month, called The Trad Fad. With a clear and poundingly straightforward beat that avoids the more intricate mathematics of modern jazz, trad centers in such items as Tiger Rag and Cushion Foot Stomp, but often goes absolutely daft with kick-me-baby versions of things like Billy Boy and In a Persian Garden.

Described by one critic as ”a sort of do-it-yourself urban folk music.” trad rests mainly on the standard instruments—clarinet, trumpet, trombone—but now and again tosses in a banjo for such provincial classics as Waiting for the Robert E. Lee. Chris Barber’s Jazzband founded the movement with a bestselling version of Sidney Bechet’s Petite Flew, and now the trad bands are so popular that they play everywhere—not only for jazz clubs and festivals, but also at debutante parties, society dances, on trans-Channel steamers, even waist-deep in swimming pools. Among the top tradders:

¶ Acker Bilk, king of the trad men, is a chap with a name that has probably caused Charles Dickens to stir in his grave, tap his foot and smile. A 32-year-old former Somersetshire blacksmith. Bilk acquired his skills on the clarinet in an army guardhouse after he fell asleep on sentry duty. Wearing bowler hats and striped waistcoats Acker Bilk and his Paramount Jazz Band are half New Orleans and half Somerset cider, thumping out numbers like Run Come See Jerusalem and Ory’s Creole Trombone, while Bilk makes Louis Armstrong-style comments. At last year’s annual trad jazz festival at Beaulieu. Bilk was in such demand that fans shouting his name booed a modern combo off the stage, threw beer bottles and overturned TV cameras in a riot that approximated the American shambles at Newport. The Daily Telegraph calls Bilk ”almost a folk hero.”

¶Trumpeter Bob Wallis. 27,gave up a career as a marine engineer to lead his Storyville Jazzmen into the trad boom, dressed in Stetsons and cutaway jackets and looking like the fallout from a Buttermilk Sky. Most trad jazz goes back only 35 years or so. but the Storyville septet has a bestselling version of Mozart’s Alia Turca.

¶ Kenny Ball’s Jazzmen is currently the fastest-rising trad band—largely on the strength of a record called Samantha, which so far has sold nearly 250,000 copies—and Trumpeter Kenny Ball himself, a 32-year-old former writer of advertising copy, is the jazziest of the trad musicians. With a pencil mustache and a cool-serious manner, he worries that funny hats and similar trad gimmicks may eventually kill the fad. “I’d hate them to kill it, dad,” says hatless Kenny. “They’re doing it for the novelty, dad, whereas we do it for a living art form—dad.”

¶The Temperance Seven, unlike the other trad groups, are part way out and going far. Actually a nine-man legion, they all drink; they wear wing collars and brown cord smoking jackets, duel with drumsticks during numbers, and achieve their effects with such instruments as Chinese blocks, cowbells, euphoniums, and sousaphones. Recalling the red hot bands of the Manhattan ’20s, they shoot new colors into My Blue Heaven and do a why-should-she version of My Baby Don’t Care For Me. All ex-students at the Royal College of Arts, they are, by day. TV set designers, art teachers and publisher’s art directors. They currently float high in the hit parade with the significantly titled You’re Driving Me Crazy. Among their fans is a teen-ager who. holding a container full of cider, whisky and gin. said the last word on the trad boom recently on BBC TV: “If it really comes to it.” said the traddist, “I prefer jazz to sex.”