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John Chilton, tumpet in hand, with George Melly and the Feetwarmers |
Blowing his own trumpet
Jazz musician John Chilton has fine-tuned his creative talents to write his memoirs, as Dan Carrier reports
Hot Jazz, Warm Feet. By John Chilton.
Northway Publications £11.99
JOHN Chilton contracted a virus when he was just 12 years old and 63 years later he is still seriously affected by it.
He caught the bug through the airwaves after absent-mindedly turning on a radio. The affliction is jazz, and John, the trumpet-playing front man with the Feetwarmers and George Melly, believes his burning passion for the strains from New Orleans has dictated his whole life.
“Jazz hits you hard,” says John, who lives in Bloomsbury, a stone’s throw from where he ran a tiny second-hand bookshop for many years. “It’s with you forever.
His early memories are fresh and beautifully told: they add an angle to these memoirs that lifts the reader out of the smoky dance halls and down-at-heel jazz clubs.
“The sound of horseshoes scraping on concrete plagued my early childhood nights,” he says. “The metallic clatter didn’t originate in a manor house stables, it came from the hooves of dray horses quartered in the railway yards of London’s Euston station, close to Levita House, a large block of council flats, one of which housed my family.”
His father, Tom, was a singer and tap dancer before ill-health cut short his career. His mother, Eileen, was also keen on music and theatre: “They loved the music hall tradition and a trip to the nearby Holborn Empire was guaranteed to dispel any trace of gloom.”
He was evacuated to Northamptonshire when war broke out, which was a defining moment as it was where he heard jazz for the first time.
John recalls: “I was due to play football but the weather was bad and the pitch was frozen. I remember flicking on the radio with an air of disdain. The music that came out entranced me, I had never hear anything like it before. I stood motionless until the piece ended – then I heard the radio announcer say: ‘That was I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say, by Jelly Roll Morton, featuring Sidney Bechet’.”
John says he fell in love with jazz there and then. He bought a jazz music catalogue for one old penny, and suddenly he had a wealth of names to investigate.
He turned detective and found out what he could and recorded it in a scrapbook. Soon he was compiling a massive array of cuttings, notes and record-sleeve information about this new craze.
The next step was to play jazz himself, and he shared this idea with his foster family.
He said: “They put down the money for a secondhand cornet on the proviso that I pay them back at sixpence a week.”
The Horton family encouraged him to practise, as did his schoolteacher, who would abruptly stop a lesson to say: “Tubby, go home and get your cornet so you can give us a tune.”
John took up the trumpet at 17 and after National Service in the RAF from 1950-52, and brief stint as a clerk at the Daily Telegraph, he eventually managed to earn a full time living as a musician. In 1974 he formed the Feetwarmers, playing annual residencies at Ronnie Scott’s and gigs all over the world.
With his wife, he opened Bloomsbury Books, which specialised in jazz but also stocked works by Bloomsburyites Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, among others.
John dubbed it the world’s smallest bookshop, a claim proclaimed by a notice in the window which stated: “If you are under 25 stone, please come in and browse.” Next to this was a note that read: “If you think your life is boring you should come in and read some of our books”, a double entendre that well-meaning customers sometimes pointed out to John, as if he didn’t realise it.
But the band was his main occupation, although he would scour secondhand bookshops while on tour to re-stock the shop.
His time with George Melly is full of the sort of tales you’d expect from someone who has spent more than 30 years on the road with the most extravagant front man of British jazz.
George’s undying love for jazz was, for John, a constant source of inspiration.
“George positively wants to share his love of jazz with the audience,” he said. “Every time he gets up he is eager to share his own pleasure, and he is still as much in love with jazz as he was the day he first heard it.”
And the Feetwarmers have taken their jazz around the world to clubs full of jazz purists through to dance halls were people had never heard the music they were playing before.
John adds: “With George, perhaps our happiest and most successful gigs were to students at universities – they are always a receptive audience, and seem to think old timers being able to handle instruments competently intriguing.”
It is fitting that John has written an autobiography: he has written extensively on the jazz greats who have inspired him. His first book, published in 1970 and called Who’s Who of Jazz, was a comprehensive guide to the genre.
It started him writing and researching the biographies of many jazz greats including Billie Holiday, Louis Jordan and Sidney Bechet, which entailed fact-finding missions to America. He lectured at the New Orleans University and his diligent work on the Orleans jazz scene was rewarded with a honorary citizenship of the city.
He still turns out each week, appearing with clarinettist Wally Fawkes for a session at the White Hart in Drury Lane.
“I’m still as keen as ever,” he says. “I play every day, and when I’m not playing, I’m thinking about playing.” |
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