FURTHER SOUTH: The Musical Odyssey of Harry South 1960-67 by Simon Spillett

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

This essay by Simon Spillett follows his earlier one on the Rhythm and Blues Records 4 CD compilation The Songbook: Harry South [RANDB040] which offers a comprehensive overview of Harry writings for both large and small groups from 1955-1990.

“Assembled from South’s own tape archive, and featuring a wealth of previously unissued material, including nine Georgie Fame tracks, Further South: Harry South Broadcast Recordings 1960-67 [RANDB051] is a sequel; a four-disc document of one of the most vibrant times in British music, a souvenir from the days when Swinging London created it's very own sound from a heady amalgam of small band Hard Bop, Big Band Swing, R&B and Soul.”

This is a very long piece. Simon and I had discussed dividing it into two-parts. But upon reconsideration, I thought it best to bring it up as one feature to protect its cohesion. Also, as Simon is now in the process of starting his own blog, it can be used on his site as one link which eliminates any confusion should he decide to feature it.

As regular visitors to these pages have come to know, Simon has researched the English Jazz scene during the second half of the 20th century quite extensively. 

A tenor saxophonist who is based in the UK, he leads his own quartet and big band and is the great tenor saxophonist Tubby Hayes’s biographer. You can locate more information about him by visiting his webpage.

It’s always wonderful to host his thoughts on Jazz and its makers on these pages and I look forward to visiting him directly when he hosts his own blog.

© -  Simon Spillett, copyright protected; all rights reserved, used with the author’s permission.

FURTHER SOUTH: the musical odyssey of Harry South 1960-67 

 

“I'm very optimistic about the future. I think there is more interest in the modern jazz scene now than there has ever been.” 

Harry South, Melody Maker, December 14 1963 

 

Asked to put together a short list of those individuals or bodies that most helped the cause of British jazz during the 1960s, it's likely that many people's choices would include the same handful of names; Ronnie Scott – and the club that he'd started at the tail end of the previous decade, which had done more than any other UK venue in drawing in international jazz artists; Tubby Hayes, who'd gone and proved the hitherto impossible by taking his red hot Hard Bop coals to the Newcastle of New York's clubland, a coup of inestimable proportions in those far off pre-Beatles days. Other nominees might also include Stan Tracey and Joe Harriott – mavericks both – whose wildly differing musical persona’s shared a common goal in finding a unique, self-sufficient originality, well ahead of the then prevailing late-Sixties mood of “doing your own thing.” Then there are the new wave who emerged mid-decade – the Colliers, Stevens, Westbrooks, Surmans and Garricks – who made no secret of the fact that they regarded their music more as art than entertainment and who began to alter the landscape in which it existed by courting (and securing) Arts Council and educational funding in a way that men like Hayes, Harriott and Scott would have never dreamt of. 

 

That all these disparate characters operated on what is, to our global-minded 21st century sensibilities, a mere microcosm of a scene remains remarkable. That they all enjoyed at one time or another the patronage of the BBC seems even more incredible, doubly so given the increasingly marginalised and diluted treatment jazz finds at Broadcasting House these days. Yet, once upon a time this is exactly what happened, broadcasts of all stripes occurring with such a regularity that, for decades, radio appearances were simply a fact of life for London's modern jazz community, rather than the occasional luxury they are today. “The British jazz scene was well supported by the BBC in those days,” clarinettist Vic Ash wrote of the 1950s and 60s in his autobiography, I Blew It My Way (Northway Publications, 2006), “and all the local groups did broadcasts.” 

 

Not that it was all smooth-sailing back in the day – this was the BBC after all. Indeed, Auntie's relationship with jazz, even then, in what we now view as something of a golden era for the music, was always more than a little shaky. In a catalogue of periodic minor scuffles between musicians and producers, two more serious wobbles –  a decade apart and worryingly more or less centred on the same issue – stand out. In 1962, the Beeb's flagship jazz programme, Jazz Club, launched in 1947 and which was to survive through various retitlings, times slots and producers up to the 1980s, effectively banned “modern” jazz, its then producer Terry Henebery telling the press that “weird stuff” was no longer permissible on what was, to all intents and purposes, a Light Entertainment show. Ten years later, almost to the month, with Jazz Club now nestled comfortably into the middle-of-the-road, late-at-night realms of Radio 2, the corporation pulled the same excuse, banning the experiments of the avant-garde from its studios on the grounds that these were not suited to such a forum. As had happened in 1962, arguments raged to and fro in the press, opinion coming from those qualified to comment (such as Humphrey Lyttelton, by this point a decade into his role as Jazz Club's regular compère) to those who simply loved an idiomatically-themed squabble (the loquacious John Stevens). Between these two incidents, there had been a certain amount of calm, although even those who'd enjoyed something close to a regular understanding with the corporation would have been hard put to explain their employers frequent vacillations.  

 

One thing that Jazz Club's two main 1960s producers – Terry Henebery, who helmed the show from October 1958 to October 1963, and Bryant Marriott, who then took over and almost saw out the decade as its chief – consistently maintained was an insistence in creating work opportunities for bands which, very often, existed solely for broadcasting purposes. True, the meat and drink of Jazz Club's scheduling during these years may well have been comprised of regular working outfits – everyone from Kenny Ball's Jazzmen to The Spontaneous Music Ensemble – but its more genuinely memorable courses were those by units convened for what were, in many instances, originally envisaged as one-off performances. Operating mainly within small groups, when offered a free-hand to put together something more unusual, many of London's modernists thought big; in between 1960 and the 1970, those leading big bands for BBC broadcasts included Ronnie Ross, Jimmy Deuchar, Phil Seamen, Freddy Logan – a sprawling Afro-Cuban ensemble – and West Indian trombonist Herman Wilson. These bands were genuine one-time-only phenomena, who never saw the outside of the Jazz Club studios many of whose work remains sadly lost (the subject of the BBC and its retention/destruction of its own archive is far too ire-raising and complex to deal with here). The outputs of other, slightly smaller, units are similarly lost to the sands of time, among them drummer Jackie Dougan's Ten and the Allan Ganley Nine. Some line-ups fared better; both Stan Tracey and Humphrey Lyttelton's big bands had begun with BBC commissions and then lived on in various incarnations as occasional in-person attractions, as did Tubby Hayes iconic mid-1960s big band. For some would-be leaders, a BBC invitation actually marked the beginning of an escape from sideman duties, and in some instances, led to a whole reappraisal of their strengths. “People complain about the BBC,” said one, the trumpeter Kenny Wheeler in 1990, “but at least they gave me the chance, once a year, to get a big band together.” In fact, a great deal of Wheeler's subsequent career elevation owed itself to that initial call back at the end of the 1960s, which in turn led to the formation of a big band that served a two-fold purpose; firstly, to alert those asleep on its leaders writing ability to just how individual it was, and, secondly, to spring the naturally shy and undemonstrative Canadian – hitherto something of a perennial sideman - onto a new level of visibility as a leader in his own right. Like many of the musicians who'd been asked to front their own ensembles for a BBC appearance, Wheeler had simply drawn on his existing and extensive network of colleagues, a “jobs for the boys” ethos that had long been the modus operandi when assembling British jazz outfits, large and small. “The first big band was all about that, really,” he later recalled, “getting them together.” 

 

Public reaction was favourable: the birth of the Harry South Big Band 

 

Wheeler, of course, was not alone. In fact, a whole decade before the trumpeter had received his call from Auntie, Jazz Club's producer Terry Henebery had put the very same question to pianist Harry South, then working with a quintet co-led by baritonist Ronnie Ross and trumpeter Bert Courtley; how would you like to broadcast with a band of your own, playing exclusively your arrangements and compositions? 

South was already a well-known figure in British modern jazz circles, having spent time in such prominent local groups as the Tubby Hayes octet, Joe Harriott's Quintet and the Vic Ash Quintet. With a well-connected career stretching back to the beginning of the 1950s, his solid skills were already widely respected among those in the know. “His talents as a pianist have been recognised and utilised almost as long as there has been a jazz scene in this country,” wrote one of South's erstwhile employers, Ronnie Scott, in the early 1960s, who praised his friend's “intensely musical” approach, which used a rare blend of pacing and deliberation in an age of “flashy” piano soloists. 

 

South's abilities as an arranger were perhaps less well known at this juncture, despite his having contributed compositions to the repertoires of bands including John Dankworth's, Tubby Hayes's and Joe Harriott's. Much of South's best early writing had been done for the co-operative Downbeat Big Band, by the end of the 1950s headed by Tubby Hayes, a strictly “for kicks'' unit that barely existed outside the Manor House club from which it took its name. On occasion, South had also been the band’s pianist, taking his place in a line-up that, like most things in British modernism at this time, simply pooled together players from the day’s most prominent local jazz groups – Hayes's, Vic Ash's, Tony Kinsey's and the like. Some of South's arrangements for the Downbeat band were little more than upscalings of themes he'd already contributed to the pads of the Harriott and Ross/Courtley bands, and with little money on offer and no interest whatsoever from the record industry, by late 1960 the band was drifting out of existence. Terry Henebery's call was therefore a welcome boost to South's ambitions, as well as something of a coup for the BBC. Indeed, so newsworthy was the occasion that the local jazz press covered the event with an enthusiasm unusual for the local product at the time. Jazz News led with the story in October, a month before the scheduled broadcast was due to take place, listing the bands “all star” personnel and confirming the programme was part of “Terry Henebery's policy of presenting British arrangers in settings of their own choosing.” 

 

“[He] asked me to select a group of musicians and write some big band scores,” South remembered with characteristic economy five years later. “I did this and we were all very pleased with the results.” 

 

“I was more than delighted to have the opportunity of indulging the writing side of my musical personality,” he remembered modestly, “and, not least, the public reaction was favourable.” 

 

It wasn't just the musicians and the public in favour. The show's compère that November night Alan Dell had radiated enthusiasm too and was even moved to haul a less-than-cooperative Michel Legrand from his seat in the Paris Theatre to comment on what he was hearing. In faltering English (and at a volume that would have had many listeners pressing their ear to their radio set) the French arranger told the nation he thought South's band was “just wonderful.” 

 

The week after the broadcast, Melody Maker carried a double page photo feature on the broadcast – which had been titled Southern Horizons, after a South composition already recorded by the Joe Harriott Quintet, and popular with audiences for both the Downbeat Big Band and Ross/Courtley quintet. Jazz News also ran a picture of South conducting the band, although editorial gremlins caused it to be captioned as Artie Shaw (“He doesn't mind being confused with Artie Shaw,” the magazine said of South a few weeks later, “but what worries him is that he is nine wives behind.”). Best of all, based on just one airing, the band had attracted possible recording interest from Ember Records, a then highly unusual instance of a UK label headhunting a parochial modern jazz artist. Within weeks though, amid news that sales of local modern jazz albums were once more on the wane, all the talk had been quickly forgotten. 

 

Happily, South had a tape copy of the broadcast, the first in a series of recordings that, in the absence of any real practical interest from a record label, were to form a series of “audio selfies” and which, in effect, tell the story of the growth of his bandleading skills. A previous volume excerpted from South's many tape reels of live shows and private recordings – The Songbook (Rhythm and Blues Records RANDB040) – was released to a welcome critical reception in 2017, presenting a career-length retrospective that stretched from some of his earliest writing (for the likes of Basil Kirchin and Tubby Hayes) right up to examples taken from his valedictory appearance on record, made with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra barely two months before his death. This new anthology, once again compiled with the permission and assistance of the South family, focuses on a far narrower period – the early to middle-1960s – to many observers South's peak as a composer and bandleader, and the point in which, via his well-publicised association with Georgie Fame, he and his big band briefly tasted genuine, mainstream-media stardom. 

 

This writer’s booklet essay for the previous R&B release attempted a little analysis of what comprised South's composing and arranging style, as well as outlining the general timeline of his career. This time around, it's perhaps more instructive to recount the remarkable story of this brief, heady time in South's career as it happened, giving some sense of how, for a few short years, he and his big band were elevated into a rarefied, indeed unique, position within contemporary music; that of being an outfit born of modern jazz purism that nevertheless, through nothing more than its own reputation, eventually found itself pleasing both pop and jazz fans alike. It's also a story that takes in the making of what is now regarded as one of the most iconic albums of the era – Sound Venture – a mod/jazz classic whose background had often been inaccurately documented. Above all, it is the story of South's vision, a story unlike any other in British jazz and one that has, sadly, been all too often overlooked in its various published histories. Indeed, the South band's purple patch stands exactly midway between what are usually seen as the two distinct phases of British big band jazz in the 1960s – the end of John Dankworth's band as a touring outfit and the arrival of the freewheeling, anarchic Mike Westbrook orchestra around 1967. 

 

It would be wholly redundant to go through each individual session contained on this collection and single out who plays what and when. Seasoned listeners will undoubtedly be able to tell a Dick Morrissey solo from one by Ronnie Scott and a mere cursory glance at the who's who personnels on each of these recordings says all that needs to be said about the quality of what's on offer. What emerges from this anthology is much more than a mere document of South's own musical choices though; it's also the story of British modern jazz during a key period in its development and, ultimately, of how, when under the perceived threat of Rhythm and Blues and Beat music, the twin forces so often said to have sounded the death knell for London's modernists, it was practicality and eclecticism and not sniffy purism that ensured their survival. Like so many of his contemporaries, Harry South may have begun as an idealist – the default setting of all beboppers – but by the time the bulk of these recordings were made he'd already begun a renegotiation of his values that was to save not only his career but also give a sudden impetus to those of several of his colleagues. And it wasn't just his association with Georgie Fame that had delivered him: his lengthy tenure with the quartet of another young talent – saxophonist Dick Morrissey – had been equally crucial in widening his outlook, as we shall see. 

 

That South could call on the best had been well in evidence on his first band’s first BBC appearance. Alongside his regular Ross/Courtley colleagues – both co-leaders, bassist Phil Bates and drummer Jackie Dougan – he'd chosen Ronnie Scott and Jimmy Deuchar – the frontline of the Scott/Deuchar Quintet; Tubby Hayes and the pianist from his quartet, Terry Shannon; old boss Joe Harriott; Tony Kinsey quartet altoist Alan Branscombe and the cream of London jazz brassmen: Keith Christie, Ken Wray, Laddie Busby and Ray Premru on trombones and trumpeters Les Condon, Ian Hamer and Derrick Abbott.  

 

On paper, the line-up looked like a British modernists wet dream and – again, a rarity in UK modern jazz circles – the resulting sound was more dynamic and cohesive than many would have predicted, providing moments both confirmatory (that Tubby Hayes was now a world class rather than strictly local phenomenon) and revelatory (that a saxophone section comprising of six notably individual soloists could play as one, with Harriott proving himself an especially powerful lead alto). 

 

The music they played set out the parameters of South's style at the time: there were hip, Blue Note-ish grooves (Southern Horizons, Coolin' Off), a couple of charts that contained vestiges of his dance band background (Sophisticated Lady and I Want To Be Happy) and one (The Goblin) that hinted at a more individualistic approach to writing still to come fully to fruition. 

 

Whatever the mood though, it was the band’s palpable spirit that shone through, overriding personal circumstance (Tubby Hayes had got married that same day!) and some awkward professional chemistry (Harriott and Hayes weren't exactly bosom buddies) to provide a marked alternative to “other” British big bands of the day, the Heaths and Dankworths. Tony Hall, who knew South and all those in the band that evening (and who, like South, was to fully embrace the musical changes ahead) had once called the brand of modern jazz these musicians played in small group settings Hard Swing, in order to differentiate it from the American Hard Bop model. By extension South's large ensemble had blown this concept up into their very own kind of Hard Big Band Swing. It made for an appealing prospect; what might a starry collective like this go onto to achieve, given the right breaks? 

 

In a perfect world, this should have been Harry South's moment; suddenly, after nearly a decade on the London jazz scene, he'd proven his true worth as a bandleader and orchestrator; he'd assembled a band stuffed full of the finest local jazz talent and had, largely through the respect the musicians had for his sincere musicianship, corralled them into something that, on one single performance, already sounded like a unit with its own identity. Moreover, he'd even wowed the usually nonplussed parochial press and piqued the interest of a record company. And he'd done it all on the BBC, never the easiest of bodies from which to squeeze a multi-layered triumph.

 

But this wasn't a picture-perfect, Hollywood biopic moment; it was a qualified victory played out in the less than conducive circumstances of Macmillan-era Britain, a nation as yet to wake to the possibilities of the new decade, at this point entertaining little more than the notion of a Sixties not so much swinging as ticking along nicely, thank you very much. In America, South might have been able to build upon the momentum of his new found circumstances, but in London, on a jazz scene so small you could literally pace it out in geographic terms (not for nothing was one of South's tunes called North of The Soho Border) there was little more to do than slink back into your existing workload. South did exactly that, working steadfastly with the Ross/Courtley Jazztet until the band folded the following year. 

 

And even then, within that unit’s inevitable defeat, there lies another lesson. Back when the Jazztet first started, Courtley had told the press they'd use “a certain amount of showmanship to get [the] music across”. It had been a false flag; like others of their ilk, the Jazztet had offered nothing more than a continuation of the deadpan face of British modernism, a music which, as Tubby Hayes once admitted, had long ago fallen victim to “a fad to ignore everyone around and play on.” 

 

South's next bandleader – a whole decade younger than himself, and in the vanguard of a slow-burning assault on the tight inner circle of London modernism – was anything but po-faced, and their association would rekindle a desire to communicate within South, buried deep beneath years of too-cool-for-school passivity. 

 

Not just surviving but thriving: The Dick Morrissey Quartet 

 

The arrival on – and subsequent departure from – London's modern jazz scene by twenty-year old tenor saxophonist Dick Morrissey followed so closely as to be almost instantaneous. In fact, there was an almost blink and you'll miss him quality to Morrissey's first time around the UK's jazz clubs. Having taken up the tenor saxophone in spring 1960, by the late summer of that year he was sharing billing at the Marquee opposite Joe Harriott's Quintet. By the following spring, a few days shy of his twenty-first birthday, he'd signed a contract with Fontana Records, the label to whom Tubby Hayes had also recently signed, taping an album It's Morrissey, Man! that sounded almost completely incongruous when set beside the few other recorded efforts of his fellow British modernists that year. Whereas music by the likes of Tony Kinsey and John Dankworth could very often sound more intellectually impressive than especially soul stirring, Morrissey's playing was a full-bore blast of unaffected jazz purism, his whole rationale less concerned with fashionable hip clichés (which had sometimes overtaken Tubby Hayes) or distracted by pretension (as Joe Harriott's free-form experiments undoubtedly were) than with the simple business of creating good jazz. To say he was a breath of fresh air was an understatement of epic proportions. As Benny Green soberly put it (in his notes to Morrissey's début) “for a man of comparatively limited experience, Morrissey has a surprising assurance and a most impressive tone...[suggesting] that jazz music is now a world heritage and that there is no sense any more in European musicians being apologetic about their efforts.”  

Ronnie Scott was another veteran who had quickly realised the import behind Morrissey's meteoric rise; chiefly that the days of the old “closed shop” of British jazz were at last seeing their twilight. He declared the saxophonist and his band “one of the best things to happen in British jazz.” Even Pete King – Scott's normally implacable partner – was moved to comment that the young saxophonist was already a talent on a par with Tubby Hayes, then hardly a creaking veteran at 25, but who'd been around long enough to represent the established face of British bop. 

 

Morrissey's precocity also extended to his character; having been a professional for barely six months, he'd already seen that the London jazz scene was no place to truly gain a greater understanding of the wider meaning of music and, to the surprise of many, in autumn 1961 he disbanded his already popular (in London clubs) quartet and took the unprecedented decision to take a commercial gig in a restaurant in Calcutta! The idea was by no means as lunatic as it may have appeared on the surface; for starters, the gig was regular, far more so than anything then being offered back in London; secondly, though tough time-wise, the hours would give Morrissey all the space needed to get to grips with an instrument which, although he had seemed to all intents and purposes to have mastered, he had only been playing for just over a year and a half. Thirdly, the band with which Morrissey was working, headed by bassist Ashley Kozak and featuring ex-Tubby Hayes drummer Lennie Breslaw, also included Harry South.  

 

For Morrissey, the Trincas Restaurant quickly became something of a public woodshed. “Our arrangement was to play three times a day – every day – in two hour sessions,” he told Jazz Journal in 1964. “I'm afraid they were inclined to flog us a bit, still it was worth it...It was an extremely good musical experience, broadening my outlook no end.” 

Over the course of a year, the gig had also helped forge a solid bond between the band’s saxophonist and pianist, who had begun to think of the unit they'd one day like to lead together. 

 

“We had a group in mind from the start,” Morrissey said of South, “and as the days went by we formulated more definite plans.” 

 

Both men took away different things from their subcontinental sojourn. Morrissey saw it as a practical learning curve and a chance to formulate his own way of doing things free from the ingrown cycle of influence then prevalent on the London circuit (he took just one LP with him to India – Tubby Hayes' Tubby's Groove). To the saxophonist, the locals remained remote, however. “We didn't make much headway with the Indians themselves,” he said later, “on the average they were completely indifferent.” 

 

South, older and perhaps in even greater need of a change of scene, found the environment gave him a fresh perspective. “It was interesting musically,” he remarked of the stay, “but really it helped me sort myself out. You see things much clearer from a distance.” 

Every so often, news of the two men's adventures reached home. “It'll be wonderful to get back to London,” South wrote to Melody Maker shortly before the residency ended in 1962, “where the beer isn't 10s. a pint and the average daily temperature isn't 95 degrees.” He also gave hints as to what the trip had done for Morrissey. “Audiences will surely notice the maturity he has gained.” 

 

Coming back to London (and “the dwindling British club grind,” as Peter Clayton put it), they found things largely unchanged; the same fashionable coterie of names continued to dominate the local modern jazz scene, many of the capital’s new jazz outfits had a certain interchangeability to them and there was still too little exposure for British musicians on records. Nevertheless, they'd come back refreshed, full of ideas and healthily free from the cynicism that had for so long sabotaged much of the potential of British modernism. It felt like a fresh start. Indeed, after a year away, Morrissey's reappearance felt more like a début than a re-arrival and straight away the new quartet began drawing a crowd, first at old haunts like The Flamingo and The Marquee but soon after at Ronnie Scott's and on the fast growing underground of pub gigs in suburban South West London. With a regular bass and drums team of Phil Bates and Jackie Dougan – South's former colleagues in the Ross/Courtley group – the band had a ready-made rhythm section, which was certainly a big help on a circuit still woefully short on good accompanists, yet neither Morrissey or South envisaged the band to be a mere horn and trio set-up though. “We wanted to get away from just the sound of tenor and rhythm,” the saxophonist told Jazz Journal in 1964, confessing that he'd also begun to try his hand at a little arranging on the side. “I've had a go,” he said, “but my ideas never sound as good as Harry's. His talent has been vastly underrated”. 

 

If there was one almost immediate by-product of the new Morrissey band, it was that South had, at last, been seen as a musician of real consequence, particularly as a composer. According to the saxophonist's brother Chris the pianist “was the first of several musical partners, mentors and guides who enhanced Dick's career”, their relationship the ultimate artistic win-win. Other contemporary observers could see the symbiosis too. “Held together by the musical ability of Harry South [the Morrissey Quartet] produces one of the most exciting sounds to be heard in British modern jazz today,” opined John Shirley of Jazz Journal, an opinion mirrored by other reviewers elsewhere. When the band made its first LP – Have You Heard?, taped for 77 Records in the summer of 1963 – its annotator – none other than Ronnie Scott – was quick to single out South's guiding hand. “His experience and knowledge is obviously of paramount importance in moulding the style of the group,” he noted, “[and] his compositions show an originality and a feeling for jazz that many better known composers could well take note of.” 

 

Accordingly, the band quickly gained a reputation for original music, playing themes which, while indisputably “modern”, by and large did away with any over-complex pretence. Have You Heard? contained several of these gems, including such South anthems as The Goblin (dedicated to his first daughter, Anita, born in 1960), There and Back and the moody jazz waltz The Celt. Equally unusual for the time, the album received unanimous praise in the jazz press, Melody Maker calling it “a must for all Morrissey fans”, while Crescendo's Steve Race thought it so good that it deserved a better fate than being written of a simply another “British” jazz effort. 

 

“If this group had reached us via some obscure American label,” he wrote, “all the jazz people would be handing the record around with expressions of amazed approval.” 

 

The band was also a hit where it really mattered – out there in clubland, where it had swiftly begun to attract something very close to a cult following. At the close of 1963, just as Beatlemania was reaching fever pitch, it represented that real rarity – a British modern jazz success story. “I'm very optimistic about the future,” South told Melody Maker's Bob Dawbarn that December. “I think there is more interest in the modern scene now than there has ever been.” Both he and Morrissey believed that “West End” prices had forced the suburban jazz fan to check out his local scene, much to their benefit. “There is a great potential audience. Take South-West London. Clubs like the Palm Court, Richmond and the Bull's Head, Barnes do great business because they present modern jazz in the right way.” (“I'd sooner play at the Bull,” Morrissey once said when asked if he preferred The Flamingo, “it's less like a Palais.”) 

South was also keen to stress that his partner’s natural ebullience was an equally strong pull. “Showmanship is important,” he noted, “but should never be overdone.” Not that South had anything to fear. Morrissey's brand of extroversion was always more instinctive than feigned, as John Shirley had noted; “[He] is the personification of the group's excitement. In the course of a number, he is never still – always jumping from foot to foot, urging his sidemen on with whoops of glee, or letting off steam by clapping or stamping his feet.” 

 

By 1964, the Morrissey Quartet's regular gigs – particularly at the Bull's Head - had acquired something of the atmosphere of a bacchanal, as Mike Hawker vividly described in a sleeve note to one of the bands albums; “I could hardly manage to squeeze into the room. Rarely have I seen a jazz club so jam-packed with people – and never, ever, have I known any jazz group receive such a fantastic reception in a club. And this was no mere chance, not just one of those lucky nights when business was good and the music better. It is always like this when the Dick Morrissey Quartet plays a gig. In the economically uncertain world of jazz, here is a group that is not just surviving but actually thriving!” 

 

Carrying the band’s message further still had taken some time. After Have You Heard? they didn't record again until late 1965 – a huge discographical gap even by the patchy standards of local modernism – and were strangely absent from the BBC's popular Jazz Club slot until the end of 1963 (they had made an earlier appearance over on Network Three, an odd choice for a band so joyfully non-cerebral in its methods. The session tapes for these shows are heard on this collection, having previously been released on the vinyl-only R&B 18 Jazz For Moderns). There were overseas appearances though – in Switzerland, Spain and Sweden – and an ambitious but badly supported tour opposite the Cannonball Adderley Sextet in spring 1964, organised by none other than Brian Epstein, but it wasn't until the enterprising Mike Hawker signed the band to Mercury Records that the wider public really sat up and took notice. Their two mid-Sixties albums – Storm Warning (1965) and Here And Now and Sounding Good (1966) – are genuine British jazz classics, the first centred around a programme Hawker thought “typical of the current repertoire of the group”, with South originals such as Wind Of Change and the title track; the second comprising the unit’s interpretations of compositions by other local jazz notables including Stan Tracey and Tubby Hayes. Both are uniformly excellent albums, yet both fell foul of the twin curses that had befallen many a British jazz release: critical prejudice and poor sales figures. Melody Maker had given a thumbs up to each release, as had Crescendo, but it was left to the sniffy Jack Cooke at Jazz Monthly (a magazine long notorious for giving unduly harsh reviews) to deliver a typically damning “local effort” hammer blow. He slammed the band’s “unenterprising set of values”, called Morrissey “remarkably anonymous” and found it “virtually impossible to pick out any track for any particular virtue.” 

 

“Boredom begins to build up,” he concluded. “However, if you like to sit back and know you're not going to be surprised by anything, this is the record for you. But not for me, I'm afraid.” 

 

It's hard to equate Cooke's dismissal with the tales of the roaring, soaring nights when Morrissey's band took to the stage of the Bull's Head, especially during Phil Seamen's time with the band. It's also hard to see what he himself could have got out of being so downright dismissive, save for a smug sense of false superiority. Listened to now, both Storm Warning and Here and Now...appear fine records, not, of course, equalling the band in full in-person flight, but nevertheless deserving of much more than an off-hand dismissal. (For a genuine souvenir of the quartet at The Bull dig out the Fontana LP they recorded there with blues shouter Jimmy Witherspoon in spring 1966. If Morrissey's playing on that fails to lift you out of your seat then get someone to check your pulse...and quick!) 

 

A taster of the kind of excitement the group could generate live is heard here, taken from a May 1965 broadcast appearance opposite the Tubby Hayes Big Band, during which they offer a brief six tune display of their wares; there are early “alternate” versions of two of the themes soon to be included on Storm Warning, Get Out Of Town and Come Rain Or Come Shine, a delightfully big-toned tenor ballad in Time After Time and a couple of examples of the astonishing head of steam the unit could generate on the most basic of material, in this instance including South's gospel-flavoured adaptation of Frankie and Johnny, played in 6/4 time.  

 

It Won't Be Commercial: meat and potato music 

 

The Morrissey Quartet's suburban gigs had also attracted another kind of fan from the usual, dyed-in-the-wool Brit-bop follower: the youngster prepared to listen to both modern jazz and Rhythm and Blues, a genuinely new phenomenon for whom the normally highly territorial local music press hadn't an existing template. Quite how this superficially bizarre crossover occurred takes some explaining. At this distance, it's a little difficult to envisage a time when a young person was expected to either like jazz or more popular musics and never mix the two, but in the early 1960s such people did exist, often vociferously defending their own tastes and proudly declaring that “their'' music was far superior to that favoured by others. If priggish fans like this were bad enough, then the capital’s jazz musicians could be even worse, mercilessly tearing into anything that smelled even slightly of commercialism. British jazz – and in particular British modern jazz – generally had little truck with pop music, despite one of its number, drummer Tony Crombie, setting himself up as one of the UK's first rock 'n' roll bandleaders back in the mid-Fifties. Always a man with an eye for a money-spinning wheeze, Crombie had made this move principally to earn better fees, which he did, before retreating back to his natural environment. At the dawn of the new decade, however, an impasse remained firmly in place: jazz was jazz and pop was pop and never the twain should meet. The 1960s were to change much of this thinking and, as with virtually everything else in that most revolutionary of decades, it didn't take long for deeply entrenched principles to come crashing down, especially on the London club scene. By 1962, the Flamingo, barely a few years before a tight enclave for the capital’s tiny band of modern jazzmen, was regularly presenting Rhythm and Blues, a music few jazzmen had taken seriously at first, but which soon proved to outstrip the club’s attendance figures for its pure jazz nights. Many were the all-nighters when the Morrissey Quartet played the same premises as one of these newer, more populist acts, often Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames, who'd begun their residency at the club that same year. Inevitably, both camps grew curious about the other and within a short while a degree of cross-pollination began to occur, planting seeds that would very soon alter the capital’s musical landscape forever. 

 

Fame's story – that of a chart-topping popular artist with underlying jazz sensibilities – is all too well known to be retold here, but it's certainly worth adding that his transition from pop star to jazz-friendly figure owed much to his exposure to the music of Dick Morrissey and his group. Fame was a fan from the off, even to the extent of taking a bus to hear the saxophonist's band at the Bull's Head on his night off - “standing room only – if you could get in”, he recalls. There was even a little musical inbreeding between the Blue Flames and the Morrissey quartet, with both Phil Seamen and Bill Eyden serving a spell with each, something that some among the two drummers’ existing circle of jazz colleagues looked upon as tantamount to treason. Those paying closer attention, however, would have recognised a jazzman-at-heart in the Blue Flames young frontman. 

 

In early 1965, after what had seemed an eternity of waiting out a hit, Fame had ousted the Beatles from the number one spot with Yeh Yeh, a cover of an American composition hitherto immortalised on-record by one of the the vocalist's favourite artists, the vocalese specialist Jon Hendricks. As close to jazz as it was possible to get without actually using the word, Yeh Yeh had shaken a jaded musical establishment, who, awash with Merseybeat, had feared their old school values had been swept away forever. That Fame was no run of the mill pop star had been instantly apparent by his choice of repertoire, which mixed jazz, blues, soul and blue beat; that he was one of even rarer musical nous was made crystal clear when he decided that he'd like to pour some of his royalties not into the usual tasteless excesses of overkitted Rollers and celebrity girlfriends but into the making of a big band album. But who to ask? After all, likely candidates were all too thin on the ground. Go to a Ted Heath and you'd have ended up with something squarer than square; even a Johnny Dankworth might not have come up with music with the required guts, and approaching the kingpin of UK modernism – Tubby Hayes – would have, at that juncture, been like putting your head in the lion's mouth, Hayes having famously just trashed contemporary pop as “a row” in the pages of Melody Maker. 

 

Fame's baritonist John Marshall had a suggestion; why not ask Harry South, a musician Marshall had already worked with. Whoever he chose to ask, it was clear the singer was fast chomping at the bit. “I was very frustrated after Yeh Yeh had been a hit,” he told Melody Maker in 1966. “I was getting in a rut commercially. I decided to do this big band thing with Harry and I approached him one night at Ronnie's.” 

 

Initially, South was a little taken aback. His band already had a singer if needed – Johnny Grant, a veteran of outfits led by Ronnie Scott and others, a functional but unexceptional crooner typical of the second-string Sinatra's who'd once proliferated on the palais band circuit, and whose contributions to South's broadcast appearances were akin to a musical palate cleanser. Grant was no showstopper, for sure, but he was perfectly acceptable in the circumstances. Why would South want to do the dirty and oust him for an untried pop singer? The young man's sincerity won him over though, and within a few drinks, the two men had realised that they actually shared similar goals, with a sense of humour to boot. Fame had found his man, and declared himself well pleased. “He's a great arranger”, he said of his new collaborator, “and he's not narrow-minded. I can't stand narrow-mindedness in music.” 

 

That the world of pop had thrust British jazz a helping hand, just at the point when it looked to be losing its grip on youth culture, was not lost on South. Nor did the irony go unnoticed by those who he'd chosen for his forthcoming collaboration with Fame. Even the éminence grise of Brit-Bop Tubby Hayes found himself charmed by this new champion. “What I like specially about Georgie Fame is this: I can talk to him in my musical language and he understands and can advise me about the contemporary pop scene. A lot of pop artists, you couldn't get through to, sort of thing. [But] he loves jazz and you can have some interesting discussions with him.” 

 

Although the first Fame/South sessions had taken place somewhat covertly at PYE Studios in Marble Arch in May 1965 (that same evening the vocalist flew to Paris for several solo TV appearances and the Morrissey Quartet alighted once more at the Bulls Head. It had also been a busy day for South's chosen pianist, Stan Tracey, who'd already done a morning TV recording with Tubby Hayes before rolling up at PYE for a 2.30pm start, after which he took off for an evening gig at Ronnie's with Ben Webster), there were already rumours among the profession of this novel partnership. Official news of the project didn't make the press until later that summer. “Did you know I'm making an LP with Harry South,” Fame revealed in Melody Maker. “It's just me singing with his big band. We have already done five tracks, but it won't be ready for a while. It won't be commercial but it's great making it.” 

 

Despite their names being closely linked for several years on from this point, one wonders how many of those reading Fame's Melody Maker interview at the time were aware of who South was? Or how many of his existing fan-base would have considered their idol's making a big band album a distinct turn-off? Within a little over a year though, any such ignorance would have been dispelled, the new collaboration taking South and his band to a whole new audience, many of whom wouldn't have otherwise given a damn about jazz or who probably previously thought that bands full of short-haired men playing acoustic instruments could only produce the kind of music their parents liked. 

 

It would, of course, be utterly untrue to suggest that in the interim between his arrival back in London from India in late 1962 to the completion of his album with Georgie Fame in spring 1966, that South's big band had been idling. Work may not have been especially plentiful but it had occurred nonetheless. In May 1964, they'd returned to the BBC's Jazz Club slot, playing a lively hour long set that, as Crescendo magazine noted, had ended with “an enthusiastic ovation from the studio audience.” Once again, South had kept a copy of the show, which does indeed leap both down the years and through the speakers. This time around, the writing is even stronger, the programme displaying the leader’s penchant for dramatic minor-keyed themes which (rather presciently as it turned out) hinted at a certain cinematic quality. Among the programme's many highlights were a new chart, Poncho, which the band took to using as a theme on its live appearances, and a score South had donated to the library of the Tubby Hayes big band, Raga, designed as a feature for Hayes’s energetic flute, and intended to capture the flavour of the composer’s stay in Calcutta. Broadcast live, the band had also provided ample evidence of its sheer professionalism; the show had under-run, despite its final number, an extended blues featuring virtually every soloist in the band, aptly titled Closing Time, running close to fifteen minutes. With a few minutes of airtime to spare, South had simply launched into it again, giving Ronnie Scott and Dick Morrissey the opportunity to square up against one another. Once again, the all-star personnel had been a large part of the show's success, South drawing in players from the bands of Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Scott, Tony Kinsey, Humphrey Lyttelton and others, including, as Crescendo noted, the entire line-up of the already legendary Jazz Couriers. The following day, Lyttelton, who'd presented the broadcast in characteristically witty style, penned a glowing review of the band in his regular Sunday Citizen column, praising how they had “produced Big Band jazz that would be hard to match anywhere in the world.” 

 

A few days before the broadcast, the band had had a shakedown gig at The Bulls Head, caught by Crescendo's (unidentified) reviewer. “Harry South has an evident flair for handling the big band,” the magazine declared, “and this band should receive further public exposure while its spirit and enthusiasm run so high. It proves an ample argument against those who say we produce nothing original.” Even more importantly, as the Sunday Telegraph's Peter Clayton observed, South was among the few British musicians prepared to put in the hard work necessary to stop the big band going the way of the dinosaur. “He believes in a little excitement and plays what [ex-Stan Kenton arranger then living in London] William Russo is apt contemptuously to call 'meat and potato music'. If this means it nourishes the belly rather than perplexes the head then he's right. And for anybody weaned on jazz it's a diet I can thoroughly recommend.” 

 

Not that South was against progress. Interviewed in Melody Maker in early 1966, he named among his favourite arrangers Gil Evans, Oliver Nelson and Gary McFarland, three of the decade’s most progressive writers. “There are a lot of people I'd like to hear more of – like Gary McFarland. He sounded as though he was doing something worthwhile and then we have heard very little from him.” 

 

Opportunities to put into practice the lessons that he was learning from men like McFarland were still too few and far between. There were a few gigs – the Bull's Head, a one-off concert at Marylebone's Seymour Hall – and another welcome return to the airwaves in March 1965, which, once more, South had the good sense to retain on tape.  

 

The band had been chosen to relaunch Jazz Club after a period in which the BBC had attempted to combine its live and recorded jazz presentations into a single programme, It's Jazz, a neat idea that had ended up pleasing fewer people than expected. When Jazz Club returned, producer Bryant Marriott had declared his wish to have the show go out live, yet South's edition had had to be pre-recorded in front of an invited audience at the BBC's Paris Studios a few days ahead of time, its eventual broadcast on Monday March 22nd being interrupted by a newsflash concerning the Vietnam War. Nearly a year on since its last appearance, the band sounded stronger than ever, playing a mix of old and new material, the latter including a gorgeous saxes-only arrangement of South's Ellingtonish ballad Royal Flush (which two of the those present – Ronnie Scott and Tubby Hayes - had actually recorded with Ellington star Paul Gonsalves the month before, a performance later released on the album Change of Setting on the World Record Club) and Six To One Bar, a 6/4 blues that was to become something of a signature on broadcasts and live appearances. And, in what was now a tradition whenever the band appeared in person, Closing Time ended the show, beginning, as always, with a spectacular Tubby Hayes tenor solo. 

 

The band didn't see the inside of a recording studio again until September 1965, when it reconvened to record still more titles for the yet-to-be-finished Georgie Fame album. In the middle of a nationwide tour, Fame was squeezing in the date, and despite production now having been taken over by the hit-making Denny Cordell, there was still much opposition to what some saw as a “vanity” project, especially at the label he was signed to, EMI/ Columbia. “Half the guys in my office were saying 'What do you want to sing with a big band for?,” Fame remembers. “'Big bands are dead'.” Even some of the singer’s closest friends were sceptical. “I went there wanting to be knocked out,” admitted Alan Price of one Fame/South session, “but I was a bit disappointed. But if they work together [more], Harry and Georgie, I'm sure it'll come off.” 

 

Fame's own faith in the project had never wavered, despite its unusually protracted genesis, but he received further validation in the autumn of 1965 when vocalese king Jon Hendricks arrived in London to begin a two week stint at Annie's Room, the Covent Garden nightspot run by his former Lambert-Hendricks-Ross colleague Annie Ross. Hendricks' presence drew Fame like a moth to a flame (“I went in there every night”) and it was no surprise that he jammed with both the clubs proprietor and her guest several times during the run. Hendricks was also influential at suggesting material: Fame had already covered several of the Count Basie numbers the American had recorded with Ross and Lambert on the iconic Sing A Song Of Basie album, taped in 1957, but Hendricks now suggested his novel update of Three Blind Mice, in which the trio of protagonists prove not merely to be myopic but blind drunk. “He came to Harry's flat in Streatham, sat around the piano and we worked it out,” remembers Fame. The American star also attended several of Fame's own appearances while in London, the first, an impromptu “sit in” with South's band at the Hammersmith Odeon on November 7th, as part of an afternoon billed as The Big Band Bonanza, itself the last in a series of Jazz Jamboree concerts staged to raise funds of the Musicians' Social and Benevolent Fund which had been running annually since World War Two. “A trifle under-amplified, and, perhaps for that reason, not at peak form” was Crescendo's verdict on Fame's performance that day, its reviewer doubtless unaware that the vocalist had been struck down by bronchitis the week before. Time had been a factor too. With no fewer than nine bands to put on in three hours (“Could all those Jazz Jamboree bands have been the same guys in different jackets?” posed Melody Maker's The Raver), everyone played it hard and fast, with South's Closing Time - retitled Last Orders - taking on an even more breathless quality than usual.  

 

There was also a frantic air to the following evening's performance by the South band on Jazz Club. Broadcast live, high spirits and microphone issues were a distraction for much of the show, and once more performing in front of his idol Hendricks, Fame sounded a shade uncertain. Humphrey Lyttelton had introduced the singer as a “young man equally popular among jazz fans and pop pickers”, suggesting incorrectly that this appearance marked his Jazz Club début. That had occurred way back in 1963, when Fame had appeared with the John Burch Octet (Burch was to write Fame's hit In The Meantime, as well as the B-Side of Yeh Yeh, Preach and Teach), whereupon he was described as “a sort of cross between Jon Hendricks, Eddie Jefferson and King Pleasure.” 

 

For the November '65 show he was firmly in his Hendricks bag, singing three of the numbers he'd taped at his initial session with South that spring, Down For The Count, Lil' Darlin' and Little Pony, sounding especially nervous on the ballad. “I was terrified because it was quite a challenge,” he remarked fifty years later. “I had to produce these long, clear, straight notes...I was surrounded by all these guys playing away and I'm singing a Basie classic. It wasn't until later on when I worked with Basie and heard the band playing it every night that I thought 'That's the way you do it!'. Now I can do it with any band, anywhere.” 

 

For their part, the South band appear in fine, if somewhat rowdy, form. There is another energetic canter through Six To One Bar (with Ronnie Scott on song) and several new items; South's setting of the Billy Strayhorn ballad, Lush Life, a theme so complex that it has unseated even the greatest jazz talents, yet here neatly dispatched by pianist Gordon Beck, and, in Afterthought, a cleverly constructed harmonic vehicle that goes anywhere but where you think it might, a further tip of the hat to Strayhorn's compositional style. Phil Seamen gets a feature in North of The Soho Border, a powerful reminder of his oft-overlooked skills as a big band drummer, but not everything South touches turns to gold; Costa Fortuna – which even its composer admitted “sounds like Antonio's dancers trying the Gay Gordons around a circus arena” - falls flat, attempting too hard to conjure the sort of mood that Woody Herman's El Toro Grande and Maynard Ferguson's Óle had captured more convincingly a few years before. 

 

Killed like every other fad; the price of Fame 

 

The final sessions for the Fame/South LP took place in Spring 1966, by which point there were already mutterings about just why it had taken so long to complete a single album. Fame's itinerary had been one reason: the odd musical difference had been another. “I'm going to play 'Papa's Got A Brand New Bag' on the album with Harry South,” the singer had forewarned the public shortly after the recording was completed, “just to mess people's minds up.” He wasn't kidding. With a play list already including songs by Willie Nelson and EMI engineer (and eventually to be one-hit wonder) Norman 'Hurricane' Smith, the album was nothing if not eclectic, but covering James Brown proved a step too far for some of those taking part. Many consider the track the record’s highspot (Elvis Costello is among the nay-sayers, finding it compromised by what he sees as session musician anonymity), though, as Fame remembers, some of the die-hard jazzers were less enamoured. “Harry South's jazz musicians didn't really want to play it because it wasn't swinging,” he told Chris Welch, “but as I was paying for the session....” When baritonist Harry Klein was asked to stand up in order to make his low register notes more prominent, Fame recalled him as being “really pissed off at being separated and having to play this lick.” 

 

However, even the most jaded of musicians could be won round by the offer of a good gig. Just before the final session for the album, Fame and the South big band had made an appearance at London's Marquee club, drawing a record attendance, which it then broke again on a follow-up appearance in April. The big band had made its début at the club the previous November (as a sole attraction minus Fame), delivering what one Melody Maker reader called “a much needed shot in the arm” to the local jazz scene. If the November gig had been a quick instrumental jab, then Fame's Marquee appearances with the band the following year were more like a vocal overdose. “One of the most exciting nights in British jazz,” was Melody Maker's reaction, Chris Welch recording that the evening had closed with South and the band delivering two encores. In the same issue as the review, the paper had published the results of its annual jazz poll, which found South voted into third place as a composer and second place and an arranger. His big band – and remember this was an outfit that existed sporadically at best and which had yet to issue a commercially available album – was placed second to that of Johnny Dankworth. 

 

It had been Mike Hawker, the go-ahead young producer at Mercury, who'd finally signed South's band to a one-shot recording contract in late 1965. There had been a certain inevitability to it: South was playing with the Morrissey Quartet, already contracted to the label, and, a Hawker well knew, his contributions to the groups library were a great shaping force in its success. There was also something else in the air, a sudden faith in larger bands that had prompted a brief, mini big band revival among British jazz musicians, 1966 also yielding a remarkable triptych of such albums comprising Stan Tracey's Alice In Jazzland, Tubby Hayes' 100% Proof and Ronnie Stephenson and Kenny Clare's Drum Spectacular. However, whereas these other LPs had faithfully captured each bands concept to a T, South's own album, at a mere thirty-two minutes in length and rather unimaginatively titled Introducing The Harry South Big Band, was something of a miss-hit, failing to catch the spirit that had come over so readily in their BBC appearances (perhaps the reason that in this age of near-forensic combing of British jazz's back catalogue nobody has yet seen fit to reissue it?). Containing themes South had made popular with both his own band and that of Morrissey – including Six To One Bar, There and Back and North of The Soho Border – the recording superficially resembled a success, with the leader himself declaring it the realisation of “a long-time hope of mine.” But something was missing; even signature flag-wavers such as Last Orders, the grooving blues the band would use as a set closer and open out to feature all its soloists, had lost its spark, trimmed to under five minutes and somehow robbed of its inherent excitement by a notably stark studio sound (a bit of a curse on Mercury albums at this time). Personnel changes hadn't helped either, with one of the two sessions used to complete the album failing to include regulars like Tubby Hayes. Accordingly, the album’s reviews were either merely polite, or, as in the case of Jazz Monthly, openly unenthusiastic. Jazz Journal's Michael Shera thought the LP “strongly swinging modern mainstream” while Michael James of Jazz Monthly called it “enjoyable but hardly memorable” and a “rather ordinary record.” Even the most partisan of critics could scarcely raise themselves to full praise. “Harry South is a thorough professional – and that is meant as a high compliment,” Melody Maker's Bob Dawbarn began his review. “He can always be relied upon to do a good job.” 

 

Relied upon? A good job? It sounded more like a school report than an artistic critique, but, unfortunately for South, there was much worse to come. Operating exclusively on the modern jazz circuit, like all but a few of London's modernists he'd been virtually invisible to the wider public. Working with Georgie Fame on the other hand, he was suddenly on view as never before, a situation which was to bring dividends and critical brickbats in equal measure. “If it ever did become a commercial,” South had said of modern jazz back in 1963, “hundreds would jump on the wagon it would be killed like every other fad.”  

Several of the fad killers were already laying in wait, pens poised. 

 

Sound Venture, the title eventually chosen for the Fame/South album, was released on October 7th 1966, to no little public fanfare. The back sleeve copy made it crystal clear that this was a new beginning for the singer, whose mission was said to be “to destroy the miserable, purposeless feuding between young and old ideas that had bedevilled the scene for years.” “Here is a milestone in Fame's career,” the purple prose declared. Indeed, the album's launch coincided with several other notable landmarks for the singer. That same month, he had announced that he was disbanding his own band, the popular Blue Flames, in order to pursue other career interests. He and manager Rik Gunnell were also in the process of negotiating a new recording contract with CBS, having flown to New York in late September to firm up the deal. And the same day that the album was released the vocalist and the South band appeared in concert at the Top Rank Suite in Brighton, the gig acting as an out-of-town warm up for their much awaited concert performance at the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday October 9th. 

 

Their combined Marquee appearances earlier that year had piqued the interest of the music press, and, on the surface, upping the stakes to a concert hall looked like a safe bet, as well as offering proof positive that Fame was now so much more than simply a club act. However, there was a vast degree of difference in entertaining the dance happy, purple heart popping punters at the Marquee to performing before a tiered concert hall full of seated listeners. As such, the Festival Hall gig was to take place in the full public glare of both the partisan music press and mainstream journalists alike, with a celeb-filled audience in attendance (Brian Epstein, Jimmy Tarbuck, Tommy Steele et al). Unsurprisingly, the former loved it; Melody Maker's Chris Welch, who had also written the sleeve note for Sound Venture, called the evening “the crowning moment in Georgie's career...a big raving success [with a] huge, appreciative crowd cheering Georgie and the Harry South band all the way” The singer wasn't the sole focus though: the review also praised the solo contributions of Tubby Hayes, Ray Warleigh and Gordon Beck, and noted a “surprise appearance” by Annie Ross. It was Fame, however, who had been the most impressive, and, according to Welch, he had risen to the challenge magnificently. “After an uneven start, brought on by nerves...Georgie appeared more confident in the second half,” he observed. 

The mainstream papers were less impressed, with the Daily Mail's James Greenwood calling Fame “not so much a jazz singer as an imitation of a jazz singer,” finding particular fault with the vocalist's turn on the achingly slow Lil' Darlin'. 

“I don't think they're familiar with what I'm trying to do,” was Fame's own muted response to the Mail. “I think [Greenwood] was being hypercritical”. 

 

The reviews for Sound Venture that followed over the next couple of months were similarly divided. Melody Maker wondered “how can this fail? There's Georgie Fame for the hipper pop fans; there's a fine, swinging big band playing excellent arrangements...this could as easily have been reviewed on the jazz page.” 

 

Yet it was the album's mixed nature, the very thing that had so excited pop journalists like Welch, that irked the jazz press. Fame took most of the flak (“insipid and adenoidal” was one verdict on his performance) but the jazz pundits railed against South too. David Illingworth of Jazz Journal panned the album for containing “average arrangements performed by an imposing list of talent (hope they get some bread out of it anyway!)”, while Jazz Monthly's Brian Priestley called South “an extremely dull arranger with no feel for this sort of commercial work”. And he didn't stop there, even taking a snide swipe at one of his fellow JJ colleagues for recently nominating South among the world’s best arrangers - “which is, to say the least, a slight exaggeration.” 

 

The inference in reviews like this was clear: Fame should leave jazz well alone as he was nothing more “a pleasant and efficient singer of rhythmic pop [sic.]” and that South should have known better than to get involved with someone who was clearly riding a bandwagon. 

“I was accused of being a young whipper-snapper that didn't have the right to be on the same bandstand as Ronnie Scott and Tubby Hayes,” Fame told Duncan Heining in 2009. “I just followed my instincts. I didn't get any of that [sort of reaction] from the musicians. That only came from the media basically.” 

 

Over fifty years later, it's a little hard to see how controversial the album was. In many ways, Fame and South were simply capturing the mood of the time, reflecting a general blurring of the dividing lines between pop and jazz, as was then also happening in bands as varied as Manfred Mann and the Graham Bond Organisation, and which would shortly reach supergroup nirvana in Cream. “There was a certain element particularly among the younger journalists on the Melody Maker that saw the future,” Fame remembers. “'This guy's one of us – give him all the encouragement you can.'” And he was well ahead of the game in other ways: it can be argued that the very idea of UK pop stars doing their “big band/swing” album starts with Fame and South, years ahead of those contemporaries that have since tried their hand (Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Rod Stewart) and today's crossover kings (Robbie Williams). 

 

Reaching number nine in the UK album chart, Sound Venture had certainly made an impact, and as usual, it was left to record buyers to realise the true merits of the record, something that, judging from a letter to Melody Maker two weeks after it was issued, some had done so far more readily that the professional scribes. “Surely the best British jazz LP of the year is Sound Venture,” wrote Terry Aldous of Swindon. “Many purists will carry on the fight saying jazz and pop don't mix, but this LP proves it does. If more people realised this the British jazz scene would be healthier.” 

 

In the years that followed, the album did indeed become something of a classic, although as with so many iconic British LPs recorded during the 1960s it was treated with something close to total neglect by its copyright owners. Rather surprisingly, it was deleted a mere three years after it was released, and it languished unreissued until 2006, when the Japanese arm of Universal saw fit to bring it out as a mini-LP sleeve facsimile. Astonishingly, it didn't receive a UK reissue until 2015, some 49 years after its first release! Yet its out-of-reach, underground status never diminished its appeal. Its fans are legion, and in some instances, legendary. One especially noteworthy enthusiast, Elvis Costello nominated the album as one of his all-time favourites, a recording that “knocked a wall down for me”, “a hip record” which had forever banished the idea of music existing in separate compartments.  

 

For Fame himself, the album had been a turning point, enabling him to realise a dream to sing with a big band, moving his career along a far broader front that it would have had had he continued within his existing format. Although he was sometimes phlegmatic about the project (“I was just trying to pursue my musical ambitions”), those around him suddenly saw the singer in a quite different light, his new found “serious” artistic status meaning that within less than a year of Sound Venture's release he had made a guest appearance with Count Basie; within two years he was doing an entire tour with the Basie band, for which his own musical director – South – played piano and conducted. “Fame, you've got a whole lot of music here, baby”, remarked the legendary Basie trumpeter Harry 'Sweets' Edison of South's arrangements at their first rehearsal. Without that initial conversation at Ronnie's one night back in early 1965, none of this might have happened. 

 

A hobby for me, really: beyond Sound Venture 

 

For Harry South the association with Georgie Fame provided a career boost many of his colleagues in the jazz business would have killed for. By the time of Sound Venture's release, the majority of his own band were entering middle-age, some with only middling prospects. Many London clubs had turned their back on jazz completely; Ronnie Scott's now found less and less room for English hornmen; and, even for names hitherto thought immune to professional misfortune, Tubby Hayes for example, times were getting tougher than tough. Their association with South was therefore doubly valuable, and, as the ripples of Sound Venture spread outwards, the bandleader was able to provide the commodity British jazzmen needed most; gigs. Almost immediately things started happening; during October and December 1966 the big band had taped six further performances with Fame for the BBC's Top Of The Pops transcription service, heard here in their entirety (complete with one of Brian Matthews’s cheery introductions). 

 

In effect, these half a dozen songs offer a mini-resume of the Fame/South collaboration to date, as well as showing some hints as to where it would go next. There are reruns of four of the Sound Venture tracks – Lovey Dovey, Papa's Got A Brand New Bag, Three Blind Mice and Fame's own anthem to London's club scene, Dawn Yawn, and yet while the singer himself sounds in even greater control of his voice than on the album itself, his star sidemen are somehow kept more under wraps before: neither Hayes nor Morrissey top their work on the LP originals, and in the “new” material -  a cover of Fame's recent solo hit Sunny and the witty Keep Your Big Mouth Shut – there is a foretaste of the soon to be almost total marginalisation of Fame's “accompanists”. 

 

Live, it was another matter altogether, at least for the time being. That December, the pairing recorded a further BBC Jazz Club broadcast and also appeared at the University of London's President’s Ball, playing for an audience including HRH The Queen Mother. Over Christmas and into January, South's band accompanied Fame on a new revue show at London's Saville Theatre, Fame in '67, on a bill also including Julie Felix and Cat Stevens, the run being extended by popular demand, and in February, South flew with Fame to the Cannes Film Festival, to conduct a local orchestra. In March 1967, they returned to the Royal Festival Hall for another sold-out concert appearance, this time balancing the bill with Fame's newly reconstituted Blue Flames. The gig yielded both a short film (not seen in years) and an album (The Two Faces Of Fame), and while the “South” side of the new LP, somewhat sabotaged by the Festival Hall's cavernous acoustic, was impressive enough – containing a tongue-twisting Bluesology, Don't Try and another humorous account the name-dropping Keep Your Big Mouth Shut – already there were signs that the band was becoming something of an adjunct to the singer, with only one of its members (Tony Coe) getting any solo space on the issued recordings, suggesting that both Fame, and, more worryingly, his record label were finding a dual existence hard to square. CBS, after all, had signed the singer at the very height of his pop success, yet had begun recording him right on the cusp of a sudden change of orientation towards jazz. How the label handled him in the years ahead would reveal a certain amount of corporate confusion, although at the time the singer himself denied there were issues. “I don't think it really raises any problems,” he remarked in spring 1967, answering Melody Maker's enquiry about balancing work with Harry South and his own band. “I look at jazz as more of an art form – as a hobby for me, really, though of course we play a considerable amount of jazz on our normal gigs.” 

It wasn't what the purists wanted to hear, sounding almost like a confession that, yes, writers like James Greenwood and David Illingworth had been right all along – he really was playing at jazz rather than sincerely exploring its possibilities. 

 

For those looking for further cracks in the façade, the studio follow-up to Sound Venture, The Third Face Of Fame, taped in early 1968, provided irrefutable evidence; indeed, if ever an album can be said to be an anticlimactic sequel it is this one: the hip, hard driving sound of its predecessor is now all but gone, smoothed out by CBS's high-end production values and by what, even by Fame's sometimes quirkily scattergun approach to repertoire, was a hopelessly unfocused choice of material; Lennon and McCartney, Donovan, Mose Allison, Gershwin, Gordon Jenkins. Admittedly, the original A&R remit had been to construct an LP around a 1930s theme, in order to tie in with Fame's recent hit single Bonnie and Clyde (which he initially detested), but the resulting album is anything but consistent, playing its two lowest blows with a version of the singalong favourite Side By Side and a setting of Someone To Watch Over Me so dull that the singer decided to turn it into a comedy monologue. It also spoke volumes that this time around, South had farmed out some of his arranging duties to others, including Derek Wadsworth and Tubby Hayes. If the album had one singular message it was this: that Georgie Fame, all round mainstream entertainer, was about to eclipse Georgie Fame, exemplar of hip. Even the album's sleeve notes admitted it, making much of the new mix of “jazz, whimsical, self-deprecating humour, sentimentality and blues.” 

 

Afterthought: almost accidental 

 

Harry South, on the other hand, had found his groove, a fact confirmed by the results of the 1967 Melody Maker Readers Poll, which placed his big band at number one and himself as winner in the arranging category. Sound Venture had done well too, coming in at number four in the album category (two places ahead of Dick Morrissey's Storm Warning). South had also been voted third best composer. Poll wins were one thing though - cosmetic and nice to receive but not really of any practical use outside of publicity purposes - yet the avalanche of work which came as a by-product of his association with Fame really did require South to change some aspects of his day to day professional life. By early 1967, he was, as his promotional blurb read, “represented by Rik Gunnell Agency, 47 Gerrard Street, London, W.1.”. The more cynical among South's colleagues – Tubby Hayes, Phil Seamen – might have considered such a requirement pretentious but for South practical management was now a necessity. The phone was ringing as never before. In 1968, he signed a deal with Philips Records, leading to the recording of a commercial album, Say No More, a skilfully arranged compendium of current popular material by the likes of Simon and Garfunkel, Sergio Mendes and Lennon and McCartney, scored for a band he dubbed his Stereo Brass. “Today, Harry is doing a great deal of writing and conducting,” Peter Clayton reported in the album's notes. “TV spectacular sessions, commercial jingles, and, very recently, the music for one or two films.” In the latter South thought he had found “an identity...I didn't know I had...not bound by categories of music.” 

 

This refusal to recognise limitations also affected his big band, which by the late 1960s, had begun to serve as something of a testing ground for South's take on the approaches of several younger jazz figures, both American and British. Like many jazzmen of his generation, he had never been wholly convinced by the avant-garde, instead favouring the work of players and composers who, while undoubtedly progressive, stayed on the sensible side of anarchy, such as Joe Henderson and Duke Pearson. The former had become a particular touchstone for those in his immediate circle – including Dick Morrissey and Tubby Hayes – and when the American saxophonist's Blue Note album Inner Urge was released in Britain in summer 1966, South wasted no time in taking down two of its themes, Henderson's fiendishly difficult title track and the Duke Pearson-penned ballad You Know I Care, arranging both for his big band. 

 

The band also continued to feature annually on the BBC's Jazz Club, with one of its appearances in September 1967 creating what was to all intents and purposes its finest hour (well, thirty-minutes, included in full here) and a set list which, for once, didn't include any reruns of existing material. Indeed, within its programming, which runs the gamut from the taught energy of Inner Urge (complete with an Alan Branscombe alto solo that is nothing less than Spauldingesque), through the stately balladry of Hayes' feature You Know I Care and onto the complexities of Limited Freedom and the tricky Times Are Changing, there is a perfect resume of South's approach, the entire proceedings also transpiring to be something of a farewell to his “old” way of writing, before the influence of commercial music and jazz-rock would come to alter his thinking. It also spoke volumes for South's abilities that his writing was by no means overshadowed by that of Tubby Hayes, who had contributed an arrangement of his own murderously fast Second City Steamer to close the show. 

 

There's also perhaps something altogether symbolic in the fact that this programme was taped in the middle of the changeover between the BBC's old Light Programme and its new pirate-fashioned Radio 1 (there were then “lots of floral characters rushing about the corridors” observed the show’s compère Humphrey Lyttelton). It was also the juncture when many of those within South's band were beginning to fade from the front rank of London modernism, itself a reminder that the outfit had begun right back in the “never had it so good” Macmillan era, which, when viewed just after a multicoloured summer of love must have already begun to resemble a sort of repressive, monochromatic, prehistory. Times were changing indeed: just looking at the paths – both career and personal – soon to be taken by many of the bands members makes for a sobering realisation: Tubby Hayes was about to topple amid drugs charges; Ronnie Scott and Harry Klein would soon record with the Beatles; Dick Morrissey was to shortly abandon straight-ahead jazz for the richer pickings of fusion. Others in South's ranks were to disappear almost completely from the annals of the music: just think, who now recalls men like Terry Shannon, Alan Branscombe, Les Condon and Keith Christie as anything but walk-on bit part players in a jazz scene that, over half a century later, now seems more remote than ever? 

 

Part of the trouble with this assessment lies in an outmoded adherence to the folk-image – or more precisely folk-myth – of British jazz in the 1960s, that nothing much really happened before the arrival of the Garricks, Westbrooks and Surmans, that wave of irreverent young bloods who made it their business to blow apart the mood of pro-American genuflection that had for so long dominated London's modernists. Like a lot of myths, this one contains more than a grain of truth, and yet, again like many bits of folklore, it's simply a nice story; an allegory that somehow deals with the whole of Britain's role in the world, its cultural aspirations and its level of artistic talent in a few lines. The detail it ignores, though, is crucial, and within it are plentiful stories of men like Harry South and his band members, who found their own identity in a period in which the country of their birth was transitioning from old to new.  

 

To accord them far less respect – or even memory – simply because they chose to work mainly within existing disciplines would be a terrible oversight.  In fact, theirs was often a far harder road to travel than that traversed by those who superseded them; after all, not only did musicians of South's generation have to learn hard and fast the existing tenets of jazz, living when they did, they also had to unlearn them and face fully the twin novelties of rock and roll and free improvisation if they were to survive at all. Some failed miserably; others simply aped the mannerisms of the new or grew a pair of sideburns and thought they'd got everybody fooled. Harry South didn't work like that. He was one of the scene’s greatest survivors, a figure who successfully rode out the sea change and emerged on the other side recognisably himself, a composer and arranger who allowed fashion to influence but never wholly overtake him, the very reason why a composition of his from, say, 1973, sounds not unlike a creation he'd dreamed up a decade earlier. To those only looking for cheap fripperies, uniformity like this might be judged as a kind of artistic atrophy or, at worst, as being indicative of a lack of real ability. To more sympathetic ears, this same consistency might be called having a “style” and Harry South most certainly had that.   

 

There's also one final point to be made about Harry South, the BBC and the importance of his big band in British jazz history, a point that those who think that jazz in the UK in the late 1960s was all about hairy free-improv, mixed-media suites and the like would do well to note. In 1968, the corporation collaborated with Philips Records producer Johnny Franz on an LP celebrating the 21st birthday of its Jazz Club slot, a bold forty-or-so minute album of newly recorded material that purported to capture something of the progress of the music the show had presented over two decades (Retrospect Through 21 Years of BBC Jazz Club). Like most anthology albums, the questions of who was in or out fell largely upon contractual releases, the scheduling of recording dates and practical availability of those who could best represent any given style. The final choices were not all that surprising, with the exception of one: a band with George Chisholm represented the more traditional end of things, Humphrey Lyttelton and Alex Welsh the mainstream and John Dankworth bebop. For more modern developments, Philips chose not Tubby Hayes – still in 1968 the establishment face of British post-bop – nor any of the young groups who'd already made a considerable impression on their various Jazz Club appearances – John Surman's or John Stevens’, to pick just two – but Harry South's big band. Think about that for a minute; it's not an in-house plug (although it can be argued that South's band might not have existed at all had not Terry Henebery first suggested a broadcast), and it's certainly not a case of going for the easy option (why book eighteen musicians when you can get four?); it's a choice made solely on musical merit, that of a band truly representing the best of British, and one that reflected the indisputable truth that, unlike so many other English musicians given a chance to lead their own outfit by the BBC, South had had the drive and determination to capitalise fully on the opportunity. “Would make a good theme for a TV thriller series,” Crescendo's reviewer wrote of one of the South big bands tracks on the Philips LP, as if seeing the future. 

 

Barely a few years ago, it could have been said that the greatest disservice time had done to Harry South was that he had left nothing like as substantial a recorded legacy as he might have. He was gone, and altogether rather sadly, largely forgotten, simply because none of his few recordings remained in print. Fortunately, releases like this (and The Songbook) have fulsomely redressed that imbalance, and have (hopefully) forever banished the tag that South was simply “the bloke who did The Sweeney”. And, with Sound Venture also available again, arguably his most celebrated moment in the limelight, there's no excuse for his true value to remain apocryphal any more. However, a far bigger injustice would be if Harry South were now only remembered for that one record alone, or for being Georgie Fame's musical director, the man who helped facilitate his move from pop singer to big band vocalist.  

 

As crucial as this association was to both men, it is important that South's role in this golden period -  those glorious couple of mid-Sixties years in which British modern jazz and popular music briefly joined hands - is seen as part of a greater career-long continuum rather than a brief burst of good luck. Like many of his musical generation, South was a firm believer in hard graft rather than fortune and chance. Yet, in some ways, this sudden, unexpected mid-life renaissance was unexpected, and was perhaps more tied in to his rather karmic character than he'd have cared to admit. (“I don't hunt around for work,” he once confessed). True, he was in the right place at the right time, and he was one of the few British modernists of his era prepared to entertain the younger guard, but he was also undoubtedly the right man for the job, no matter what the critics may have said.  

Interviewed in Crescendo magazine in early 1965, just before the whole Fame/South collaboration went public, he was philosophical on the subject of success. “I think it's all what you make of it,” he remarked. “I don't think anyone's entitled to expect anything from life. Anything I have done has been almost accidental. More and more as I go on, I find the things I do best and carry on the line I think is the strongest.”  

 

Many of the things he did best, and many of his strongest lines, are right here. 

 

Simon Spillett 

September 2018  

 

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FULL SESSION DETAILS  

 

DISC ONE: 

 

THE HARRY SOUTH BIG BAND 

BBC “Jazz Club”, Paris Theatre, London - broadcast live, Thursday November 10th 1960 - Programme introduced by Alan Dell. 

 

Southern Horizons - Cooling Off - Sophisticated Lady - I Want To Be Happy - All The Things You Are (Trio - South, Bates and Dougan only)* - The Goblin - Save Your Love For Me - Tam O’Shanter - Jazz At The Paris 

 

Derek Abbott, Ian Hamer, Jimmy Deuchar, Bert Courtley (trumpets); Keith Christie, Laddie Busby, Ray Premru (trombones); Ken Wray (valve trombone); Joe Harriott, Alan Branscombe (alto saxes); Tubby Hayes (tenor sax, flute); Ronnie Scott (tenor sax); Ronnie Ross (baritone sax); Terry Shannon (piano); Phil Bates (bass); Jackie Dougan (drums); Harry South (arranger, conductor, piano*) 

 

 

THE DICK MORRISSEY QUARTET 

BBC 'Jazz For Moderns (Jazz Session)' Unidentified Studios, London - recorded unknown date in 1963 - Programme introduced by Tony Hall. 

 

Down Home - Love For Sale - Landslide - I Married An Angel - I Married An Angel – TAKE 2 - Down Home – VERSION 2 - Minor Incident - The Gypsy - Bang! - Bang! - TAKE 2 - Down Home VERSION 3 

 

Dick Morrissey (tenor sax); Harry South (piano); Phil Bates (bass); Bill Eyden (drums) 

 

DISC TWO: 

 

THE HARRY SOUTH BIG BAND  

BBC “Jazz Club”, Paris Theatre, London - broadcast live, Saturday May 16th 1964 - Programme introduced by Humphrey Lyttelton. 

 

Poncho - The Sound Of Seventeen - Day In, Day Out* - Alone Together – Raga - Willow Weep for Me * - Save Your Love For Me - The Goblin - Time Will Tell * - Closing Time 

 

Ian Hamer, Greg Bowen, Les Condon (trumpets); Jimmy Deuchar (trumpet, mellophonium); Bobby Lamb, Keith Christie, Johnny Marshall (trombones); Ken Wray (valve trombone); Alan Branscombe, Roy Willox (alto saxes);, Ronnie Scott, Dick Morrissey (tenor saxes); Tubby Hayes (tenor sax, flute);  Joe Temperley (baritone sax); Terry Shannon (piano); Phil Bates (bass); Bill Eyden (drums); Johnny Grant (vocal*); Harry South (arranger and conductor) 

 

THE HARRY SOUTH BIG BAND 

BBC “Jazz Club”, Paris Theatre, London - taped Tuesday March 16th 1965 - broadcast Monday March 22nd 1965 - Programme introduced by Humphrey Lyttelton. 

 

The Sound Of Seventeen - Six To One Bar - The Scandinavian - Time Will Tell* - This Heart Of Mine* - Raga - Royal Flush (saxes and rhythm only) 

 

Greg Bowen, Ian Hamer, Les Condon, Hank Shaw (trumpets); Keith Christie, Bobby Lamb, Chris Smith (trombones); Ken Wray (valve trombone); Roy Willox (alto sax, flute); Alan Branscombe (alto sax); Tubby Hayes (tenor sax, flute); Ronnie Scott, Dick Morrissey (tenor saxes); Joe Temperley (baritone sax); Terry Shannon (piano); Phil Bates (bass); Phil Seamen (drums); Johnny Grant (vocal*); Harry South (arranger and conductor) 

 

DISC THREE: 

 

THE HARRY SOUTH BIG BAND 

BBC “Jazz Club”, Paris Theatre, London - taped Tuesday March 16th 1965 - broadcast Monday March 22nd 1965 – personnel as above 

 

There And Back - Closing Time 

 

THE HARRY SOUTH BIG BAND  

BBC “Jazz Club”, Paris Theatre, London - broadcast live, Monday November 8th 1965 - Programme introduced by Humphrey Lyttleton. 

 

There And Back - Save Your Love For Me - Costa Fortuna – Afterthought - Six To One Bar - Lush Life - North Of The Soho Border – Raga - Last Orders 

 

Greg Bowen, Ian Hamer, Bert Ezzard, Hank Shaw (trumpets); Ian Carr (trumpet, flugelhorn); Keith Christie, Chris Smith, Johnny Marshall (trombones); Ken Wray (valve trombone); Alan Branscombe, Roy Willox (alto saxes, flute); Ronnie Scott, Dick Morrissey (tenor saxes); Tubby Hayes (tenor sax, flute); Joe Temperley (baritone sax); Gordon Beck (piano); Phil Bates (bass); Phil Seamen (drums); Harry South (arranger and conductor) 

 

THE DICK MORRISSEY QUARTET 

BBC 'Jazz Club', Paris Studios, London - recorded  Monday May 10th 1965 - broadcast Monday May 17th 1965 - Programme introduced by George Melly 

 

Get Out Of The Country - Time After Time - Blue Mode - Get Out Of Town - Come Rain Or Come Shine - Frankie and Johnny 

 

Dick Morrissey (tenor sax); Harry South (piano); Phil Bates (bass); Phil Seamen (drums) 

 

DISC FOUR: 

 

THE HARRY SOUTH BIG BAND  

BBC “Jazz Club”, Paris Theatre, London - broadcast live, Monday November 8th 1965 - Programme introduced by Humphrey Lyttleton. 

 

Down For The Count - Lil’ Darlin’ - Little Pony 

 

Personnel as November 8th 1965 above with Georgie Fame (vocal). 

 

THE HARRY SOUTH BIG BAND 

BBC “Top Of The Pops” (transcriptions) Show # 102 unidentified BBC Studios, London - recorded Tuesday October 4th 1966 - Introduced by Brian Matthew. 

 

Sunny - Dawn Yawn - Lovey Dovey  

 

Georgie Fame (vocal); Tubby Hayes (tenor sax); Harry South (arranger and conductor) - remainder of personnel unidentified but probably similar to November 8th 1965 session 

 

 

THE HARRY SOUTH BIG BAND 

BBC “Top Of The Pops” (transcriptions) Show # 112 unidentified BBC Studios, London - recorded Monday December 12th 1966 - Introduced by Brian Matthew. 

 

Papa's Got A Brand New Bag - Keep Your Big Mouth Shut - Three Blind Mice 

 

Georgie Fame (vocal); Dick Morrissey (tenor sax); Harry South (arranger and conductor) - remainder of personnel unidentified but probably similar to November 8th 1965 session 

 

 

THE HARRY SOUTH BIG BAND  

The 27th Jazz Jamboree held in aid of the Musicians' Social and Benevolent Council: Big Band Bonanza, The Hammersmith Odeon, London - recorded Sunday November 7th 1965 - Programme introduced by Tommy Trinder 

 

Last Orders 

 

Ian Hamer, Greg Bowen, Hank Shaw, Les Condon, Ian Carr (trumpets); Keith Christie, Chris Smith, Johnny Marshall, Ken Goldie (trombones); Ken Wray (valve trombone); Alan Branscombe, Roy Willox (alto saxes); Ronnie Scott, Tubby Hayes, Dick Morrissey (tenor saxes); Joe Temperley (baritone sax); Gordon Beck (piano); Phil Bates (bass); Phil Seamen (drums); Harry South (arranger and conductor) 

 

 

THE HARRY SOUTH BIG BAND 

BBC “Jazz Club”, Playhouse Studio, London - recorded Monday September 11th 1967 - broadcast Sunday September 17th 1967 - Programme introduced by Humphrey Lyttelton. 

 

Inner Urge - Requiem For J.B. - Times Are Changing - You Know I Care - Limited Freedom - Second City Steamer 

 

Greg Bowen, Derek Watkins, Ian Hamer, Kenny Wheeler, Les Condon (trumpets); Johnny Marshall, Keith Christie, Chris Smith (trombones); Gib Wallace (bass trombone); Alan Branscombe, Tony Coe (alto saxes); Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Scott, Dick Morrissey (tenor saxes); Harry Klein (bari sax); Terry Shannon (piano); Phil Bates (bass); Bill Eyden (drums); Harry South (arranger and conductor) 

 

All arrangements by Harry South except Second City Steamer, arranged by Tubby Hayes 

 

Original sessions produced by Terry Henebery, Ron Belshier and Bryant Marriott