FLANNELLED WAILIN' FOOLS - Part Three "HOWZAT??!"

HERE’S THE FINAL FASCINATING INSTALMENT OF MATTHEW’S WRIGHT’S POTTED HISTORY…………….

For many years, pianist George Shearing and his wife relocated from his New York home to Stow-on-the-Wold in the Cotswolds for a few months each summer. Here he would listen to Test Match Special on BBC Radio and when cricket commentator Brian Johnston heard of this, he invited Shearing to the 1990 New Zealand Test match at Lords and interviewed him for View from the Boundary. Johnston had met Shearing once before, at Fischer’s Restaurant in London in 1946, when Shearing was with the Frank Weir Band and Johnston was broadcasting Saturday Night Out.

Shearing described his life in the Linden Lodge School for the Blind, Wandsworth, where he attended between the ages of 12 and 16 and where he played cricket, at first with a large balloon-type ball with a bell in it (he was later to joke “you needed the bell for the shortsighted”), underarm bowling and a wicket made of wooden blocks and plywood. “As a kid” (in Battersea) he recalled, “I used to go out in the street and play cricket with sighted people,” with him holding the bat helped by one of the local boys. “Sometimes I hit the ball and sometimes it hit me.” When imagining the play, Shearing admitted to having only vision of light and dark, but sitting in the commentary box “it’s an interesting aspect of controlled acoustics and wonderful daylight.” He would have to imagine the proceedings: “Two things that a born-blind man would have difficulty with are colour and perspective,” but his education and instruction had given him the information to deal with spatial issues. After his knighthood ceremony in 2007, he hosted a luncheon for close friends including fellow cricket enthusiasts Michael Parkinson and John Dankworth.

There are many other examples of jazz musicians being involved with the sport. When Jim Laker famously took 19 wickets in the Test against Australia at Old Trafford in 1956, Tubby Hayes dedicated a number, Laker’s Day, in recognition of the performance. Recorded as Live at the Flamingo at the Railway Arms, West Hampstead, the band shouts “Howzat!” at the end of the number. Tony Hall, who co-produced and introduced the session, later wrote in his column Hall Hears in the Record Mirror, August 1957, that “many modernists are ardent cricket enthusiasts” and referred to Hayes spending most of his free time at the Oval cricket ground. Also mentioned was a Tubby Hayes XI which played against a team organised by drummer Terry Seymour on Clapham Common. Participants included Allen Ganley, Phil Bates, Joe Temperley, Phil Seamen and Joe Harriott. The game was helped somewhat, Hall suggested, by the proximity of the pitch to a pub. Spike Wells who played with Tubby (Brian) Hayes in the late 60s/early 70s and himself a member of the MCC and Sussex County Cricket Club: “I knew Tubby liked cricket - we watched a programme about Gary Sobers together and, when he died, Liz (Grunlund) gave me a dog-eared copy of Testing time for England signed, by its author, "To Brian. Best wishes Denis Compton". 

For many years The Outswingers, a band formed by saxophonist Johnny Barnes and including over the years American tenor player Spike Robinson (a member at Essex C.C.C.) and trombonists Campbell Burnap and Roy Williams, have regularly entertained the crowd at Lords during Test matches.  

 According to his website, bassist Orlando Le Fleming’s “facility as an improviser and capacity as a team player were honed not on the bandstand, nor in the practice room, but on the cricket pitch”, when he was a professional cricketer for Devon and Somerset. Since moving to New York in 2003, he has played with Jimmy Cobb, Billy Cobham, Branford Marsalis and others.

Orlando Le Fleming bowling for Somerset

 There are numerous other links and very often clubhouses are used as jazz venues. (Some of my earliest recollections of both were at Didsbury cricket ground, where my father went to hear pianist Ken Frith play jazz and where he took me to a Brian Statham benefit match on the rest day of the 1961 Old Trafford test. The whole of the Australian team turned up for it.)

Other connections include a set of improvisational performances by British musicians in Berlin, October 2011, issued as Just Not Cricket, featuring Lol Coxhill, Trevor Watts, Steve Beresford, John Edwards, Gail Brand, Shabaka Hutchings and others. South African bassist Harry Miller could often be heard at rehearsals and gigs discussing the latest test scores with saxophonist Elton Dean. But perhaps the most curious is Canadian percussionist Chris Corsano’s CD The Young Cricketer (2006) which includes tracks such as “How should you pick up the ball and throw it”, although it has no apparent connection to the sport.

These different approaches to improvised music might be seen as mirroring those in cricket. In April 2013, Guardian sports columnist Barney Ronay compared West Indian Chris Gayle’s high-speed hundred off 30 balls for the Royal Challengers Bangalore with Billy Godleman’s painstaking half century off 244 balls for Derbyshire in the same month. He saw a clash of tempo, textures and interpretation parallel to the violent airing of differences between traditional jazz fans and modernists, followers of the Bebop of Charlie Parker, during the Beaulieu Jazz Festival of 1960, but optimistically saw it as the indication of a new golden age of cricket and the meeting of “the be-bop fecundity of the new world and the enduring trad of the old.”

 (Thanks to Val Wilmer, Howard Rye and the late Jim Godbolt. Versions of this article have been published in Wisden’s Quarterly magazine, The Nightwatchman and in Jazz Journal online)