Once again, sorry to take up a lot of space but I thought you guys would
enjoy reading an interview with a cantankerous old member of the British
jazz community. A great musician and a fine storyteller.
The interview is in today's UK Guardian in a weekly column ostensibly about
record collections.
Its just a quick grab of the text so apologies for any errors.
Richard Gardner
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Home Entertainment
Stan Tracey
Interview Will Hodgkinson
In 1960, Sonny Rollins played with Stan Tracey in London. The US tenor
saxophonist believed that he had found the unsung master of British jazz.
"Does anybody know how good he is?" Rollins asked the audience about the
pianist, composer and arranger. Forty three years later, his question
remains unanswered.
Tracey and his wife Jackie live in a small flat in St Albans, in a
residential sprawl of cul-de-sacs and Barratt homes a world away from the
smoky Soho jazz scene they inhabited for so long. There are stacks of
records in the hallway that give evidence of Tracey's six year stint as the
house pianist at Ronnie Scott's, while the living room is dominated by a
large television that currently provides him with much of his inspiration.
Tracey's 1965 musical setting of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood has been
cited as the best British jazz album ever, a 90-minute documentary on his
life goes out on BBC4 on April 18, and he has an OBE. But Tracey has been at
the coalface of jazz performance since his first professional gig aged 16,
and at the age of 76, it's too late for him to start playing the role of the
master talent now. "Yeah, well," he sighs, upon being reminded of Sonny
Rollins's comment. "He was a friend, we worked on that film Alfie together,
and Rollins was the one who changed the game musically. Don't ask me to
explain how, he just did.'
When Tracey started at Ronnie Scott's in 1960, the British government
operated a one-for-one policy: for each American Jazz great that played,
England, the US got a British pop star: John Coltrane for Cliff Richard, for
example. ("Serves them right," says Tracey) As a result, Tracey worked With
Rollins, Coltrane, Roland Kirk Yusef Lateef, and pretty much everyone else
on the scene at the time. Any British records they made tended to feature
the Stan Tracey Quintet. was he intimidated?
"Some of them tried to intimidate, which you don't do if you want the best
out of people;' says Tracey, mentioning no names until memories of Stan Getz
bubble to the surface. "But 1 was never intimidated. They're just geezers,
aren't they? They all piss and shit the same." "How do you know?" counters
Jackie. "I found out," replies her husband.
Tracey was so deeply steeped in the subterranean jazz world of early-1960s
London that he had little idea about what was going on beyond the walls of
Ronnie Scott's. He was completely unaware of the Bay of Pigs until after the
event, and maintains that he was happier that way. His only practical
concern from those days, besides turning up each night at the club and
taking his two small children out for a walk during the afternoon, was to
nurse a heroin addiction.
"You get very focused with a habit," says Tracey. "Everybody at Ronnie's
was at it, and I played there seven days a week for six years. You took it
a) because it was there; b) because it helped you get through the night; and
c) because you plain old enjoyed it."
Tracey discovered music at the age of eight, with a swing record called
Scratching in the Gravel by Andy Khan. 'My father's friend had a radiogram,
a huge beast that incorporated a radio and a record player for 78s. Every
Sunday the parents would go out drinking and the son and 1 would stay in the
house. I just couldn't stop playing it, although I have heard it since and 1
couldn't recapture the feeling."
From the mid-1950s, Tracey heard jazz at its source after getting a job
with a house band on a cruise ship, so that he could travel to New York and
see names that had until then been a world away. "Birdland hadn't long been
open. You could pay a dollar and see Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie
Parker ... I saw Duke Ellington up at the Harlem Apollo. In England back
then, jazz was a dirty word. It certainly wasn't respectable - still isn't.'
Ellington and Thelonious Monk were the musicians with the biggest
influence on Tracey. Elsewhere in his record collection there is some
western classical - "Stravinsky, Ravel, Shostakovich and Bartok, that's
about it - and a lot of Indian classical. "The link between jazz and
classical is improvisation," he explains. I did concerts in Bombay, Calcutta
... In 1977 we went to play at a temple in a small suburb of Bombay. it felt
like we were the first westerners there. Then the priest told us that
Charlie Mariano had been there the week before. "
What about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones? "What about them? Charlie
Watts is a lovely man, but musically, what is there to say?" Jackie warns us
not to get him started on Paul McCartney, but the temptation proves too much
to bear.
"He's a shit. You know he's vegetarian? His entire crew have to be as
well. I heard he found out that two of them had eaten a meat pie on the sly.
Gave them the bullet." What about his musical achievements, his virtuosity?
"Have you seen that thing with him on the BBC?" asks Tracey, referring to a
trailer for Radio 2 featuring McCartney in the studio performing Band on the
Run with a variety of strange instruments. "He's playing every instrument
ever invented, and some that are about to be invented. He's mastered them
all, of course. It's quite touching!'
