Roots. Craig Horne
domestically, wives and families were fed up waiting for their men to come home. After five years of constant touring, the band had lost its joie de vivre and most of its members wanted out. ‘Lou and Pixie were all for going on, but the rest of us wanted to quit for a while, so we cancelled the whole thing …’36
It was, perhaps, a case of too much of a good thing: too much touring, too much music, too much booze and too much partaking of the pleasures of the road. Bell’s jazz career subsequently took a backseat; instead, he played piano as an arranger-for-hire in other people’s bands while concentrating most of his energy on his emerging business interests.
Bell had co-founded the Swaggie record label in 1949, alongside his brother Roger, Ade Monsbourgh, Pixie Roberts, Lou Silbereisen and Mel Langdon. Swaggie was the first Australian-owned record company dedicated to recording Australian jazz music. The label was a cooperative and continued as such until it was sold by the partners to Nevill L. Sherburn some four years later.
Bell also hosted The Platter Parade, a radio program which broadcast once a week on 3UZ. He tried his hand at jazz promotion as well, touring a number of American jazz musicians around Australia. Ever the businessman, Bell made a point of recording with the touring international artists on his Swaggie record label, including English trumpet legend Humphrey Lyttleton, providing a bank of material for later release.
Bell continued to play live, but what he presented was, in his own words, ‘a musical smorgasbord … with programs cluttered with novelty and hokum … playing ragtime and boogie pieces [which] appealed to the general public.’37 Bell got through all this by hitting the bottle, apparently the booze blurred out the reality of playing music for the money and not for the art.
Then in 1954 Bell received an offer to tour Korea with the dynamic young singer, Yolande Wolffe (Bavan). The offer was too good to refuse, and so Bell put a band together. It included John Sangster (his old fan from the Uptown Club) on trumpet, Jack Baines on clarinet, John Costello on trombone and Jack Banston on drums. The tour lasted three months and even took a swing through Japan.
However, Bell was moving further and further away from the hot jazz that had made his name. He played dinner music in Tokyo for the English military, and cabaret in Kyoto. Back in Australia he played piano in the orchestra pit for an ice-skating show at the Theatre Royal in Adelaide, then moved to Brisbane to take up a six nights-a-week residency playing jazz standards at the Bennelong with John Sangster. This was a wild period for Bell, he drank too much, played bad music, was broke and became depressed.
Then, luckily, an offer came from food and wine expert Len Evans. He wanted to put together a traditional jazz band to play the prestigious Oasis Room at the Chevron Hotel in Sydney; other band members included Bob Barnard on trumpet, Norm Wyatt on trombone and Laurie Gooding on clarinet. The Chevron Hotel in Kings Cross was Sydney’s poshest and swingingest night-spot of the era, and Bell, upon joining the band, was now back playing what he was famous for: energetic, direct, uncomplicated hot jazz, an approach forged in the dance halls and clubs of Melbourne.
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