The Hidden Musicians. Ruth Finnegan
Horwood House fête arranged by British Telecom, or the British Stock Car Racing Supporters’ Dinner Dance in Solihull, as well as working men’s clubs around the area. They also played for fund-raising events, charitable occasions for senior citizens, and a Women’s Institute Christmas party for the disabled. They also managed to arrange some regular bookings like the monthly Sunday lunchtime spot at the Swan Hotel in Fenny Stratford during 1979, and regular appearances at Ye Olde Swan, Woughton-on-the-Green, or the Coffee Pot at Yardley Gobion.
Like other bands, they too failed to get a permanent jazz club going within Milton Keynes to match the long-continuing jazz evenings at the Cock in North Crawley to which many enthusiasts went, and their various local attempts (like the Swan sessions in Fenny Stratford) were short-lived. But their playing regularly drew audiences of 70–100 people, and their total of around 140 performances a year by 1982 showed the appeal of jazz in the area despite its relatively fragmented organisation. They were said to be less adventurous musically than the Original Grand Union Syncopators and with a smaller repertoire, but their particular version of Dixieland New Orleans jazz for people ‘to sing along to and have a good time’ was popular with local audiences from a whole range of social backgrounds and organisations.
The T-Bone Boogie Band was different yet again. As they themselves publicised it, they went in for ‘rhythm and blues with an element of self ridicule’, for ‘blues and mad jazz’ and, as one of their admirers expressed it, ‘boogie, ragtime, bop and riddum ’n’ blooze’. They presented themselves as a zany ‘fun band’, but their act followed many traditional jazz and blues sequences, with beautiful traditional playing interspersed with their own wilder enactments of blues. They spoke of these as ‘improvised out of nowhere, on the spur of the moment’, but they were in practice based on long hours of jamming together as a group.
The nucleus of the band was the headmaster of a local school for handicapped children, Trevor Jeavons, an expert on the boogie piano, and Tracey Walters, a local youth worker who played the harmonica as well as producing extravagant vocals and wild clowning around for the audience. In all by 1982 it consisted of six players, including a schoolboy and a social worker. The somewhat unexpected but extremely popular combination of instruments was acoustic piano, saxophone, lead and bass guitars (sometimes replaced by string bass), harmonica, drums and vocals. The group had grown gradually from a series of informal jamming sessions by Trevor Jeavons and Tracey Walters in the foyer of the Woughton Centre at Sunday lunchtimes under the informal title of the Jam Band which used to draw in a large and enthusiastic audience. By September 1981 they had taken on the name of T-Bone Boogie Band to indicate both their rhythm-and-blues character (with a passing reference to T-Bone Walker as well as the T for their lead vocalist Tracey) and Trevor Jeavons’ boogie piano with its Dixieland overtones. They started getting widespread invitations to gigs, but – all busy people – preferred to keep these to about one a week, appearing regularly at their home base of the Woughton Centre as well as for a scattering of local social occasions and a few pub and outdoor performances.
Figure 16 Trevor Jeavons and Tracey Walters in action: the two leading members of the T-Bone Boogie Band, the popular ‘community mad jazz and blues band’
They saw themselves as ‘a community band’, playing ‘to give other people enjoyment … and for our own enjoyment as well’, a hobby rather than professional enterprise. When they were approached by a recording company and offered money to go professional, they turned it down. They did agree to do a recording live at Woughton with a local amateur recording engineer (which immediately sold out to local fans), but then decided to disband for a time, saying their performances were getting too serious and they wanted a rest. The upshot was the first of several ‘Final Renditions’ and ‘Final Thrash Goodbye Concerts’ – but both then and later, they were soon back again for a ‘triumphant return’ with only minor changes; their playing was too enjoyable and too well appreciated locally to keep away from for long.
Their entertainment aim was obvious in their performances. The lead singer’s extravagant antics, the excited and active audience, the explicit air of enjoyment and their unconventional clothes were all part of the occasion. ‘We like to entertain people’, as Trevor Jeavons explained it, ‘which is why we dress rather outrageously sometimes. People like it.’ They themselves encouraged this extravagant image further by the ironically drawn self-portraits in their advertisements, designed to bring out the ‘madness’ so much appreciated by their fans. On their favourite home ground, the foyer in the Woughton Centre, their audiences regularly included people of all ages ‘from babies to OAPs’, which was just how they wanted it, and it was usual wherever they played for the venue to be filled to capacity. Some groups followed them from gig to gig, replying energetically to their jokes (musical, verbal and gestural), and T-Bone Boogie playing always stirred up the audience, not so much to actual dancing or singing along but to an active engagement with the performance. The band’s own enjoyment was also clear as they played, with an air of mutual interaction, appreciation and, in a sense, pleased surprise as they presented their pieces from jokey songs like ‘Little fishy’ or ‘My baby’s gone down the plug hole’ to a more traditional slow ballad.
The presentation of the T-Bone Boogie Band’s music was designed to bring out their ‘crazy’ image, eliciting active audience participation and a ‘fun’ atmosphere. The emphasis on enjoyment should not obscure the enduring musical centre of their performances, however. The cassette that they recorded ‘Live at Woughton’ in 1982 was treated seriously in the ‘Album of the Week’ column in one of the local newspapers – which seldom took a local example – on the grounds that the band had ‘proved that “fun music” can also be good music’ in their ‘remarkably professional sounding debut offering’. There was certainly far more to their playing than the visual clowning, not least the lyrics, music and piano playing of Trevor Jeavons himself, and the band’s practised improvising in the traditional blues style. In some eyes the T-Bone Boogie Band’s light-hearted exhibitionism made them less orthodox than the Original Grand Union Syncopators, Fenny Stompers, Momentum or the Mahogany Hall Jazzmen; but, whatever their idiosyncratic presentation, they were still part of the local jazz and blues offerings, one of the few local jazz groups performing at the local Great Linford Jazz Festival in July 1982, and immensely admired by some local jazz enthusiasts for their musical as well as ‘fun’ interest. Together with the other jazz bands in the area – all in practice varied in terms of instruments, personnel, background and detailed musical tastes – the T-Bone Boogie Band formed part of the contemporary realisation at the local level of the traditional jazz and blues storehouse of musical themes and idioms in a form no less ‘real’ than the more ‘serious’ offerings of other bands.
These three bands were not the only jazz groups functioning in Milton Keynes, and the picture must be completed by briefly mentioning some of the others. These included the five-piece Momentum, putting on about twenty performances a year, mainly early fifties bebop, on a combination of flugelhorn/trumpet, reeds/saxophone, bass, keyboards and drums; the Mahogany Hall Jazzmen playing Dixieland early jazz and ragtime regularly once a fortnight or so in local pubs; and the long-lasting Wayfarers Jazz Band performing ‘mainstream’ and Dixieland jazz in pubs, wine bars, social clubs, colleges and fêtes in both the Milton Keynes and the Luton-Dunstable area – not quite a ‘local’ jazz band, though one very active member lived locally. Among the other local or near-local jazz bands (several of them overlapping in personnel with those already mentioned) were the Alan Fraser Band, the twosome blues and early jazz Bootleg Band, the Concorde Jazz Band, the Holt Jazz Quintet, the zany 1920s New Titanic Band with its stage pyrotechnics, the very fluid Stuart Green Band, the Colin James Trio, Oxide Brass and the John Dankworth Quartet (this last based on WAP and giving occasional performances there); there were also the short-lived Delta New Orleans Jazz, the New City Jazz Band, the Pat Archer Jazz Trio and (for a few struggling months) the MK Big Band.
All these bands put on public performances, sometimes singly, sometimes on a regular basis at particular pubs and clubs in the area. In addition there were probably several other groups who met more for the pleasure of jamming together or playing on private occasions than for taking on public engagements.