Life & Society
Class conscious - Andrew Martin praises the pioneers of revivalist jazz
Published 31 May 2004
Jazz revivalism - a quasi-Nordic look involving beards and Arran jumpers
On Monday 31 May, I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue returns to Radio 4, presided over as always by Humphrey Lyttelton, who not only went to Eton but was actually born there, his father, George, being an "assistant master" at the school. That sounds quite lowly, but Eton terminology is very self-deprecating and surreal, and I believe that in his case, "assistant master" really meant something like "head of classics".
In a dictionary of humorous quotations that I'm editing, Humphrey and George Lyttelton account for nearly 20 entries between them, all of George's coming from The Lyttelton-Hart-Davis Letters, his correspondence with the writer and publisher Rupert Hart-Davis, which made him famous late in life. His letters are full of remarks such as: "Have you noticed how, sooner or later, all doctors are called Mackenzie?" In fact, George was just as funny as Humphrey is, which is saying a lot.
As chairman of Clue, Humphrey Lyttelton has been credited with uttering "the obscenest thing ever said on Radio 4". At which point I have to let the reader's imagination roam free because I never heard it. But it is not the sauciness (OK then, filth) of his performances that is engaging so much as the world-weariness, as in: "Anyone wishing to avoid the crowds when leaving, please wait until the end of the show."
It is not unprecedented to have a toff on a game show. Patrick Campbell, a team captain on Call My Bluff, was Anglo-Irish gentry. But Lyttelton seems a positive social contortionist when you remember that he was also the leading trumpet player of the jazz movement in the mid-Fifties. As he wrote in I Play As I Please (1954), volume one of his autobiography: "The press critics who asked 'What's so odd about a viscount's nephew becoming a jazzman?' may have a valid point. I suppose the only remarkable thing about it is that it's never been done before."
Revivalist jazz seems to have been the punk rock of its time, with the BBC programme Radio Rhythm Club, the Fifties equivalent of The John Peel Show. Ostensibly a reaction against the professional slickness of dance-band jazz, the revivalist movement was also a protest against the social strictures of wartime Britain, a budding forth of classlessness, expressed in a reverence for New Orleans jazz and a fascinating, quasi-Nordic look involving beards, Arran jumpers, pipes and strange hats. Many of the turbulent spirits of the Fifties were jazzers: Melly, Milligan, Larkin, Amis. But the figurehead was Lyttelton, and when his trumpet was stolen, it was front-page news in the Daily Mail.
What was missing from revivalist jazz was what the guests on Clue might call "full-blown sex". That arrived, as Larkin noted, with the Beatles - too late for him; and many bohemians of the Fifties cut strangely discontented figures in the Sixties, as though aware that they had initiated a revolution only for a later generation to experience the benefit. You still see those pioneers about the place: playing clarinets in pubs on quiet Sunday evenings, flipping through the vinyl racks at Ray's Jazz shop on Charing Cross Road. Look out for their suede shoes, Breton fishermen's caps or berets and the thick-rimmed glasses, vaguely reminiscent of the Paris Left Bank. These seventysomethings are escapees from the class system - social heroes, really.
Meanwhile, somebody should think about capitalising on Lyttelton's Clue fame by reissuing the early volumes of his book, in which he is frequently just as amusing as he is on radio. For example: "I shared the back of the car with the double bass player, who snored prodigiously until dawn and then produced a large bag full of apples which he ate one by one with a noise like a herd of cows trying to extricate themselves from a bog."
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