TAKING CARE OF BABY

He’s worked with Woody Herman, been a traditionalist with George Webb and a modernist with John Dankworth. Inspired teacher, performer and all-round jazz guru Eddie Harvey talks to Peter Vacher.

EDDIE HARVEY, just for once, is looking back. He’s pondering on the days when jazz musicians, traditional or modern, regularly travelled the highways of 1950s Britain.

‘The most important thing about those days’, he says, ‘was the dedication and reverence given to the music. Not so much thought about the commercial side.’

Eddie Harvey is now a renowned educator and composer, but he was a busy full-time player then, playing trombone or piano (and sometimes both) in a wide variety of bands. As he recalls all this, at his home near the Thames in Twickenham, it’s evident that Eddie Harvey still retains his original enthusiasm. It’s also clear that his exceptional range as a jazz player (he graduated from pioneer traditionalist George Webb’s band to Humphrey Lyttelton’s mainstream octet via the modernisms of the John Dankworth Seven) has brought him into contact with just about every British jazz musician of consequence, and plenty of Americans, too. Mention a name, and there’s usually a memory to go with it.

‘Bob Brookmeyer says, “you’ve got to take care of the baby”’, Harvey remarks, ‘and the “baby” is your love of the music. If you don’t take care of it, it’ll die.’ He still has heroes, who ‘stay with you forever.’ One of the most enduring is the uniquely expressive trombonist Bill Harris.

‘I was in Woody Herman’s Anglo-American Herd in 1959 with Bill. I could hardly play for the first day - that bright, huge sound of his made my hair stand on end. He was very kind to me. I said I loved that Conn trombone he had and he got me one. Unfortunately I had no money at the time, so he had to take it back.

‘We corresponded for some years. He was a very funny man, and so was Woody Herman. To hear the two of them talking you just cried with laughter. They used an argot that was really old-fashioned, like “gage”, which meant pot, and those ancient hipster words like “dig”. At first, the British contingent were all treading carefully. Then I remember Woody saying to somebody “show us your balls, pal.” After that, it started sounding like Woody’s band.’

We turned to the often vexed question of jazz education. How does Harvey see the jazz educator’s role?

‘The whole thing about teaching arts, and particularly jazz, is that you’re not actually teaching them to play, you’re teaching them how to teach themselves.’ he says. ‘ That’s what I do. I give them pointers.’

Eddie Harvey no longer teaches full-time, but he remains an enthusiastic fan of music education.

‘When I think what jazz has done for me, I think it’s absolutely essential that we pass it on to these young musicians. Music has made my life. I don’t know what I’d have done without it. Probably been a bank robber or something.’.

In fact, Harvey, who grew up in Kent, was set to be an engineer. ‘After I left school I was an apprentice for three years, but when I got hold of jazz, that was something else. Once you’re bitten by that stuff, it can transform your life.’

His mother was a manageress in army catering, who loved to sing. ‘She started having piano lessons at the same time as I did, when I was seven. I had a Victorian music teacher who made me play “In A Monastery Garden” forever. I hated it. My Damascan moment came when a friend of a friend, Wally Fawkes, who was at art school, played me some jazz, the Spanier Ragtimers and the classic Armstrongs. Wally was my early mentor, and we still have a great laugh together. After that, I never slept for a week - it was like falling in love. I thought it was the most thrilling, fantastic thing I’d ever heard. That’s always stayed with me.’

At the Vickers-Armstrong aircraft factory in the early ‘40s, Harvey met up with George Webb and his band of New Orleans revivalists. From those encounters came the residency at the Red Barn pub in Barnehurst in Kent, widely regarded as the original home of the postwar British traditional-jazz movement. Like many in that circle, Eddie Harvey thought of himself as an amateur during his time with Webb and with Dixieland trumpeter Freddy Randall. The latter experience left vivid memories with Harvey too.

‘Freddy was a very forthright player, very busy, used to fill in all the gaps. I had wonderful times with that band, with Bruce Turner, who was a hoot. And when Freddy got the baritone player Pat Rose, that’s when I started writing my first arrangements, for the four frontline. After that, I did what everybody did in those days. I went down to Archer Street.’

Archer Street, in Soho, was the legendary open-air job-centre for professional musicians. Players would congregate there to swap news of gigs, and fixers would mingle with the crowd, choosing players for night-club and theatre jobs. ‘Then there was this “university” called Club Eleven, where Ronnie Scott, John Dankworth and others regularly played.’ Was this the clincher for Harvey’s conversion to modernism?

‘I’d say the movement away from the confines of early jazz had happened to me much earlier. Even when I was playing with George Webb, I went around watching the notes fly by with local semi-pro big bands, sitting in on third or fourth trombone, for nothing. With George, I was supposed to be Kid Ory, but then I heard JC Higginbotham and Teagarden. I got rubbished by a committee in the band. It was a kangaroo court, that tried you for playing out of context! When I suddenly became a bebopper, this was headlines in the Melody Maker. I also had to change my dress: I used to wear corduroys, tweed jackets, great thick ties, and have long hair. When I started going to Club Eleven, I had my hair shorn off to a flat top, started wearing button down collars, Ivy League dark suits and shades.’

Newly booted and suited, Harvey was a founder member of John Dankworth’s celebrated Seven in 1950. ‘John and Don Rendell and I were very friendly, and I remember us actually splitting the gig money sometimes. It was a co-operative band and we were scuffling. I was sleeping on Jim Goldbolt’s floor for six months but I’ve never had such a wonderful time. To keep the band together, we did comedy routines, sang duets, we did Sunday concerts, dance gigs, summer seasons, and that way we survived. We wanted to do that in order to keep the band together to play jazz.’

The Seven eventually morphed into the first Dankworth big band. ‘I remember we rehearsed for three weeks, being paid wages all that time. John was one of the hardest-working guys you’d ever meet. The lights were on 24 hours a day in his house.’

Eddie Harvey wrote extensively for Dankworth’s repertoire, studied at the Guildhall, took palais jobs with Oscar Rabin to improve his reading and branched out as a small-group player with fellow modernists like Rendell, baritonist Ronnie Ross and trumpeter Bert Courtley, later turning in numerous arrangements for Jack Parnell’s TV orchestra and Kenny Baker’s extended Dozen.

As if these weren’t enough irons for his fire, Harvey was also the Lyttelton band pianist and arranger for the trumpeter’s occasional big band for eight years from 1963. He even trained to be a teacher and joined the staff at Haileybury College for a further fifteen, publishing tutor books and becoming an authoritative figure in the wider world of jazz education. Harvey’s training band at City Literary Institute boasted such putative stars as trombonist Chris Pyne, altoist Mike Osborne and trumpeter Kenny Wheeler. ‘It was a prison band,’ Harvey grins. ‘Used to do concerts in all the nicks.’

As if to remind me that all these recollections in no way imply that he lives in the past, Eddie Harvey reminds me that he has an urgent appointment with a piano student. And with that, the man described by JazzDev director Seb Scotney, as ‘the youngest 79 year-old in town’, was on his way to work.

This feature originally appeared in Jazz UK Issue 62 (March - April 2005)