John Dankworth's What The Dickens!

If Charles Dickens is one of the great pillars of English literature, and he is, then John Dankworth (Sir John now of course) is undoubtedly one of the great pillars of British jazz, or jazz anywhere for that matter. Combine the two, as they are in Dankworth's 1963 recording What The Dickens! - when John still called himself Johnny - and we experience not only the creative strengths but also the wonderful humour of these two most prolific of creative artists.

Listening to my forty-three year old LP again recently ( I don't own a CD of the recording yet, nor do I have an mp3 to download the tracks, and they are available as downloads now) you realise that Dickens (although he didn't know it) was not only a great novelist, but a kind of jazz musician in the making in as much as he could go off on long musical-like narratives, or create page after page of dialogue where the characters exchange words as jazz musicians exchange solo choruses. Try putting a Dickens novel down when he's on a creative high, you can't, and like good inventive jazz you just want it to go on and on. Obviously Dankworth was inspired by Dickens' work to such an extent that he had to try and encapsulate it in his own self-expression. Let me quote from Dankworth's own cover notes from the LP...

" Dickens is the only author I've really read I once told Benny Green. ' I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now,' Benny commented recently. 'Any man that can maintain a large jazz orchestra in the 1960s without ending up in the bankruptcy court must have read, at least three times through, the collected works of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Caesar, Shaw and Churchill.'

" But nevertheless it's true. And what's more, it's very fortunate that my only possible literary inspiration to write music should be such a suitable one. The diversity of Dickensian characters and the indelible mark they made on my memory leave me with no excuses if my portraits are not vivid, however inaccurate they may be to some ears. In issuing invitations to my guests for the album, I tried to mix famous names with several which I feel have not been seen enough on record sleeves. To all of them, and to several fine soloists in my band, I apologise for having been unable to give more time to display their talents. However many more similar attempts at this sort of thing I may make, I don't suppose there'll be one which will contain more genuine love of the subject matter. If some small amount of this doesn't issue from the music and reach your ears, then I shall have failed."

Dankworth didn't fail, in fact he created, with What The Dickens!, a joyous tribute to the novelist, and created some of the best British jazz ever recorded (and I don't say that lightly).

From the moment the album kicks-off the immediately recognisable sound that Dankworth had carefully formed with his various bands during the 1950s is here, which is a sound that relies less on a standard big band line up of sax and brass sections, but on Dankworth's much more integrated ensemble sound that came from using a tuba and various members of the clarinet family. And in this lovely recording his unique sound is used not only to give a wonderfully tight and blisteringly modern feel, but also, with the help of David Snell's harp (yes, harp!), we get a quick-step or two back to the noisy music halls, via the refined front parlours, of the mid-19th century. And in the playing of guests such as saxophonists Ronnie Scott, Ronnie Ross, Tubby Hayes, Bobby Wellins, and the wonderfully lugubriously hard swinging Dick Morrissey, we are treated to elongated, note filled solos that are themselves musical versions (as I mentioned earlier) of Dickens' often long and twisting sentences, which need to be re-read, and re-listened to again and again to simply marvel at the ingenuity and artistry of it all.

We also get brilliantly precise vignettes of some of Dickens' best loved - or hated - characters too, not least in the reincarnation of the Ghosts from A Christmas Carol, where Dankworth uses the then three basic forms of jazz - Traditional, Mainstream, and Modern - to give us one of the most amusing musical episodes you'll ever hear, which, as Dankworth says, might, with the odd spoonful of Dankworth humbug, have converted Scrooge to jazz a century early.

By the time Dankworth - who was born in London in 1927 - came to record the Dickens album he had been leading a band since the late 1940s (after playing alto sax and clarinet on the Atlantic liners, outings which gave him a chance to hear such players as Charlie Parker in New York), most notably the Johnny Dankworth Seven - which included tenor sax player Don Rendell - before forming one of the finest big bands of the 1950s (the other one was the superb Ted Heath outfit) that gradually evolved from a pretty straight forward sixteen piece band to the more integrated, more orchestrationally challenging band that recorded What The Dickens!.

At the time Dankworth recorded What The Dickens! his career as a composer for film and TV was also taking off, with scores for such films as Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,and The Servant firmly under his belt.

John's marriage to Cleo Laine (Dame Cleo) is one of the most celebrated in the music industry, and one which has created something of a musical dynasty, with their son Alec, and daughter Jacqui two of the finest exponents of jazz.

Copyright 2007 Steve Newman