Classic Blues & Jazz 2-George Melly
Alan George Heywood Melly, jazz singer, writer and broadcaster, born August 17 1926; died July 5, 2007
Adam used to read George Melly’s film reviews in the Observer many years ago. Then later when flatting in London he and friends used to go to Ronnie Scott’s club and a pub in Camden Lock amongst other places to see Melly perform, usually with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers band.
One time at Camden Lock Mr Melly came on stage in jeans, T Shirt and fedora carrying a bottle of cognac which he swigged copiously throughout his set. The evening was, as they say, memorable.
Subsequently, although working outside the UK, Adam used to try and get to see George Melly performing, whenever he could, on visits to the UK.
Therefore, it was with sense of youth finally passing that Adam read an obituary for Melly when browsing the Economist website recently.
The above is the cover of what Adam thinks was Melly’s last album. Here are some notes on it:-
This is George Melly’s last go-round, recorded on his specific instructions (”I definitely want to make one last record”) when he knew he was dying. It captures the man Digby Fairweather calls the Dean of Decadence in sometimes tired voice – understandably so – but also demonstrating the verve and joie de vivre that were so much a part of his huge presence. Interspersed between tracks are passages read from his autobiographical writings, read by himself. They lend a brief but lucid narrative thread and oddly put me in mind of Louis Armstrong’s Musical Autobiography LPs in which he read Leonard Feather’s texts between musical tracks.
He revisits old friends and family here. Bessie Smith is here of course, and other Classic Blues, but Harlem narcotics (If you’se a viper) and Fats Waller also rightly feature. Sweet Lorraine is sung by Julian Marc Stringle because Melly was unable to manage it – the only such occasion on an album in which the singer, enfeebled and suffering from the onset of dementia, nevertheless shows all his accustomed familiarity with his material.
Read more at the link above.
Adam remembers hearing Melly sing many of these numbers - especially If you’se a Viper, and Send me to the ‘lectric chair.
Adam had a number of Melly’s Lps on vinyl, but unfortunately these have become lost and he now has only 1 compilation CD. Somehow it is not the same.
This part of the record notes ends appropriately:
And the envoi, when it comes, brings with it Melly’s wolfish amusement at any kind of solemnity in Brother’s Blues And Requiem – with a ghostly fade-in of the first side ever recorded under his own name back in 1951, a lusty, unvarnished Rock Island Line.
In our end is our beginning. Melly ends entirely on his own terms returning to the songs he loved the longest and the best. Let’s hope that wherever he is, like Bessie’s young woman, he ain’t done runnin’ around.
Melly in younger days
From the obituary in The Telegraph:-
- LISTEN: When my ship comes in | I can’t get started (with you)
- Ol’ rockin’ chair | The joint is jumpin’ | Frankie and Johnny
Adam took part of his post from The Telegraph because of the audio links.
The Telegraph obituary begins:
George Melly, the jazz singer, author and raconteur who died yesterday aged 80, leched, drank and blasphemed his way around the clubs and pubs of the British Isles and provided pleasure to the public for five decades.
Melly’s involvement in jazz was born out of a romantic nostalgia for a golden age of brothel music.
Appearing in the 1950s with Mick Mulligan’s Magnolia band and later for nearly three decades with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers, “Good Time George” followed a well-established routine of singing numbers from the 1920s (his foremost influences being Bessie Smith, Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton) interspersed with camp asides and bawdy anecdotes.
Loopy-mouthed and rotund under an outsized fedora, Melly could always be relied upon to wear louder suits and tell better, funnier and dirtier jokes than anyone else on the circuit.
The obituary fondly recalls many of the episodes in Melly’s life, including his legendary Christmas seasons at Ronnie Scott’s club in Soho, where Adam was fortunate enough to see him on several occasions over the years. One of the favourite songs of the regular audience was Frankie & Johnnie, with actions - ideally performed before Melly had drunk too much.
As The Economist noted:-
AMONG his many unguilty pleasures—Marlboro Lights, Irish whiskey, bacon and eggs, blue jokes, smoke-filled dives where the music wandered on till four in the morning, voracious sex with good-looking men and women—George Melly especially liked to fish. The man famous for red, green and cream striped suits, red fedoras and a huge, rude, laughing mouth could often be found quite still, thigh-deep in the Usk or the Teifi, preparing to cast as soon as a bold trout tickled the surface of the water. And the singer whose party piece, when touring with John Chilton and the Feetwarmers, was to scamper round the stage and groom the clarinettist’s head during his rendition of “Organ Grinder Blues”, would admit that his thoughts on the river bank were of poppies, midges, Magritte and clouds.
And as the Guardian commenced it’s affectionate tribute here:
George Melly, who has died aged 80, was one of the most genial and genuinely popular figures in the world of British entertainment. Dressed like a 30s gangster or a 40s Harlem hipster, a huge hat on his large head, his ample figure and rubbery face, with its mischievous hint of Mr Toad, were warmly welcomed wherever he went. He was a “personality” who actually had personality, a jazz singer who was also a cultural commentator, a devotee of the Surrealists who wrote the story-lines of a cartoon-strip. Presenter-performer, autobiographer, libertarian and in his own word “tart”, he was “Good-Time George”.
Read the rest at the link it is worth it, the Guardian finishes:-
Like many people attracted to anarchism, George was neurotically fastidious in his habits, and there was much that was contradictory in his personality. A compulsive story-teller, he even talked loudly on the riverbank as he cast for trout, a well-known way of frightening the fish. But he recognised the contradictions, indeed revelled in them, and made them his subject. First and foremost a performer, he loved both to entertain and shock his audience, and though shocking naturally became more difficult as he grew older, he was never shocked himself. His favourite quote in old age was Groucho Marx’s “Hello, I must be going”. And now he has gone. Open-minded, open-hearted, he will be missed all over Britain by people of every class and kind.
The first clip is a recording with John Chilton of ‘Boogie Woogie Man’, with some photos of George Melly in his later years.
The second again with John Chilton is ‘My Canary’s got circles under his eyes’
George Melly, talented, larger than life, entertainer - jazz singer.
Long may you be remembered
Tags: Bessie Smith, Blues, Fond memories, Fun, George Melly, Jazz, John Chilton, Music, Ronnie Scott's, The Economist, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Trad-jazz
