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UK's Gypsy Jazz
Guitar Pioneers
 Denny
(Denys Justin) Wright
(6th
May
1924
- 8th February 1992) was a
jazz
guitarist, born in
Deptford,
London,
England.
Denny grew up in Brockley, with frequent forays to the Old Kent Road and
the Elephant & Castle.
<Denny on the left.
Denny's first
instrument was the piano. His older brother, Alex, was a
semi-professional guitarist before the war and it was inevitable that
Denny, ten years younger, was soon trying to play his brother's guitar.
He must have succeeded, because Denny began playing professionally
before 1939 while still at school. For a schoolboy, he was pulling in a
substantial income. Indeed, when one teacher took a dislike to him,
Denny took his entire class to the cinema and the teacher arrived after
lunch to find an empty classroom.
Denny spent the first part of the war playing in jazz
clubs in the West End of London, doing almost non-stop session work and
performing in bands on many hit wartime shows. He worked with Stephane
Grappelli for the first time in London around 1941. Denny was unable to
join up, being classified as medically unfit due to a childhood injury
which resulted in his spleen and half of his liver being surgically
removed. When he was old enough to join up, Denny joined ENSA,
entertained the troops, and ended the war in Hertogenbosch in Holland.
After the war, he toured Italy and the Middle East with the Francisco
Cavez Orchestra. In the 1950s he featured on BBC's Guitar Club.In 1981,
Denny was voted BBC Jazz Society Musician of the Year. Denny's
free-flowing improvisational style came to the forefront through his
work with Lonnie Donegan in the 1950`s. Denny was a pioneer in
establishing a fresh lead guitar style in the context of the folk and
blues roots from which Donegan drew his song repertoire . Drawing upon
and transcending the jazz blues elements in his own background, and the
vital influence of Django Reinhardt, Denny produced constantly
innovative lead breaks and solos for Donegan's live work and recordings
on both acoustic archtop and electric guitar. Together with Bill
Bramwell and Donegan's younger lead guitar players, Les Bennetts and
Jimmy Currie, he helped forge an approach to lead styling inspirational
for the next generation of British lead guitarists working with blues -
based material in a rock context.
Les
Bennetts was a fine player and a better one in the making then. Les
formed "Les Hobeaux" and joined Chas McDevitt when the then incumbent
Tony Kohn was purloined into National Service. A bit later he was
recruited by Lonnie Donegan to replace Denny who was not treating his
body like a temple. Les stayed with Lonnie for some time until Denny
recovered his health.
Stephane Grappelli: "Denny
Wright also is a marvellous player, he's got such a good technique. Of
course he can't produce Django's melodic line because Django invented
it, but he has his own style, and on top of that he's got the strength
of Django Reinhardt. In my opinion he's the only player in the world who
can compare to Django and, you know, when I'm playing with Denny Wright
and if I let my spirit go, then maybe I find that for a few seconds I'm
back again with Django Reinhardt." Paul McCartney: "I remember
going to see Lonnie Donegan in 1956 at the Empire in Liverpool. It was
wonderful. After we saw him and the skiffle groups, we just wanted
guitars. Denny Wright, his guitar player, we really used to love--he was
great."
Denny died
in1992 in London after a nine year battle with cancer. His wife,
Barbara, predeceased him by just under three years. He leaves a son.
 Ike Isaacs
Ike was born in Burma in 1920. A chemistry graduate he
chose to pursue a career in music & started his own Jazz group while in
India. In 1944 Ike turned pro with the Leslie Douglas Bomber Command
Band. He later joined Cyril Stapleton's BBC Show Band as their guitarist
& worked on a series of orchestral albums. He played for 12 years with
the Ted Heath Band & featured in Braden's Weeks & the Max Bygrave Show
& has made several Albums, notably - Ike Isaacs Lutes & Flutes - The
Music of Michel Le Grand. Ike joined the Diz Disley Trio on their world
tour with Stephane in 1974.
 1959
Ike Isaacs talks guitars with two fellow Guitarists
Bert Weedon & Jack
Llewellyn
during a break in his recording session
Photograph by Mark Hamilton
 Ken
Sykora - influential host of
‘Guitar Club’ who was on a number of occasions voted the winner,
‘musician of the year’ by readers of the ‘Melody Maker’
Music remained an all-consuming passion for Sykora. He led own band in
the 1950s, performing with Ted Heath at the London Palladium and with
Geraldo at the old Stoll Theatre, and was voted Britain's Top Guitarist
five years running in Melody Maker's readers' polls. Music led him
into broadcasting, and involvement in the creation of a wide range of
popular radio programmes. First he presented and played on Jazz Club and
At the Jazz Band Ball. He devised, presented and performed on the Guitar
Club and Stringalong series. Other programmes with the Sykora stamp
included Those Record Years, Album Time, LP Parade, Big Band Sound, and
Radio Three's Jazz Digest. In his final years he liked nothing better
than to watch the ever-changing waters of Loch Long lap on the foreshore
opposite his house at Blairmore, and to soak up the music of Django
Reinhardt and other guitarists.
Thanks for the mention we are keen
to make sure his music and playing remain alive, it's so lovely to hear
and see him on the net. He pretty much worked with every one you
mentioned on the UK Jazz Pioneers page! Dads 1958 tune "Little
Black Dog" dad plays rhythm, Ike Issacs on lead guitar with the guitar
club band is the theme tune for the new short British Film "The
Bedfordshire Clanger" from Five Feet Films, showing at Cannes Film
Festival this year (2007). Very kind regards - Alison
Sykora - Duncan Sykora (Ken's Son) is also A Guitarist and sister Susan
Sykora has a career as a Chanteuse
 Roy
Sainsbury his musical career
began in the 1960s. He had his first lessons with Jack Toogood who, through his
appearances on Gordon Frank's radio show "Swingalong," became a very well known
guitarist in Britain. Roy comes from a musical family and from his very early
days he wanted to play the guitar. His godfather was a semi-professional
guitarist who first gave him the opportunity of hearing recordings of Barney
Kessel, Johnny Smith and also the Ray Ellington quartet, who always featured
very good guitarists. During the time he was growing up in Bristol he was
exposed to many kinds of music. His father was a drummer and bandleader, and
there was always music playing in the house. Roy grew up to the sounds of
musicians such as Count Basie, Fats Waller and Coleman Hawkins. The first big
band he ever saw was when his father took him to see the Count Basie band when
they gave a concert in Bristol. It evidently made a huge impression, as his
first love is the big band sound. It was only in later life that he realized the
influence that these musicians had on his own playing.
FRED DEGVILLE was probably the first jazz guitarist living and performing in
Walsall and extolling the virtues of Django's Artistry
. .. My father was much loved and respected and should be up
there with the rest of the Walsall jazz contingent. - Paul Degville
 Paul
Degville, guitar, b. Walsall (West Midlands), England, UK. Paul
started his career at the age of 11 playing rhythm guitar. From age 12
to 17, he played guitar in his father's trio at the Wheatsheaf pub in
Walsall. His father, (Fred Degville) then took over the 'Crown Inn'
Brownhills which became a famous jazz haunt. He also taught Noddy Holder
the guitar when Noddy was 15. Through the years, Paul has played
alongside Bud Freeman, Ruby Braff, and the venerable Stephane Grappelli.
In 1980, 'The Paul Degville Trio' (Degville (gtr), Roscoe Birchmore (bs)
Nick Ward (dm)) was formed, and has since been featured on BBC Radio 2,
and played all over the world, playing a varied repertoire of 1930's and
'40's standards.
<Paul Degville Trio
In his
early 20's Paul performed with such illustrious names as Stephane Grappelli, Bud
Freeman, Ruby Braff as well as countless traditional and mainstream bands. He
has been a member of the Pete Allen Jazz Band as well as performing with the
late Duncan Swift. In recent years Pauls 'Django-esque' trio has been featured
on BBC Radio 2. A virtuoso on his instrument.
Dave Goldberg
Born in 1922 in Liverpool, Dave
Goldberg's family settled in Glasgow and he took up the guitar at the
age of fourteen. He was playing professionally in 1940 playing trombone
as well as guitar but later joined the RAF during the second world war
as a pilot instructor. On demobilisation he joined Ted Heath playing
guitar only. He made several trips to the USA in the late 1940s and
worked with the Les Brown band, rejoining Ted Heath when he returned to
the UK. He was an early bebop pioneer and the flat he shared with fellow
guitarist Pete Chilver in central London was where many young musicians
gathered in 1949 to hear and discuss the bebop records beginning to come
from the USA. Proof of his familiarity with the idiom can be found on
twelve inch 78 issued under the title "Melody Maker Columbia Jazz Rally"
recorded in June 1947. He sounds very much at home on Thrivin' on a
riff made at a time when most of our local musicians were still
playing in the swing style. After a further spell in the US in the
early 1950s, (working under the name Dave Gilbert to help him obtain
work in Los Angeles), he returned to Britain in 1954 and worked with the
Dizzy Reece Sextet and the Phil Seamen Quintet in 1956. He freelanced in
the USA, UK and Italy working on film soundtracks and with many small
jazz groups and dance bands before becoming a long-time member of Jack
Parnell's ATV Orchestra. Goldberg had worked with Parnell for several
years in the Ted Heath Orchestra in the 1940s. He died in 1969 at the
early age of 47.
There is some good video of him on the Stephane Grapelli double DVD also
a BBC Jazz 625 session on YouTube. Not much on CD as yet unfortunately.
Dave plays for
Benny Golsen with Tubby Hayes
Pete Chilver, who became one of the first
British-born musicians to establish the electric guitar in this country, died
aged 83. The relative shortness of Chilver's career has obscured the
importance of what he achieved. But he was honing his skills at a time when many
of the best young British musicians - among them Ronnie Scott, John Dankworth
and George Shearing - were attempting to master the harmonic language of bebop.
Chilver and his guitarist friend Dave
Goldberg used to frequent the Caribbean Club, where Trinidadian guitarist
Lauderic Caton encouraged them, built them amplifiers, and let them sit in with
the house trio. But before this, at Feldman's club, at 100 Oxford Street,
Chilver had witnessed jam sessions uniting locals with the American members of
the Glenn Miller and Sam Donahue bands, and as a result replaced an ailing
Carmen Mastren with Miller's band on a number of dates elsewhere. By the late
1940s, he was mastering the idiom's melodic intricacy and speed, and - like
Scott and Dankworth - he became one of only a handful of London-based players
who could keep up with the American innovators. His work drew praise from such
luminaries as Benny Goodman and the Modern Jazz Quartet's John Lewis. Born
in Windsor, Berkshire, Chilver was the youngest of three children of a police
sergeant and a musical mother. A boy chorister at Windsor Castle, he learned to
play the piano before taking up the guitar. After leaving school at 16 in 1940,
he formed his own Silver Sovereigns to play weekends at Skindles, the riverside
hotel at Maidenhead known as "Soho on Thames". That same year, he met the
Cardiff-born black guitarist Joe Deniz at Feldman's, and through this friendship
encountered musicians of African descent. George Formby and Django Reinhardt had
inspired him initially, but he celebrated jazz as a black creation and could not
believe his luck when Deniz asked him to deputise at rehearsals of Ken "Snake
Hips" Johnson's West Indians.
Pianist Ralph Sharon was a near-neighbour and in
1942, while doing war work in adjacent factories - Chilver was a draughtsman -
they played together in the Embassy Aces band in Slough, Berkshire. They were
spotted by trumpeter Johnny Claes, who engineered their release to tour American
military bases. After meeting Chilver in Bristol, the young John Lewis,
stationed with the US army prior to the D-day landings, played with the band on
several occasions, and 50 years later still remembered "that wonderful
guitarist".
In 1946, Chilver joined singer Ray Ellington and
was playing with him at the Bag O'Nails in the West End when Django Reinhardt
and Stephane Grappelli sat in. He then worked with accordionist Tito Burns
who, together with Ellington, would help to popularise modern jazz in Britain.
The following year, Chilver heard his first Charlie Parker disc and was
entranced by bebop's excitement and daring. But while Ronnie Scott and others
visited the US for first-hand experience, Chilver worked on in London with
George Shearing, Jack Jackson and Bert Ambrose and toured with Grappelli.
Whenever he could, he played bebop with Sharon and other progressives. At
the Charing Cross Road flat he shared with Goldberg and the South African
percussionist Jack Meyer, the visitors were legendary; composer Tadd Dameron,
Ella Fitzgerald with new husband Ray Brown, and dancers from Harlem's Apollo
theatre all came for sessions. In 1948, with Britain's leading bandleader, Ted
Heath, Chilver reached a teenage audience, but his most prestigious job came the
following year, accompanying Goodman at the London Palladium.
In 1950 he married Norma Domenico, the sister of
Ted Heath's singer Lydia MacDonnell, and they moved to North Berwick, where
Chilver managed the family hotel. He went on to run two family enterprises in
Edinburgh, one of which, the West End Cafe, became Scotland's major modern jazz
venue. But he never played professionally again. Norma and his son David survive
him.
·
Peter William Chilver, guitarist and hotelier, born
October 19 1924; died March 16 2008
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