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PAUL VERNON CHESTER

Manouche Maestro
 


Louis Gallo
Len Williams
Diz Disley
Jack Toogood

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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Last modified: 27/02/2010