The Daily Telegraph
Friday, March 11th ,1988
Obituaries
KEN COLYER
KEN COLYER, the traditional jazz musician, who has died aged 59,was a fanatical disciple of New Orleans Jazz and one of the few British cornet players to achieve an unmistakeable and distinctive style.
A hard-drinking roustabout,as in the best traditions of his New Orleans heroes,who never tailored his
blunt-on occasions violent-manners to flatter audiences or club managements,
his innate musicianship still continued to command an unwavering following.
A man of few words and few notes; Colyer played with an economy suggesing each note had been chosen with great care, and displayed the same qualities in his singing and guitar playing.
Kenneth Colyer was born in Great Yarmouth in 1926 and grew up in Soho before his family moved to Cranford Middlesex during the 1939-45 war. He became interested in jazz through listening to the record collection of an elder brother who was away in the Army, and took up first harmonica, then trumpet.
He did various jobs, including delivering milk and cleaning railway carriages,and served in the galley of a merchant Ship which took him to America where he met his hero, the cornettist Wild Bill Davison.
Colyer's first group, formed in 1949, was the Crane River Jazz Band, who rehearsed wherever they could, sometimes in open fields (to be chased off by irate owners) and in a road mender's hut.
Its members were part of a generation which rejected the slick sophistication of the earlier Swing Era, believing that "real jazz" was played only by those New Orleans musicians who did not join Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet in the exodus from New Orleans in the 1920s but stayed at home and did not record until the 1940s.
Among the Cranes was the clarinettist Monty Sunshine,later to achieve international fame for his million-selling version of Petit Fleur,
and John RT Davies, who was to become arranger for the later Temperance Seven.
After two years with the band Colyer briefly worked with a former member of Humphrey Littleton's Band, clarinettist Ian Christie.
But it was an unhappy association: Christie was too "modern"
In 1952 Colyer signed on with a ship again, with the sole intention of making the pilgramage to"Mecca"--New Orleans,Louisiana. He jumped ship at Mobile, Alabama, and completed the remaining 150 miles by Greyhound Bus. Arriving at his goal he got the chance to play and record (on primitive equipment in a front room) with his heroes. The clarinetist George Lewis even offered him a job, but the American Federation of Musicians and the prevailing racial code scotched the proposal.
Colyer overstayed his visitor's permit and was jailed in the notorious New Orleans Parish jail, which afterwards led him to be deified by like minded members of the British jazz fraternity.
He was invited to become titular leader of a cooperative band formed in his absence that included Chris Barber. One of their records, a version of a 1930s pop tune Isle of Capri,was the first British jazz record to enter the top 50 in the musical press hit lists. But the coperative ethos was not to his liking and in 1954 he left to form a band under his indisputed leadership, using the clarinettist Acker Bilk.
When the 20 year dispute between the American and British musicians' unions ended,Colyer later accompanied the George Lewis Band in New England colleges, and in 1958 his band shared the bill with a full Lewis Band on a British tour.
Colyer was a master of melodic improvisation, although he was musically illiterate and knew nothing about the rules of harmony. His whole approach was directed towards rhythmic and melodic variation, yet he had an instinctive harmonic sense which made the "shape of the tune" crystal clear. At the same time he was rhythmically surefooted and could swing a band with very few notes. Unfortunately not many of his colleagues could live up to these standards, and he was not adept at explaining the way. Taciturn and intolerant, Colyer expected his musicians to know. He never rehearsed - and assumed that any shortcomings would work themselves out in performance.Inferior sessions were accepted as part of the natural order.
Colyer, who also played a vital part in bringing jazz to Germany, led bands almost continually until illness forced him to retire in 1986. Despite his obduracy it was a measure of the affection in which he was held that a benefit given for him in early March resulted in more than a hundred musicians performing gratis, raising £3,000 for the old maestro.
Left to right: Monty Sunshine, Lonnie Donegan, Ron Bowden, Ken Colyer, Chris Barber, Jim Bray
(Photo courtesy of the Barber-Purser Archives)