Jim Petrie obituary

Jim Petrie, who has died at the age of 83, was a highly regarded stalwart of the Scottish jazz scene, a gifted cornettist and the leader of the Diplomats of Jazz, a much-loved classic jazz band which was something of an Edinburgh institution. His height gave him an imposing appearance, but although he towered over many other musicians musically as well as physically, he was an extremely modest and quietly spoken character who was taken aback by his own popularity and his reputation as a cornettist with a hot sound and lyrical, swinging style. 

He was born James Petrie in Edinburgh in 1937. The youngest of three boys, he was the son of a train driver and a housemaid/factory worker. It was during his last year at Tynecastle Secondary School that he – along with his pal Jack Weddell – took up playing music. He told the Scottish Jazz Archive last year: “We went to the room and all the instruments were on the floor – there was a choice. I saw the smallest one – the cornet – and Jack took the trombone.” Petrie was already interested in jazz, thanks to his brother John, who had begun to assemble a record collection of traditional jazz which, when they were teenagers, was enjoying a revival. 

For a while, he took lessons with Jock Miller, a trumpeter who played in the pit band at the King’s Theatre. “I got a cuff of the ear for mistakes from him – I was 15. That’s why I stopped going to him. Jack and I practised together instead.” Initially, Petrie was particularly influenced by the playing of the early New Orleans jazz trumpeter Bunk Johnson, a forerunner of Louis Armstrong who was first recorded in the early 1940s, towards the end of his life.

Petrie, who served an apprenticeship as a painter and decorator when he left school, soon began going to gigs. During this period, the city was bursting with bands representing all the variations of classic and traditional jazz. He and Weddell became regulars at the India Buildings, on Victoria Street, where two now-legendary local bands, one led by clarinettist Sandy Brown and one by trumpeter Alex Welsh, packed the place out every week.

“They would do an hour each, and it cost us sixpence to get in; a shilling for non-members,” recalled Petrie last year. “Brown’s band was out of this world.” At a farewell party at the Crown Bar for Brown before he left for London, Petrie and Weddell were approached by Mike Hart, the young banjo player who would eventually go on to establish the Edinburgh Jazz Festival. This meeting ultimately led to the formation of the Climax Jazz Band which existed in various forms – Petrie was out of the line-up during his two years’ National Service in Germany in the late 1950s – for several decades. 

The 1950s were colourful times in Edinburgh’s thriving young jazz scene. Trad jazz was hugely popular amongst teenagers and twentysomethings; to the extent that there was an annual Scottish Jazz Band Championship at the St Andrews Hall in Glasgow to which jazz bands, including the Climax, came from all over Scotland to participate. In Edinburgh, the Climax Jazz Band’s regular gigs became moveable feasts because they would run foul of disapproving residents.

“Our bass player, Jim Young, had a house with a cellar in St Peters Place– so we’d play there. We had police climbing over the gardens at the back with their binoculars trying to see what was happening. They thought there must be drugs and sex going on – but there was none of either! We ended up playing in the cellar below Dofos Pet Shop on London Road; it was a shambles. The police closed us down. Then the jazz club moved to York Place – The Stud Club. It was for students, not for studs! Then we moved to the Golden Eagle Lodge on the top of Castle Terrace.”

It was at a local jazz club that Petrie met his future wife, Margaret, and he followed her down to London when she took a job there. They married in 1961, and returned to Edinburgh to start a family. James Jr said: “In addition to jazz, classical music was a great love for my dad – Sundays were spent listening to it all day until the TV went on at 7.30. The other great love of his life was football and the Hibs football team in particular. He followed the team religiously.”

In the late 1960s, Petrie – who worked by day as a self-employed painter-decorator – joined Old Bailey’s Jazz Advocates and quit the Climax Jazz Band – though he returned to it later in his career. His elder son James Petrie Jr says: “Jazz was just part of our family life. We often went as a family to listen to him playing ….the Maybury Hotel on a Sunday afternoon, especially. One of the other children that used to go with their jazz playing parents recently described us as being ‘jazz orphans’. It was quite exciting as a child to be in bars drinking bottles of juice with the smells of a smoky pub, and all the colourful characters around us. It was a scene and a lifestyle for all those involved and we were part of it by default. As we got older we would often drink with dad at some of his many residencies, taking our friends as well.”

It was in the 1980s that he founded the Diplomats of Jazz, a four-piece outfit comprising cornet, clarinet, sousaphone and banjo – with occasional vocals by Petrie. As the band evolved, it reflected his love of the playing of such trumpet greats as Jabbo Smith and Louis Armstrong. A class act, it always stood out amongst the other bands on the scene, partly because the four musicians were often decked out in their dinner suits at festival gigs in Edinburgh and Leith, partly because of its unusual – in this century – combination of instruments and also because it performed hot, swinging, seldom-played numbers from the repertoires of such top-notch black ensembles of the 1920s and 1930s as McKinney’s Cotton Pickers and the bands led by Clarence Williams, and avoided the hackneyed staples favoured by trad outfits. 

“He worked in jazz because he loved it,” says James Jr. “He loved to play it and he grew into the musician he was because of that. He kind of blossomed as a professional player despite a non-professional approach to it. I recall the pride he had when Humphrey Lyttelton played him on the radio – it was almost as if even he was taken by surprise by where playing had taken him.”

Margaret Petrie died last year; Jim Petrie is survived by his sons James and Martyn, and by his grandchildren William, Victoria and Aimee.

Jim Petrie, born April 14, 1937; died August 1, 2020.

Mike Hart Obituary

Mike Hart, who has died at the age of 84, founded the Edinburgh Jazz Festival – Scotland’s first such event – and, in so doing, consolidated the city’s status as an epicentre of classic, traditional and mainstream jazz. The jazz festival he created may have evolved and mutated over the four decades since it began, but it has kept Hart’s kind of jazz at its core.

An only child born in Inverness, Hart moved to Edinburgh when his father (a former engineer) set up an antiques business later run by his mother. After a brief, unhappy spell in boarding school in England, Hart was educated at Edinburgh’s Royal High School, a breeding ground for trad jazz musicians in the late 1940s when that genre of jazz was enjoying huge popularity. The teenage Hart took up drums and by 1949, was playing in a local band, Gavin’s Gloryland Jazz Band, led by trumpeter Jimmy Gavin.

One night, around the same time, in the West End Café, Hart was invited to sit in with the band led by clarinettist Sandy Brown, a maverick and now legendary figure. As Hart told Graham Blamire, the author of Edinburgh Jazz Enlightenment – The Story of Edinburgh Traditional Jazz, “I nearly fell over but immediately accepted”.

So began Hart’s association with Brown, and the trumpeter Al Fairweather and the pianist Stan Greig who also played in the band. With them, Hart went to London in 1952 where their gigs include the Big Jazz Show at the Royal Albert Hall.

After completing his National Service in the RAF, Hart returned to Edinburgh in 1954 and played banjo in trumpeter Charlie McNair’s band. Before long, he had established his own outfit, Mike Hart’s Blue Blowers, and in 1956 he co-founded what would become one of Edinburgh’s longest-running bands, the Climax Jazz Band which featured Jim Petrie on cornet and which would take Hart into the recording studio for the first time. The late 1950s saw the birth of two more popular bands which he co-led, Old Bailey and his Jazz Advocates and the Society Syncopators.

While his jazz career was bubbling away, Hart – who married his first wife, Moira, in 1960 – supported himself and his family via a number of jobs, including agricultural feed advisor, sail boat skipper in France, variety club producer and tour manager (for the likes of Jimmy Shand and Andy Stewart) and, ultimately, from the mid-1970s, running a successful antiques business with his mother, to whom he was very close.

By this time, he had re-formed and re-launched the Society Syncopators as Mike Hart’s Society Syncopators – and it was this band which Hart took on foreign tours on many occasions, notably to the Dunkirk Jazz Festival, where it was named European Amateur Jazz Champions 1979, and to California’s Sacramento Jazz Jubilee which it visited ten times.

Keen to stage something similar in Scotland, Hart spent a great deal of time with the Sacramento Jazz Jubilee’s director, Bill Borcher. Fionna Duncan, who sang with Hart’s band, recalls: “Bill had a sort of ‘war room’ in his house where he plotted out the programme, moving bands and audiences from one venue to the next using models!” This type of planning manifested itself in the way the Edinburgh Jazz Festival was structured during Hart’s tenure.

Hart brought together a number of local bands plus a couple of well-respected soloists from England and staged a mini festival in a ballroom in the capital in 1978.Its success inspired him to seek sponsorship for the first Edinburgh Jazz Festival which took place in 1979, and featured a variety of semi-professional bands from here and abroad.

But it was in 1980 that Hart began to operate the policy which helped define the festival (re-named the Edinburgh International Jazz Festival): he began to hire individual jazz stars, many of them veterans of the great American bands of the 1930s onwards, who had been sidemen in their youth but were now happy to be more in the spotlight. Such now-legendary players as Teddy Wilson, Doc Cheatham, Harry Edison and Milt Hinton all visited the Edinburgh Jazz Festival during its first decade.

Into the mix, Mike Hart added younger players who were part of the mainstream revival. All these musicians would stay for several days, if not a whole festival, at a time and would be mixed and matched in different line-ups, often featuring Scottish talent in the rhythm sections. Many of today’s leading Scottish players – among them pianist Brian Kellock and bassist Roy Percy – cut their teeth at the EIJF, invariably alongside big name Americans.

When the jazz festival became a limited company, Hart assumed the role of Artistic Director, and later Founding Director. In 1995, he was awarded an MBE for his services to jazz, and he also received a citation from the City of Sacramento in recognition for his work.

Always a figure who cut a dash and who had something of the old-fashioned adventurer and bon viveur about him, Hart threw himself into other passions beyond jazz. He was an accomplished deep sea fisher (a photo of him and the 180lb Blue Fin Tuna which he caught during a trip to Madeira with author and deep sea fisherman Trevor Housby is featured in Housby’s best-selling book). He also enjoyed sailing and racing his wooden keelboat, then he got hooked on flying, learning to fly a single engine Cessna aircraft and gaining his private pilot’s licence in 1985. That passion gave way to driving and owning a Triking wheeler sports car and attending events for enthusiasts. Jazz remained the constant while other interests came and went.

Graham Blamire says: “Mike would never have claimed to be an innovative or particularly original jazz musician but he was a fine player, both as a member of the rhythm section and in his solo work. He could be a volatile and demanding individual with whom to work, but he had vision, energy and determination and, when he wanted, a great deal of charm. He was a major influence on Edinburgh Jazz for a very long time, a leading figure in some of Edinburgh’s best bands, and he left his mark on jazz at an international level through his creation of the EIJF, which will be his enduring memorial.”

Hart, who was twice married and divorced, is survived by his children Susan and Michael, and three grandchildren.

* Michael Warner Hart, founder and original director of the Edinburgh Jazz Festival, jazz musician; born Inverness March 23, 1934; died Edinburgh December 11, 2018.

This obituary was first published in The Herald on Wednesday, December 26 2018

Old Bailey & the Jazz Advocates, 1965, at the Manhattan Club. Thanks to Hamish McGregor (clarinet) for the photo.