Edinburgh Jazz Fest Memories: Forrie Cairns

Forrie Cairns (third from left in front row), with Jim Galloway (centre, on soprano sax) playing When the Saints Go Marching In at the Edinburgh Jazz Festival’s Guinness Book of Records attempt at biggest ever jazz band. This was just, says Forrie, one section of the band!

One-time member of the Clyde Valley Stompers and a fixture on the Scottish jazz scene from the 1950s onwards, Glasgow-born clarinettist Forrie Cairns enjoyed the Edinburgh Jazz Festival as both a player and a listener. He says:

“I was working virtually non-stop in Switzerland for the first 30 years of the jazz festival. But on the odd occasion when I took part in it (I think four altogether), what always excited me was the way Mike Hart (before it became more of committee-run event) managed to arrange those great afternoon Pub Trail gigs and the ones in the Festival Club with all the unusual line-ups comprising the musicians from the various visiting bands.

“For example, in the mid- 1980’s I came over for week with Bob Wallis and although I worked each night with Bob at various venues, I found myself one afternoon duetting with John Crocker, the sax/ clarinet player from the Chris Barber Band. It was great fun.

“That same year gave me the unique opportunity one other afternoon of listening for one hour to the two wonderful horns of Warren Vaché and Spanky Davis, the resident horn man at Jimmy Ryan’s Club in New York. Two quite different styles and two musicians at their peak, not attempting to blow each other off the stand, but rather complementing each other in quite superb fashion. Those musicians who crowded into the Festival Club that day were so lucky. That was the Edinburgh Festival at its best.”

Warren Vache & Spanky Davis with Kenny Ellis (bass), Festival Club, 1985

Next: Alison Kerr

Jim Galloway Obituary

(c) Alison Kerr, 2011

Jim Galloway, who has died at the age of 78, was one of the leading exponents of the soprano saxophone in jazz. Not only was he a wonderful musician and organiser; he was also one of the warmest, friendliest and least egocentric of talents. A kind, witty character with a mischievous twinkle in his eye and gentle west coast accent which he never lost, despite having spent more of his life in Canada than in his native Scotland, he loved the music, loved other people who loved the music, and seemed to represent what’s best about the jazz community – its spirit of camaraderie.

Any time his name came up in conversation – whether with American, Scottish or French musicians – eyes would light up, and somebody would tell a story and want to be remembered to him. It’s impossible to separate the man from the music: both were full of infectious, often gleeful, enthusiasm and irrepressible joie-de-vivre.

Jim Galloway, Bruce Turner, Warren Vache, Edinburgh Jazz Festival, 1988 (c) Donnie Kerr

American cornettist Warren Vaché says: “He was a caring and honest musician whose sense of fun and humour were always present, and whose love of puns in speech seemed to translate into a love of quotes in his solos.” Glaswegian clarinettist Forrie Cairns – who first met “Jimmy” at the Evening Times’ annual Jazz Band Championships at the St Andrew’s Halls, when Galloway was with the Esquire Jazz Band and he was with the Jim McHarg Jazz Band – remembers him as “one of the few true gentlemen of jazz”.

James Braidie Galloway was born in Kilwinning, Ayrshire, in 1936, and raised in Dalry. During his teens he taught himself to play the clarinet (the only music lessons he had as a child were on the chanter for the bagpipes), and spent all his pocket money on jazz records. In a 1992 interview with Jazz Journal, he said that hearing a chorus by Frank Teschemacher on the Eddie Condon Quartet recording of Indiana was a defining moment. “I’ve never copied a chorus played by another musician. But I do remember that I sat there and laboriously wrote out Teschemacher’s chorus on that recording. It really made an impression.”

An avid radio listener, the teenage Galloway soaked up inspiration from many instrumentalists, notably trumpeter Louis Armstrong, trombonist Vic Dickenson and saxophonists Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster. But, as was evident in later life when he was at home in any jazz context, he also grew up listening to the emerging bop players. His late teens coincided with the trad jazz revival, when there were plenty of opportunities for a young jazz clarinettist to play every weekend in Scotland’s major cities, and the unlikely mecca for trad enthusiasts in Glasgow was Whitecraigs Tennis Club, on the southside.

(c) Alison Kerr

By 1964, the scene had changed. Gigs were fewer and further between and Galloway’s “itchy feet” took him to Canada. He arrived in Toronto on Saturday, July 4, 1964 and, decades later, said: “I still remember the first evening. I went in to this place called the Colonial Tavern and literally stopped dead in my tracks. My first night in North America, and there’s a bandstand and on it are Herman Autrey, Vic Dickenson and Buster Bailey.. I thought “Jesus Christ! This is heaven!”

Due to union rules, Galloway couldn’t operate immediately as a full-time musician so he took on design work, but he involved himself in the Toronto jazz scene right from day one, sitting in on jam sessions and playing with several local bands. In 1967, he joined the Metro Stompers, led by the afore-mentioned fellow Scot Jim McHarg. Two years later, McHarg asked him to take over – and this indirectly gave birth to the other major strand of his jazz career: as an organiser. Within months, Galloway had brought in his first guest star – the legendary stride pianist Willie “the Lion” Smith. This led to Galloway booking such other ageing greats as pianist Teddy Wilson into the club Bourbon Street.

A fallow period for musicians in the early 1970s led to Galloway breaking up the band, and taking a high school teaching job. But in 1975, his international jazz career was launched when his drummer friend Paul Rimstead put together a band that included Galloway and Buddy Tate on saxes and Buck Clayton on trumpet, and took it to jazz festivals in France. “It changed my life,” Galloway later said. “I quit teaching on the strength of five weeks’ work. I remember going to the principal’s office to resign. He thought I was crazy.”

By now, he was playing saxophone – mostly soprano, but he had also mastered alto, tenor and baritone. (Indeed, the last time I heard Jim Galloway, at the 2012 Norwich Jazz Party, he surprised everyone by playing a duo set on a baritone borrowed from Karen Sharp five minutes before kick-off. It was the highlight of the weekend.) He played the straight soprano sax from 1967, until three years later, when a drummer pal gave him a shot of a curved one and “it was love at first blow.” His sound on soprano was utterly distinctive and owed nothing to anyone, especially not to its most famous exponent, Sidney Bechet.

In 1985, Galloway and his then-wife Rosemary, were commissioned to write a major composition, entitled Hot & Suite, to be performed by the Scottish National Orchestra plus jazz ensemble at the Edinburgh International Festival. The hour-long piece featured a host of jazz musicians (including Warren Vaché) who had performed at the Edinburgh Jazz Festival that week.

Jim Galloway (in characteristic pose) & Spanky Davis, Edinburgh Jazz Festival, 1988 (c) Donnie Kerr

In 2002, Galloway received the most prestigious arts award in France when the government made him a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres for enriching French culture.

In Toronto, the tireless Galloway kept a 17-piece group, the Wee Big Band, going from 1978 until his death, recorded a string of albums for Sackville Records, hosted a radio show through the 1980s, and went on to co-found what became the Toronto Jazz Festival in 1987. He was its artistic director until he retired from the post in 2009, by which point he was also a columnist for The Whole Note magazine. In the Toronto Star’s obituary of Galloway, Fay Olson – one of the team which produced the festival– said: “Toronto wouldn’t have a jazz festival if it wasn’t for Jim. He was a lovely guy, one of those who sees the good in everyone and always finds a reason to laugh.”

Indeed, the worst anybody could say about him is that he couldn’t keep his puns to himself.

He died after several months’ illness, and is survived by his second wife, Anne.

* James Braidie Galloway, born July 28, 1936; died December 30, 2014.

First published in The Herald, Saturday January 17

 

Stan Greig Obituary

The pianist Stan Greig, who has died at the age of 82 following a long illness, was a stalwart of the British jazz scene for 60 years and was known for his boogie-woogie prowess, and his convivial nature. As pianist or drummer (he took up drums, he said, because he was so often confronted by duff pianos on gigs), he played in key bands in the British trad jazz revival movement, among them the groups led by Ken Colyer, Acker Bilk and Humphrey Lyttelton before embarking on a fruitful freelance career in middle age.

Born in Joppa, Edinburgh in 1930, Stanley Mackay Greig was the son of a piano tuner and repairer. At Edinburgh’s Royal High School in the mid-1940s, he formed a band with fellow pupils who, like him, were mad for 1920s jazz. The Royal High School Gang’s front line featured the now-legendary duo of clarinettist Sandy Brown and trumpeter Al Fairweather. It rehearsed in Greig’s living room, and almost immediately began playing gigs. Greig continued to play with Brown and Fairweather after they had all moved to London; their fantastically distinctive album Doctor McJazz is one of the all-time greats.

On leaving school, Greig took up his father’s trade and worked with him until the age of 24 when, as a drummer, he signed up to Ken Colyer’s London-based band. He joined Humphrey Lyttelton just in time to play drums on the 1956 recording session that produced the Top Twenty hit, Bad Penny Blues, but his tenure with Lyttelton was interrupted by the Suez Crisis – he was called up as a reservist – and when he returned, he had to share the drummer role with Eddie Taylor, who had been brought in as his replacement. Greig soon quit to go on tour, as a pianist, with the American gospel singer Brother John Sellers.

Greig spent much of the 1960s on the road as pianist with Acker Bilk’s Paramount Jazz Band which was riding high on the success of their hit Stranger on the Shore. After eight years, he left and spent a year running a coffee shop before emerging as a freelance juggling all sorts of gigs with piano tuning jobs (Mick Jagger was one of his regular clients). In 1975, he formed the London Jazz Big Band, a 16-piece outfit which featured many big names on the London scene, had a devoted following for ten years, and was very much a labour of Greig’s love. (He even built the music stands.)

Multi-instrumentalist Alan Barnes, who worked regularly with Greig when both were in Humphrey Lyttelton’s band in the 1980s, describes the London Jazz Big Band as “one of the most joyous big bands ever”.

Barnes adds: “He was a great spirit to be around and a real driving force in Humph’s band. One of his original boogie compositions had a break in which he would shout out the song title. I can remember his sudden appearance in the pulpit above the band in Peterborough Cathedral yelling ‘Beano Boogie!’ at an amazed congregation.”

The clarinettist Forrie Cairns, who played duo gigs with Greig in the 1970s, recalls: “Stan was a musician totally absorbed in the music all his life, and a pianist who differed from almost all the other good British pianists in his amazing feel for blues and gospel music. He played that style like the black American musicians did.” Which is no doubt why, in the 1980s, he toured Europe with the Harlem Jazz & Blues Band, an otherwise all Afro-American line-up of veterans from the golden era of jazz.

By 2002, the onset of Parkinson’s Disease had begun to hamper Greig’s ability to play. At a benefit concert in his honour that year, he was assisted by Jools Holland, and at a wonderful tribute concert to Sandy Brown at the 2002 Edinburgh Jazz Festival he shared piano duties with his old friend Ralph Laing.

Twice divorced, Greig is survived by his first wife and by their three children.

* Stan Greig, pianist, born August 12, 1930; died November 18, 2012.

First published in The Herald, Saturday December 1