Memories of Jazz on a Sunday Afternoon. Part Two - The Tally Ho, Kentish Town.

It was during this period (1963) that I got married and spent my honeymoon in London.

The Tally Ho in Kentish Town was the Sunday lunch jam at the time and crowds overflowed into the streets outside. The bonnets and roofs of parked cars provided substitutes for tables and you could still hear the music.The finale, Jumping at the Woodside had more 'One more time' codas than April in Paris ever did! I've never witnessed a jam like this - ever! I wanted to ring my buddies back at The Bluebell, let them have a piece of the action, but this was back in the days of kiosks, press button A and other stone-age methods of communication so I had to press button B to get my money back
. And, if you don't believe me when I say how exciting it was, there's a vinyl LP of it around if you can find it - I still play it. Pete Shade on flute, Ziggy Ludvigsen (tenor); Alan Littlejohn, Gerry Salisbury (trumpets); Dave Castle (alto) just some of the names led by Vic Richards on drums. Sixteen men swinging (sometimes more) and not a chart in sight! The landlady, Lillian Delaney, also sang. Reminiscent of JATP without the histrionics, that Tally Ho session was probably the best I'd ever heard. Although if Newcastle's Jazz Café had more floor space for the jammers it could maybe run it close...

I returned to the Tally Ho a few years later. The jam had gone but Roger Nobes was leading a tidy Goodman style sextet. This was the afternoon when I learned of the murder of Lord Mountbatten by the IRA. Paradoxically, the next time I called in it had become an Irish pub... (To be continued)...
Lance.