What's in a name?

As I listened to the latest review album that landed on the turntable of the old Victrola, it occurred to me that, although it was played by a band (no names no pack drill) of players who had not only been to renowned music colleges both here and over there but were probably technically more proficient than the players who created the music they were now draining the emotion from.

I wondered why this should be, I mean they'd studied, paid their dues - well their term fees - some even have doubled barrelled names which was when it clicked!

Think of the great jazz musicians: Satchmo, Dizzy, Hot Lips, Fats, Peanuts, Jelly Roll, Muggsy, Lucky, Bird, Zoot, to mention but a few. With names like that you knew that the music was going to meet your anticipation - it didn't always but, it usually did.

Likewise the blues singers. Irrespective of how out of tune or repetitive their lyrics were, the fact that they plied their craft as Big Bill, Sonny Boy, Blind Eye, Big Mama, Blind Lemon, Champion Jack placed them ahead of anyone less colourfully named.

The informality has gone. Jazz critics and, by default, fans aspired for the music to be shown the respectability that, in a Utopian world should have been its automatic due. That it did indeed achieve this respectability - at least to a degree - is witnessed by  BG's famed Carnegie Hall concert in 1938 as well as today when jazz is now a regular part of "The Proms".

Nevertheless, I often wonder if Sir John Dankworth would have received that knighthood if he'd still been called Johnny, as he was when he played with Freddie Mirfield's Garbage Men, and Dame Cleo Laine was just another dame who sang with a band?

Just thinkin' Lance