The search is over! At last I've got my
hands on the legendary BB cylinder. Its value beyond the dreams of avarice -
the Maltese Falcon a mere bagatelle by comparision. On this cylinder I will
hear the greatest New Orleans trumpet player ever. Buddy Bolden who begat
Keppard, Oliver, Armstrong, Carey, Bunk and all the other Storyville hornmen.
How did I acquire it? Well, amazingly
it was in a thrift/charity shop only a couple of miles away from my local
boozer where I'd been chatting with one of the local soaks. You know, the usual
thing, sport, sex, the council, sex until eventually music came up and we got
around to talking about the merits of CDs, vinyl, cassettes etc and he
mentioned seeing a cylinder in one of the thrift/charity shops only a few
miles away.
Could this be it? I didn't even finish my pint nor wait for a bus but jumped in a taxi. I gave the driver a tenner and told him to keep the change.
There it was! A
cylindrical object with a handwritten scrawl "Boldon Jazz". They
wanted a quid for it but I got them down to 50p.
There was only one
problem, I didn't have a stereo system that played cylinders. It played
everything else including mini-discs which are now even rarer than
cylinders.
eBay! You can buy
anything on eBay and, sure enough, there was a guy in Glasgow who had a machine
that played cylinders. He wanted £150 and I didn't haggle - chickenfeed. As
soon as it arrived I'd play the cylinder then put it up for auction.
Not on eBay but at, say, the New York branch of Sotheby's.
The Smithsonian Institute, Library of Congress, Lincoln Center,
Preservation Hall, the Louis Armstrong Museum - they'd all be in there bidding.
Came the big day and the machine arrived. I plugged it in and awaited eagerly to hear what Buddy really sounded like. To hear Baquet and Picou on clarinet weaving intricate patterns around BB's lead as they played Make me a Pallet on the Floor.
A drum introduction - sounded like ten drummers - could only be Baby Dodds. Then the horns came in, they sounded like kazoos as they went into, not Make me a Pallet on the Floor but The Happy Wanderer!
Which was when the penny, and my dreams of riches beyond compare, dropped. This wasn't Buddy Bolden but a juvenile jazz band based in Boldon, Tyne and Wear.
So the quest goes on... Me, Joel Cairo, Gutman and Bridget O'Shaughnessy searching for Falcons and cylinders. Lance
Ps: Cylinder for sale 50p o.n.o
No comments :
Post a Comment