Boaters, Bowlers and Bowties - The Best Of Barber, Ball and Bilk [Album]

Decca

August 19, 2009, 10:37 PM

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Kenny Ball, Acker Bilk and Chris Barber, also known as the 3B's, were highly influential in reviving traditional jazz in Britain in the fifties and sixties. The threesome, respectively playing trumpet, clarinet and trombone made the country jump jive and wail long before it lost its virginity to Rock 'n Roll. Despite the fact that a ‘best of’ album of the same trio made its way to the top of the charts as far back as 1962 already, a new album, highlighting the best well-known songs the trio recorded has just been released.

Despite the general idea of jazz being old-fashioned and irrelevant since Beatlemania, the swinging sixties wouldn't have existed without the fifties. The Chris Barber band was the place where Lonnie Donegan, who influenced practically everyone, including the Beatles started and Barber himself was co-responsible for the Blues explosion in the sixties. Moreover, numerous songs on this album has also been covered by modern artists in more recent times - ‘A Taste of Honey’ has been covered by The Beatles, ‘Nobody Loves You When You're Down and Out’ by Eric Clapton and ‘Delia's Gone’ by Johnny Cash proving that a lot of these old songs have a glow of timelessness around them.

This however, is not something you would find out when listening to these two discs. The songs presented here are mainly jazz and blues standards, swinging dance hall classics and pre World War One marching songs that were recorded in the fifties and sixties. It makes 'Boaters, Bowlers and Bowties' a nostalgia trip rather than an attempt to find a new audience for a genre long disappeared from the public eye.

There are some moments of recognition for the younger generation though (albeit different versions); there are two shiny moments of Disney fame - Kenny Ball's interpretation of Jungle Book's 'I Wanna Be Like You' and 'Hawaiian War Chant (the song Timon performs in mini skirt in The Lion King). There is Acker Bilks rendition of the famous whistling jazz tune 'Sweet Georgia Brown', better known as the theme of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, and there is 'Stranger on the Shore' which, in 1962 was the first British number one on the Billboard Top 100 and has recently been used as the theme for BBC Radio 4 show 'That Mitchell and Webb Sound'.

The general feeling though is one of old-fashioned swing and rhythmic renditions of jazz standards tailor-made for the dance hall. For jazz newbies the album isn’t a good one to begin with - with forty songs (many of which are instrumentals) you have to be quite caffeinated to survive the complete listening session. For everyone who loved and still loves the music of the swinging fifties, ‘Boaters, Bowlers and Bowties’ is the perfect album.

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