Jazz Score

There’s no shortage of music quizzes on the radio from the current all out pop variety of PopMaster and Ten to the Top and the former Pop Score (1972-92) to the general music quiz ‘from Bach to the Beatles’ of Counterpoint. But for pure jazz only content there was Jazz Score.

Jazz Score was heard on BBC Radio 2 over nineteen series spanning 1981 to 1997. As I’ve written before, though “ostensibly a music quiz it effectively allowed a load of jazzers to reminisce and entertain the audience with their anecdotes”.

The idea for the programme came from clarinettist Roy Pellet, a one-time member of the Clyde Valley Stompers. It was Roy that researched and wrote the questions. He told the Radio Times: “I spent 20 years travelling with jazz musicians and roaring with laughter at their stories. Each question is tailored to provoke a particular memory.”

In charge of production for most of the run was light entertainment producer, and part-time jazz trombone player, Richard Willcox. Chairing virtually every edition was Benny Green who reckoned that “a lot of people are listening just for the jokes. But don’t be fooled, underneath the banter there’s lots of knowledge”. Most often taking a spot on the panel and providing that banter were Humphrey Lyttelton, Ronnie Scott, George Melly and Acker Bilk.

Over 70 guests, mostly jazz performers, appeared though it often sounded like a gentlemen-only club, at least until later (and independently produced by Unique) series. Early series would often have special jazz enthusiast guests such as Eric Sykes, Kingsley Amis or Barry Cryer. To make everyone feel at home the shows were mostly recorded at Ronnie Scott’s on Frith Street or the 100 Club on Oxford Street.

I’ve uploaded a couple of editions of Jazz Score on YouTube. First from the start of the sixth series is a programme that was broadcast on Saturday 7 September 1985. Joining Benny are Humph, Acker, Chris Barber and Alan Elsdon.

Two years later the eighth series kicked off with this edition recorded in 1986 but broadcast in April 1987 (Radio Times billing above) just a few weeks after the death of special guest Buddy Rich. Also taking part are Barney Kessell, Ronnie Scott and George Melly.       

 

Jazz Score series details

Chaired by Benny Green except Shaw Taylor (s01e04/5), Peter Clayton (s02e05-7, s04e11-12) and Humphrey Lyttelton (s05e01-06),

The pilot episode was recorded in October 1980 and was broadcast at the start of series 1.  

Series 1: 3 October 1981 to 28 November 1981 (9 editions)

Special guests Eric Sykes, Deryck Guyler, Barry Took, Kingsley Amis, Jack Brymer, Barry Foster, Barry Cryer, Roy Castle and Mike Hailwood

Series 2: 17 April to 3 July 1982 (12)

Special guests: Arthur Davidson. Jimmy Edwards, Barry Fantoni and Philip Jones

Series 3: 26 March to 11 June 1983 (12)

Series 4: 31 December 1983 to 17 March 1984 (12)

Series 5: 6 October to 22 December 1984 (12)

Series 6: 7 September to 30 November 1985 (12) (not 28 Sept due to boxing coverage)

Special guests: Charlie Byrd, Don Lanphere, Slim Gaillard

Series 7: 30 March to 29 June 1986 (13)

Special guests: James Moody

Series 8: 26 April to 28 June 1987 (10)

Special guests: Buddy Rich and Barney Kessell

Series 9: 14 December 1987 to 22 February 1988 (12) (not 28 December)

Series 10: 8 November 1988 to 7 February 1989 (14)

Series 11: 20 November 1989 to 19 February 1990 (14)

Series 12: 2 February to 20 April 1991 (12)

Series 13: 9 November to 28 December 1991 (8)

Series 14: 19 October to 7 December 1992 (8)

Series 15: 3 January to 14 February 1994 (7)

Series 16: 7 November 1994 to 26 December 1994(8)

Series 17: 17 July to 4 September 1995 (8)

Series 18: 10 June to 5 August 1996 (9)

Series 19: 22 July to 26 August 1997 (6)

Series 16 to 19 were produced by Unique. The BBC World Service broadcast selected repeats between 1988 and 1997.

Panellists: George Chisholm, Humphrey Lyttelton, Annie Ross, Ronnie Scott, Acker Bilk, George Melly, Jack Parnell, Peter Clayton, Digby Fairweather, Chris Barber, John Turner, Richard Clegg, Beryl Bryden, Alan Clare, Alex Welsh, Kenny Ball, Ian Christie, Andy Cooper, Alan Elsdon, John Barnes, Roger Bennett, Geoff Nicholas, Eddie Thompson, Jack Fallon, Herb Ellis, Peter Ind, Ian Carr, Slim Gaillard, Coleridge Goode, John Dankworth, Geoff Nichols, Al Cohn, Yank Lawson, Murdell Lowe, Dave Shepherd, Barney Kessell, Charlie Byrd, George Masso, Nat Gonella, Max Jones, Roger Horton, Monty Sunshine, Campbell Burnap, Major Holley, Bobby Rosengarden, Peter Appleyard, Dave Shepherd, Derek Smith, Dick Charlesworth, Pete King, Diz Disley, Bob Wilber, Kenny Baker, Eddie Harvey, Oliver Jones, Ken Rattenbury, Tommy Burton, Carol Kidd, Al Gay, Roy Williams, Alan Barnes, Sheila Tracy, Dick Hyman, Rob McConnell, Cleo Laine, Brian Priestley, Marion Montgomery, Stan Tracey, Alan Plater, Bruce Adams, Vic Lewis and Larry Adler. 

Finally the answer to the question posed in the opening photo of Benny Green is Bobby Hackett and Lionel Hampton.

The Paramount Man of Jazz

One of Britain’s best known jazz musicians, instantly recognisable with his goatee beard, bowler hat and striped waistcoat, Mr Acker Bilk died at the weekend.

Acker was a radio regular over the best part of forty years on programmes such as Jazz Club and Saturday Club and the eponymously-titled Acker’s Away (1960/86-91) and Acker's ‘Arf ‘Our (1981-83). He also cropped up as a regular panellist on Radio 2’s Jazz Score (1981-97).

By way of a tribute here’s my recording of the first programme from the sixth series of Jazz Score. Asking the questions is Benny Green, With Acker are fellow jazz musicians, all of a similar vintage: Humphrey Lyttelton, Chris Barber and Alan Elsdon. The programme was broadcast on 7 September 1985.

Acker Bilk 1929-2014

Christmas Punch – Benny Green

Today Benny Green recalls how professional musicians are suddenly in demand over the festive season, if only to play for the conga line!  

This programme was the first in a series titled Christmas Punch and aired on BBC Radio 4 on Christmas Eve 1984.

There’s more from Benny on Radio 2 this coming Christmas as his son Leo presents stories and music from the Golden Age of Hollywood with archive interviews that Benny recorded in the  1970s as part of his research for the documentary series Hooray for Hollywood.
Leo Green on Hollywood is a 2-part series on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day.   

Radio Lives - Benny Green

His epitaph could well have been devoted to the “blind saxophone player” when, on the late 50s TV sensation Oh Boy, he was in the line-up of Lord Rockingham’s Eleven playing slightly out of tune on the hit Hoots Mon.  Fortunately polymath Benny Green would become far better known as a broadcaster and writer with interests in music, theatre, cinema, literature and cricket. In fact those dark sunglasses had been an attempt to avoid being recognised in “this appalling travesty of a band” but it didn’t stop the fan mail pouring in at the time.

Despite being most people’s idea of a Cockney, Benny was born in his mother’s home town of Leeds in December 1927 to Dave (“a strolling player”) and Fanny. Though married in London they had met the year before when his saxophone-playing father had been touring Northern England.

Young Bernard developed an early interest in music and writing from his father, of whom he would later recall: “He taught me to play and presented me with two saxophones and a clarinet when I was thirteen”.  Dave also had unfulfilled ambitions to write short stories that he hoped to sell to one of the London evening papers.  “He impressed upon me almost without realising it the special, almost mystical nature of the act of picking up a pen and a sheet of paper.”

Following demob in 1947 Benny plied his trade as a touring professional sax player working the rounds at Jewish weddings, tea-dances, holiday camps and with a variety outfits led by Anton Burns, Sonny Landau, Roy Fox, Lew Stone, Bertie King, Kenny Baker, Tito Burns, Geoff Love and Ralph Sharon.

Life changed in two respects in 1952 when he joined Ronnie Scott’s band – he would become life-long friends with Scott – and he wrote the first of his regular columns for the New Musical Express. Eventually his interest in writing about jazz rather than playing it led to him becoming jazz correspondent of the Observer in 1958.

By the early 1960s Benny was now well-known as a broadcaster and writer. His first radio broadcast had been in 1955, though as musician rather than as host. However, the BBC were looking for musicians who could present a growing number of jazz programmes with authority and interest, Benny was one of them, alongside the likes of Humphrey Lyttelton, George Melly, Steve Race and Ken Sykora. As early as 1961 he was an occasional host on Network Three’s Jazz Session and in 1964 a regular on the Light Programme with The Jazz Scene and It’s Jazz. Later he was a contributor to Jazz on One in the early days of Radio 1 when its fare extended beyond pop.

1964 also saw the start of his regular TV work as either presenter or scriptwriter with Rediffusion’s thrice-weekly Three After Six, billed as “a personal comment on what’s going on”. A TV Times article in November 1964 told readers that “In theory it sounds easy - just assemble three intelligent people who take an interest in what’s going on in the world, sit them in front of the cameras and let them chat to each other for 20 minutes. No scripts to be written and learned, no elaborate rehearsals.

The trio have to like each other enough to enjoy discussion, yet have such different personalities that they are constantly disagreeing. It’s generally agreed that the current team of Dee Wells, Alan Brien and Benny Green disagree with rare pungency and wit”.

A couple of years he was the host of a late-night chat show, again for Rediffusion three nights a week, Late Show London.  Writing in The Spectator Stuart Hood described it as “probably the worst programme to go on the telly in living memory”. How fair this was I don’t know, to my knowledge recordings of the series, which went out live, don’t exist. But at least some viewers approved:“There could be no better choice of host than Benny Green who treats his guests in just the right way” wrote a Mrs Gleneen Proudman.

Alongside his jazz broadcasting on both TV (Jazz at the Maltings, Commonwealth Jazz Club) and radio he was also a literary critic for The Spectator and provided film review for Punch. In 1975 he scripted two programmes for Radio 2 that reflected his different interests. From the world of music came a 13-part tribute in The Fred Astaire Story with David Niven recording the narration. One of Green’s literary heroes was P.G. Wodehouse and in Wodehouse on Broadway, presented by Ian Carmichael, he wrote about his time as lyricist and librettist in musical theatre.

In 1976 Radio 2 broadcast two major series written by Green: first was the 26-part celebration of “outstanding producers of entertainment in the USA this century”, The American Showmen narrated by Michael Craig. Secondly, his love of the cinema, and especially the movie musicals led to him research and interview most of the main protagonists for the 28-part Hooray for Hollywood. Narrated by Douglas Fairbanks Junior it traced the development of the genre from the 1930s Busby Berkley extravaganzas until they went out of fashion in the late 60s. Here’s the final episode Full Circle, first transmitted on 19 December 1976 and here repeated on 6 January 1981.
 

Benny’s radio repertoire was still expanding. On Radio 4 he appeared on the Robert Robinson hosted talking shop Stop the Week and here on Start the Week in July 1980 he got to interview one of his idols Ella Fitzgerald. 

In 1978 he had a six month stint on Radio 2’s Album Time (he’d go on to present a similar series on the BBC’s World Service). The following year there was a major series on the great American songwriters Green On…, each week focusing on the likes of Kern, Porter or Gershwin. Benny then took over a Sunday morning show for a few months (September 1979 to January 1980) for what was, in effect, a dry run for his most famous series. In 1980 he co-wrote a series on the career of Stanley Holloway, Wiv a Little Bit o’ Luck and on 30 March kicked off his Sunday afternoon shows that would become unofficially be known as The Art of the Songwriter.
 

Radio Times illustration for Green on ...
19 September 1979

Those Sunday afternoon shows initially replaced Sounds Easy but eventually both ran in tandem throughout the 1980s and until 1994 when David Jacobs took over from an ailing Alan Dell.  They became essential listening for anyone who enjoyed popular music presented by guys who knew their stuff and had often worked with or met the artists whose discs they played. In his biography of his father Dominic Green wrote:

“He was to carry on working for the Beeb right up to the end; in his bag when we took him to hospital for the last time was a script for the next Sunday’s Art of the Songwriter show. When in an act of Eighties philistinism, a new station controller attempted to displace him for his Radio 2 slot, his two million listeners were outraged, there were complaints in the press, and a protest march up Regent Street. Chastened, the controller renewed Benny’s contract, and the show continued. Taken collectively, his Sunday show is perhaps the largest single collection of history, anecdote and analysis of the popular song. For reasons so asinine that they are best left unexamined, the BBC did not have a policy of keeping archive copies of the shows. When we decided to collect them together and present copies to the National Sound Archive for the study and pleasure of future generations, we had to obtain cassettes from fans who had illegally taped the show every week”.

A number of the shows were unearthed as part of last year’s Listeners’ Archive project. Here’s my own contribution with an early example from 14 December 1980.

Green’s jazz roots were not forgotten, however, as he also chaired Jazz Score (1981-1997). Ostensibly a music quiz it effectively allowed a load of jazzers to reminisce and entertain the audience with their anecdotes.  I’ll post an edition of Jazz Score at some future date.  In 1990 Benny was part of the launch line-up for London’s Jazz FM with a Tuesday night series on songs and songwriters. 

Benny’s last Radio 2 Sunday show was in June 1998, they were usually recorded in pairs on Friday, and he died a little over a week later. Those programmes are remembered on Radio 2 tonight in Green on Green when his son Leo recalls Benny’s career and favourite music. Next week Leo will re-create that last un-broadcast show based on that script that was in Benny’s bag.

Benny Green 1927-1998

That’s Entertainment!