The great thing about the pre-war piano traditions, known to jazz historians as stride piano, which produced Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, Earl Hines and Art Tatum, is that it probably led to the finest flowering of solo improvising since Beethoven’s day.
The sad thing about it is that its main survival today comes in the bastardized form of pub piano and that Waller’s glorious two-fisted artistry is known to most people in the shape of ham-fisted amateurism. It is as if the vast majority knew about Mantovani and had never heard of Mozart.
Luckily, there are still a few pianists who are dedicated, nimble and sensitive enough to preserve the old tradition alive, and Dick Wellstood is about the best of them. The ever-enterprising Jazz Centre Society presented him at the Seven Dials in Shelton Street, a congenial haunt enhanced by the presence of Young’s bitter beer, and he did them proud. He plays his vast repertoire with such ease, with such a nonchalant disposition of the hands that the unalerted listener might feel nothing was happening. In fact he is thinking like lightning the whole time and it is difficult to spot a moment when his fingers do not follow suit. He is not so much a musical archaeologist, more a one-man repertory company dedicated to reinterpreting the works of Ellington, Waller, Joplin, Johnson and many others in a totally individual manner. If this were a fair and just society he would be on television every other night and a household name. As it is, he is only here for a fortnight on a wayward tour round Britain from America: catch him if you can.
As if that were not enough, the relief band was led by Bruce Turner, who looks increasingly like Spike Milligan and plays increasingly like one of the best alto saxophonists ever to come out of Britain. His set took time to warm up, but by the end he was well into his stride and playing like a man possessed, with one of the warmest yet shrewdest tones in jazz. All in all, one feels sorry for the seven million-odd Londoners who could not make it to the Seven Dials. (Reprinted by kind permission of ‘Times’ Newspapers)
