John Dankworth

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty six, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson.

Presenter0:29

Our guest today is about to be a castaway for the second time. He was first banished to our desert island in 1957. And then, as now, he's renowned as a musician and a composer. He is John Dankworth. John, welcome back to your Desert Island. You can, of course, choose the same records, but I see, in fact, you have chosen to repeat only two, and one of them is the Benny Goodman version of Clarinet A La King. Why is that?

John Dankworth0:53

Well, I think when one's choosing records for a desert island, you're torn, especially for a second time, you're torn between having the same solution as you did when you were twenty-eight years uh younger and doing something different for the sake of variety. But there was one record and one artist that I couldn't possibly leave behind because he was my first inspiration to be a jazz man, and he was my first excuse for being allowed to be a jazz man. It was Benny Goodman. I came from a a family where classical music was considered de rigueur, and the only way I could really convincingly get my parents to believe that I was serious about playing jazz clarinet was by choosing an instrument played by Benny Goodman, who was already then crossing the barriers of music and having works written for him by Bella Bartock and Darren Copeland. And so he was literally a shining example of the sort of thing I hoped to be later in life. Why this particular tune, Clarinet La King? Well because Benny did a lot of things on both sides of the fence, very jazzy and as I said, very classical pieces that were written especially for him in the classical idiom. But this one seems to bridge the two to me. It was by a very skilful arranger, Eddie Sauter, who also composed the piece for him. And it's very difficult to see in the performance where the actual writing stops and where the improvisation starts. And that, to my mind, is the real goal of a truly great composer or arranger of music, to be able to absorb improvisation into the tapestry of his composition and for us not to know the difference.

Presenter3:16

John, you mentioned there the musical background being classical. Who in fact were the musicians in your family?

John Dankworth3:22

Well, most of my mother's side of the family was either professionally or in an amateur capacity very into music.

John Dankworth3:28

My mother wasn't a professional, but she was a marvellous singer and played the piano and the cello a bit. And my sister before me, a little older than me, was the shining example of what the offspring of a classically oriented family should be, because she passed all her exams and went on to music college and that sort of thing. Which left me five years behind a sort of a little bit of a rebel and not wanting to fit so well into the mold like a goody-goody should, I suppose, and wanted to show my musical independence. And so I didn't respond to lessons on the violin or the piano at all. And it was obvious to my parents by that time when I was about fifteen that I wasn't going to be really interested in music or anything like taking it up for a career, when I happened to hear a little bit of jazz. And I consulted a maiden aunt of mine who was a horn player. And she said there was such a thing as good jazz, something that nobody had ever told me before from an authoritative source. And so I began seeking it out. And the first person I found, really, was Benny Goodman. And you buy your own clarinet? Or was that bought for you by a parent? No, when my mother saw I was serious, she found 35 shillings to find me a clarinet, which a friend had, and I persevered on that for a few weeks until I could do something with it. You taught yourself?

Presenter4:34

Nope.

John Dankworth4:46

I did in the first instance, yeah. And then they realis my parents realised that something should be done of a more formal nature, and they suggested I went to the Royal Academy of Music, because by that time my school work was suffering anyway.

John Dankworth5:00

So I went for an audition there. Unfortunately, it was uh during the

John Dankworth5:04

last years of the war when male people actually wanting to go to the Royal Academy of Music in between V one and V two attacks were very sparse and so I got in even though I could barely play. And it's strange to say that when I passed out for my diploma at the Royal Academy of Music, I had to play the same thing that later on, twenty-five years later, my son had to play for an audition piece to get in. So the standard has gone up a great deal since then.

Presenter5:29

What did they make of you there, this person studying at the Royal Academy whose great passion was jazz? Was it regarded as being rather bizarre, ambitious?

John Dankworth5:36

It wasn't regarded at all because I kept it a very closely guarded secret. Believe me, if they'd have really known, I'd have been in for a hard time of it anyway. I'm not sure they would have thrown me out.

John Dankworth5:46

That's very much a contrast to now when they have a jazz course at the Royal Academy at full blown.

John Dankworth5:50

Jazz course, but in those days it was a sort of dirty word, and I used to pretend my saxophone was a bassoon when I put it in the left luggage department at the uh in the basement of the Academy. There actually came up to be a saxophone solo in a piece by Bizet, L'Alécienne Suite, when I was playing with the Second Orchestra at the Academy.

John Dankworth6:09

And the conductor, Ernest Reid, asked if there was anybody in the clarinet section who played the uh saxophone. And I was keeping quiet, I wasn't going to say a word, but the other clarinet player said, Go on, danky, tell'em. So I put my hand up timidly and said that I could play uh saxophone a bit, and uh next week I brought it and played the solo into the second movement of the L'Alesienne suite.

Speaker 16:18

One

Speaker 16:19

Um

John Dankworth6:29

And he stopped the orchestra and said, Now, here's a case of the saxophone being played beautifully by a person who's not been tainted by the awful sounds of jazz.

John Dankworth6:39

And I hung my head in shame because I was playing uh in a Soho Dive that same evening on the

Presenter6:43

Thanks so much for musical purity.

John Dankworth6:46

What about the next choice?

Presenter6:47

Record Yeah.

John Dankworth6:48

Well, I've chosen a record by John Williams because John came into my life comparatively recently over the last ten years or so, but he always struck me as a musician who epitomized someone who wanted to break down those awful barriers between classical music and jazz. He was the first one to deformalize the clothes that a guitar player wore on the stage. You know, it used to be tails and he introduced a sort of floral shirt and that sort of thing. He was always one, and it still is one, to break down those barriers, and I admire him tremendously for it, because he put his own career on the line, I think, in order to do so with great courage. And what a virtuoso he is. Here's a record of a composition by a Paraguayan composer, Augustin Barrios, and it's simply called a volce.

Speaker 47:57

Yeah.

Presenter8:04

John what sort of

John Dankworth8:05

What bands did you play in the in the early days? I started playing with just little gig bands that weren't known to anybody before or since, but then I formed my own little group, the Seven, and we did a great deal of touring in the tawdriest of circumstances sometimes with that little group.

John Dankworth8:20

And uh of course when you're with a small group like that you live as a family on the road and you get to know each other very well and uh and inevitably I find out in those conditions a musician's sense of humour comes to the fore. We used to make up silly lyrics to tunes like um oh I don't know, it seems very appropriate on Desert Island this we did one called A Sleepy Giraffe, A Trout in the Raff, A Three Corner Tram Car.

John Dankworth8:46

A diligent stoat, A thrush in a boat, A banjo for grandma

John Dankworth8:52

While two hostile kegs Sit waving their legs And sneering at weasels, And George with his flag Is marching a stag Past several wax easels That sort of silliness, you know

John Dankworth9:05

It strikes me as very peculiar that uh or it's not peculiar at all that musicians love the Monty Python uh sort of uh humor because it does run very close to the sort of musicians' humour that I know and love over the past.

Presenter9:17

Which leads you nicely into your next choice of record then.

John Dankworth9:20

Absolutely. It's a marvellous Monty Python track which I'm sure many listeners will have heard many times, but one more won't hurt. It's the track about the argument.

Speaker 49:30

Come in!

Speaker 49:32

Uh is this the right room for an argument?

Speaker 49:34

I've told you once. No, you haven't. Yes, I have. When? Just now. No, you didn't. I did. Didn't. You did. Didn't. I was telling you I did. You did not. Oh, I'm sorry, just one moment. Um, is this a five-minute argument or the full half-hour? Oh, just the uh five minutes. Ah, thank you.

Speaker 19:40

You did not!

Speaker 49:48

Anyway, I did. You most certainly did not. Look, let's get this thing clear. I quite definitely told you. No, you did not. Yes, I did. No, you didn't. Yes, I did. No, you didn't. Yes, I did. No, you didn't. Yes, I did. You didn't. You did. Oh, look, this isn't an argument. Yes, it is? No, it isn't. It's just contradiction. No, it isn't. It is. It is not. Look, you just contradicted me. I did not. Oh, you did. No, no, no. You did just then. Nonsense. Oh, look, this is futile. No, it isn't. I came here for a good argument. But you didn't know you came here for an argument. Well, an argument isn't just contradiction. Can be? No, it can't. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. It is.

Speaker 19:57

Yes.

Speaker 110:08

So

Presenter10:20

Uh

Speaker 410:21

Yes it is.

Presenter10:22

John, you've had this long association now with Cleo Lames, who lasted professionally for more than thirty years. Most of her lifetime. Most of her years. How did she in fact she come into your life?

John Dankworth10:28

Most of our

John Dankworth10:31

Well, I had this little band, the seven, that uh I was talking about, and we needed a singer.

John Dankworth10:37

We were a co operative band, so we all had an equal say. And we auditioned something like sixty seven singers, and none of them came up to scratch or were what we wanted. And then just as a sort of

John Dankworth10:47

Aftermath, when we'd given up, uh my agent said there was a girl who'd come into our office looking for a job.

John Dankworth10:54

I and the pianist auditioned her one lunch time at a little club in Great Newport Street, and we couldn't believe our ears. It was such a a finished, um mature sort of sound from someone who'd never been a professional. But we had to consult the other five members of the orchestra, so I invited Cleo down to sing that evening with the band doing its job in the jazz club and um played her down a bit to the other five, but when they heard her they were even more enthusiastic than I was, so that started the career. And then uh it was about another eight years actually before we got married and um quite a few years actually before we had any relationship other than strictly professional.

Presenter11:34

In most of the articles one reads about the pair of you, when you talk about the working relationship, you're often quoted as being the Svengali figure. Do you object to that?

John Dankworth11:42

Well, I don't object to it because it's natural for people to say things like that. I think in some elements of her career I have been helpful to her. But the answer is now that she is doing something without me and with nothing to do with me, as she's often done in the theatre in the past, and creating an enormous success for herself. So I don't think that what I've done has been at all essential to her career. I've probably helped her in in certain ways, as she's helped me.

Presenter12:06

What problems have been caused by the two of you working together this closely for all these years? Because you are her husband and a musical director, aren't you?

John Dankworth12:15

Yes, it's a very difficult thing to handle sometimes when you feel you should be, as you would with any singer to whom you were a musical director, drawing attention to something that she shouldn't be doing and she is musically. And sometimes, if we're both in the wrong mood, it can look like a husband and wife bicker instead. But I think we're both big enough to assimilate that and realise when we're wrong. And likewise, we both have very strong ideas about musical styles and what we should do. And so it's an eternal fight as to what goes into Clear's repertoire, because she's a lyric lady. She likes lyrics more than the music, so to speak. Whereas I always listen to the music first and the lyrics after, so there are inevitable clashes there. But once again, we fight quite hard on those issues, and the one who has got the weakest case hopefully realises it and backs down in time, which almost always we do. Occasionally we have a real fight, but very rarely these days.

Presenter13:07

Well then who won the fight for the next choice? Because it is a the recording of Clio, but I wonder who who won the fight in the choice of uh of song?

John Dankworth13:15

Well, there wasn't much of a fight really, because I'd already written this setting of a Shakespeare poem for a City of London festival production of Twelfth Night. And when I write things for other lady singers, especially Cleo, is very good at picking them up and showing them she can do better, and so it was a natural choice for Cleo to select this one to record when that I was a little tiny boy.

Speaker 413:37

When that I was a little tiny boy, With hay-ho, the wind, and the rain, A foolish thing was but a toy, For the rain up raineth every day.

Speaker 413:52

When I came alast to wive with hay, Hope the wind and the rain by swaggering could I never thrive for the rain and rain as every day.

Presenter14:05

John, you've spent most of your life trying to break down these musical barriers that we've been talking about. Do you think uh that you've succeeded in in shifting people's positions in any way?

John Dankworth14:15

Yeah.

John Dankworth14:15

Well, I'm not sure that I've succeeded, but I certainly have noticed during the period that I've been in this profession that there's a profound difference of attitude to the crossing of barriers, whereas uh twenty five years ago for a classical player to actually deign to play any jazz or for an opera star to sing any Broadway show hits would have been curtains for their career. On the contrary, these days it seems to enhance them. People like James Galway and

John Dankworth14:39

Kiritakanawa and many hundreds of others of artists are doing that thing all the time. So maybe what I have been preaching over twenty-five years has had some little effect. And of course the thing I've always noticed is that the musicians and artists themselves have never had those prejudices against good music of other sorts. It's always been the audiences that have been the ones with preconceptions and some form of snobbery. I think that is very fast disappearing, that trend. And meeting artists like Vladimir Ashkenazi, for instance, who is a great fan of jazz piano. Nobody would dream of that from someone who is so essentially a classical artist, but he loves jazz. And as a result of friendship, he's been very helpful towards our scheme at Wavendon, where we have a music centre that is devoted to the breaking down of barriers between all sorts of music.

Presenter15:26

I haven't

Presenter15:33

Well, let's talk about Wabden in a moment then. You mentioned Ashkenazi there, and you've chosen a piece by him, haven't you, for your next record.

John Dankworth15:39

Indeed, that in fact has also got a a story. It's a Chopin scherzo that uh when I was young I remember every Saturday morning for months on end waking up in bed and hearing my sister practice on the piano and going over every bar slowly, fast and uh soft and loud until I knew every single note in that particular scherzo. Without even knowing the name before I looked it up for this programme. But I could sing along every note of uh of Chopin's scherzo number two in B flat minor, played by Vladimir Ashkenazi.

Presenter17:12

John, you started the Wavedon or Music Plan some seventeen years ago. What was the original purpose behind it?

John Dankworth17:18

Well, Clio and I had been playing in little auditoriums all over the country.

John Dankworth17:23

And we felt we'd like to have a little auditorium of our own one day, so we looked for a house that had a place that would be suitable, and we found one with a stables block that would work. And then we thought, well, we've tried in our musical philosophy to show that all sorts of music can coexist. Why don't we dedicate this whole place to that philosophy? And so we started putting on concerts and concert series in which the mixture of musics was quite extreme, particularly for that time. And we also started an education programme where we had courses, residential and otherwise, where we preached the same philosophy to young musicians and got young academy students to have a go at a bit of jazz and young jazz players to try Beethoven for the first time, that sort of thing. And it's been overall tremendously successful and tremendously well received, both on the performance and the education side. And it's something that's become part of our lives now. How do you most have funded? Well, it's registered as a charity and it funds itself quite a lot of the way, but for the shortfall that inevitably happens when you try to run a place like that, although it's very cost-efficient compared with some of the big centres, we get help from private enterprise and organisations, corporations, that sort of thing, and from the Milton Keynes Council as well, which is in the area where we live.

Presenter18:37

What about the standard of musicianship in the children who come along to Wavendon? I mean, how do they or do they differ from pupils students in your day?

John Dankworth18:45

The standard of playing has gone up just incredibly. It's there's no question about that. I don't know why it is, particularly because it doesn't seem.

John Dankworth18:54

Logical that the climb should be so steep, but probably the ways of education and the increase of numbers of school orchestras and that sort of thing has done it. What about your own children? Are they musical? My son is a bass player. I was rather glad. He started off playing the saxophone and clarinet, but then went on to bass. And I thought the saxophone and clarinet was a bit too close to the old man to either embarrass him or embarrass me, I'm not sure. So I was glad when he went on to the bass, which has always been one of my favorite instruments. I'm a frustrated bass player.

John Dankworth19:24

He's Alec. My daughter Jackie is a very good singer, but uh likewise she didn't want to duplicate her mother's career and she was very keen on acting, so she went to the Guildhall School of Drama and did an acting course there. She's now a professional actress, although inevitably she finds herself quite often cast for musicals where she has to sing, and she does very well.

Presenter19:43

What about this next choice of of record? This is rather bizarre.

John Dankworth19:47

Well

John Dankworth19:49

I always feel that a a sense of humour is something not only that musicians should have, but everybody should have if they're going to get through life in this crazy world. If you don't laugh at something, you're in trouble. And certainly I found a character in the States, a very well-trained musician named Peter Schickley, who protects the interests of a composer named P. D. Q. Bach, which is actually Peter Schickley in disguise. But he said that he discovered P. D. Q. Bach, who was easily the last of the Bach family to be discovered and easily the least talented. And he writes lots of pieces which are attributed to P. D. Q. Bach, and he makes me laugh tremendously. Some of his efforts are very subtle, some of them are very basic. But one that particularly has me in fits is a madrigal that he wrote called My Bonny Lass She Smelleth.

Speaker 420:36

She looketh like a jewel, And soundeth like a mule My money walketh like a doe, And talketh like a crow

Speaker 420:53

My mother asked would be nice, yay, even at twice the price.

John Dankworth21:09

Well, I think it's lovely. It's always been one of my favorite little musical jokes.

Presenter21:14

Now the curious thing, John, is that is that you and Cleo are a bigger box office in the States than you are here. Why should that be, do you think?

John Dankworth21:22

Well, I think the enormity of the American music and leisure industry, I suppose is what you'd call it now, means that there is far more opportunities for us to do what we want to in the States than there are over here, inevitably. I mean, there are enormously rich organizations who can afford to do experimental things. We've done things with the Michigan Opera. I've written an opera ballet for the Houston Ballet and so on and so forth, where there just aren't the resources quite often to commission things of that sort over here. They have so many symphony orchestras. We work a lot with symphony orchestras in the States. And how many symphony orchestras have we got in this country? A dozen or so. Whereas it must amount to hundreds in the States, and we've played with many, many of them.

Presenter22:04

Do you notice, though, when you play a concert, say, in in America, a difference in the audience reaction there to here?

John Dankworth22:11

Yes, often when we've played the same concert to polite applause from a British audience and then we go to America and do a concert at Carnegie Hall or wherever it might be and uh they stand on their seats and they cheer and they whistle and they hoot and do all those things. As we walk off I say to Clare, don't let it go to your head, dear. You must realize that the same people who are moting so much have got something like two hundred times the murder rate in their civilization as we have in Britain, so that whatever they do, they do bigger, whether it's killing each other or cheering their heroes.

Presenter22:43

Claire, of course, has been over there recently, being a a hit on Broadway, and uh you do an awful lot of work, as you said, in America. Have you ever been tempted to live there, to settle there?

John Dankworth22:52

Well, we do have a couple of homes in America now, which means we can feel at home when we're over there for extended periods. But in fact, uh.

John Dankworth23:00

Cleo particularly, perhaps a little more than I, is a very, very British oriented lady and she feels at home here. And I think it would take a lot more persuading than we've already had from our success over there to persuade us to uh leave this country.

Presenter23:13

Of course all your heroes, your musical heroes basically speaking, have been Americans, have the American jazzmen basically, and we're going to hear a record now of one of them in particular, a man called Duke Ellington.

John Dankworth23:23

Yes, well when I first did a paper round in order to earn money to buy records back in 19, the first record I bought was a Duke Ellington record and from that day right up to the moment I regard him as one of the great musical people to come out of the United States of America of any sort. I think he was a genius and a man of tremendous style.

John Dankworth23:47

And the music that he created, even though it was very personal music for a set group of musicians, nearly all of whom have passed on, that his music will continue to live. And I regard Duke Ellington as one of the great influences in my life, always has been, and always will be. Here's a piece of music which he wrote, for instance, for a Shakespeare festival in Stratford, Ontario. He called the record Such Sweet Thunder, and all the pieces on it were dedicated to some facet of Shakespeare. And here's a charming little portrait of the central character in Macbeth, or one of them, Lady Mac. And the trumpet soloist on it is a great friend of mine who I feel to be one of the great trumpet stylists in the world club, Terry.

Presenter25:31

John, looking back at this long career you've had in music, and a very career, do you think you that you might have concentrated perhaps on any one aspect of it?

John Dankworth25:41

Well, I think probably it might have been a mistake to have tried, but I think if I did have another chance, maybe I would try to concentrate on the writing and composing rather than the playing. It might conceivably detract something from the way I composed or alter the way I composed, but I think I might like to have a shot at that on my next time round in life. On the other hand, I don't really regret the fact that I've been a sort of all-rounder in cricket as in music. There aren't enough all-rounders today, I think, you know, people who are not necessarily

John Dankworth26:10

superlative at any one facet, but very good or quite good at a number. And I placed myself in that category and I've enjoyed it immensely because I've never got bored with things that I'm doing and I've been very fortunate in that people have given me so many opportunities to do things that were quite on a tangent from what I'd previously been trying.

John Dankworth26:29

And that way I've amused myself immensely. So far, of course, I've still got a lot of things I would like to do.

Presenter26:34

Well, like what? I was going to come on to that. I mean, I mean, what ambitions do you have left? I mean, you've done everything. You've written classical music, you've performed the classical orchestras, you've done jazz, you've done popular songs, you've written to the stage, you've written opera, you've written film music. It's difficult to think of of of any aspect of of music that you've not covered.

John Dankworth26:51

No, I think I wouldn't even strain my mind to try to think of what it is, because I know that somewhere or other within a year or two someone's going to come up with it and say do it and I'll know that I haven't done it before and I'll say yes, I can do it and learn it on the way. And that's why I suppose I'm an all rounder and uh that's our lot, us all rounders.

Presenter27:08

One of the new things you did, of course, last year was to uh introduce the summer pops, it was called, at the barbicum with the L S O. Uh was that a sort of lifelong

John Dankworth27:17

Not quite a lifelong ambition, but a very long-standing ambition. For years, Cleo and I have been doing pops concerts in America with all the symphony orchestras there, and it just didn't add up to me that nothing really serious was being done in the way of a series of these type of concerts in Britain with all the fine orchestras that we had. So I approached the London Symphony Orchestra to see whether they were interested in the idea. And they certainly were, and I got great enthusiasm from them about the whole thing. And the long and the short of it was last year that we put on a series of seven concerts, and they were wildly successful, to the extent that we're just about doubling the output for this coming year.

John Dankworth27:57

It was a runaway success and I pat myself a little bit on the back because I did it was something that I really tried to be single-minded about and I did everything I could to publicise it. I put my whole soul into the whole thing for the whole series and it did turn out to Trump's. I admire the London Symphony Orchestra tremendously. They're perhaps the most versatile symphony orchestra in the world. And I can't say how much I enjoyed working with them.

Presenter28:21

So the last record then is very much a celebration of that event.

John Dankworth28:25

Absolutely. I've chosen them to play a piece of music by a composer who I've admired so long for his magnificent orchestration and was one of my early influences in the orchestral field. Conducted by a person who I admire very much as being a great man who crossed barriers when it wasn't so fashionable as it is now, Andrei Previn, conducting Ravel's La Volts with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Presenter29:47

John, your second stint on this desert island, do you think you'd try and escape from it?

John Dankworth29:51

Well, I suppose it depended how much I enjoyed it the second time. I think I might try to establish contact with the rest of the world, but then perhaps if a ship stopped I would just ask the captain if they could uh make a regular stop there so I could get away and come back there whenever I wanted to and use it as a hideaway, because I think I'd have got myself very well established by that point. I'm quite a do-it-yourselfer and I do quite well in straightened circumstances to uh you know to make myself comfortable.

Presenter30:18

What about one record of the eight that you've chosen? Which would it be?

John Dankworth30:22

Well, I think Clio's because firstly, it has a lot of my mates, Paul Hart, Kenny Clare, Darryl Runswick, playing on it. And secondly, because if Clio hears this program and I didn't take Clio's, I'd be in real trouble.

Presenter30:36

What about the the luxury, the inanimate object? The last time, to remind you, you chose to take a saxophone.

John Dankworth30:43

Well, presuming it's the same island, uh I did before I left the last time bury the saxophone and the book choice as well, so that uh the saxophone would still be there. So I think I'd go for a a keyboard this time, either a piano, but that would go out of tune very quickly. Perhaps a solar powered synthesizer would do nicely.

Presenter31:01

Right, and finally the book. The last time you chose The Wisdoms from 1920 onwards, that was your choice.

John Dankworth31:08

Yes, well, having buried those as well, perhaps I should uh have the wisdoms from nineteen twenty backwards to make the thing complete. But if you didn't allow that, I think I'd just like one thick copy of the Exchange and Mart.

Speaker 131:20

Thank you.

Presenter31:20

Uh

Speaker 131:20

The

John Dankworth31:21

Why the exchange of markets? I just think it's fascinating to read, you know, where you can buy a reptile or a or a donkey or a synthesizer or a pile of uh polystyrene.

Presenter31:34

John Dayworth, thank you very much indeed.

Speaker 131:43

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.