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Hot Jazz, Warm Feet

By John Chilton

Northway (275pp., Ł11.99)

The author of a series of definitive, scrupulously well researched biographies of jazz figures such as Coleman Hawkins, Sidney Bechet, Louis Jordan, Henry 'Red' Allen and Roy Eldridge (not to mention a couple of indispensable reference works dealing with UK musicians and US players born before 1920), trumpeter John Chilton has now documented his own life as a professional jazz musician in this consistently lively, readable autobiography.

From his early years as a WWII evacuee from his council-estate home near Euston Station, through National Service in the RAF and work as a junior clerk for the Daily Telegraph, to finding his feet in the post-war UK jazz scene and eventual fame with George Melly and the Feetwarmers, Chilton's life has been not so much enlivened by as totally imbued with jazz, both the music itself and the personalities and histories of its practitioners.

From the moment, in 1944 when he was twelve, that Chilton chanced to hear Sidney Bechet on the radio playing Jelly Roll Morton's 'I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say', he was utterly besotted with jazz, keeping scrapbooks (eventually expanded into his Who's Who of Jazz), gravitating towards jazz-literate girlfriends, playing in various RAF bands and eventually, via Butlin's, joining the Jump Band recently formed by alto player/clarinettist Bruce Turner (whose own memoir's title, Hot Air, Cool Music clearly inspired Chilton's).

From here on, Chilton's life is easily summed up by his book's chapter titles, among them 'Living Jazz', 'Finding [Wally] Fawkes and Meeting [George] Melly', 'On the Road Again', 'A Jazz Scrapbook Comes to Life' and 'The Good Old Wagon Stops Rolling'.

Personalities such as the sweet-toothed vegetarian teetotaller Turner, the rumbustious larger-than-life Melly and the various US musicians with whom Chilton came into contact (the unpredictable Ben Webster, the irascible Ruby Braff, the uniquely roguish showman Slim Gaillard í about whom there is a hilarious, if somewhat uncomfortable chapter describing a drunken dÎbÎcle of a performance at the Newbury Spring Festival í among them) are all entertainingly described in a narrative rich with anecdote and peppered with psychological insights, but, above all, infused with love of and knowledge about jazz.

A worthy addition not only to Chilton's jazz biographies, but to the growing library of works dealing with what used to be a somewhat neglected subject, British jazz.