Joe Temperley - early days...

Joe Temperley was born in 1929 in Cowdenbeath, Scotland. He emigrated to New York in December, 1965. This, in his own words in 1989, is his story up to when he left the UK... xxxxxxxxxxxxxbiog. and discography..

I started to play the cornet with Cowdenbeath Brass Band when I was twelve or thirteen years old. My brother played cornet in the band as well, but he also had a band which was playing semi-professional around the various halls in West Fife. He wanted a saxophone player, so he bought me a saxophone and that's how I got involved. I was fourteen when I first started playing the sax and started having lessons with one of the local guys in Lochgelly. After six months I could play better than he could and that was the extent of my musical education. Most of the things I learned I just learned from experience, by just actually doing it. When I was about seventeen I went to Glasgow and played in the Piccadilly Club in Sauchiehall Street and I met a wonderful guy there by the name of Jimmy Morgan. He was a trumpet player and he also played piano, I learned a lot from him. After about eighteen months at the club Tommy Sampson came up from London with his band to Green's Playhouse, I had an audition with Tommy who offered me a job. I was about twenty years old and that's when I went to London. After Tommy I was with the Harry Parry Sextet (late 1949). The trumpet player was Pat Barnett, drummer Danny Craig and Dill Jones came in on piano. Jack Fallon played bass. It was a fun time for me. I was just a kid and Harry loved the way I played. but Harry was a peculiar sort of guy - like a two bottles of Vodka a day guy! He was wonderful up until the second bottle of Vodka started, then he got kind of short tempered. But I had a great time with Harry. He got a little bit disenchanted with the music business towards the end of his playing days, I guess, but I had a lot of good experience with him. I went to Egypt with him and the first time I went abroad I went to Holland with him and various places like that. I had a good time with Harry and he was very upset when I left him to go to Joe Loss (c1950/1). Joe Loss was strictly a dance band. It was a great business. Joe was a very astute man and he really knew how to get to people and make them dance. People all over the country and everywhere loved him so he must have been doing something right. Phil Seamen and I were in the band and we were the band hooligans, I guess. We were just having fun and having a good time. Those were sort of carefree days and we didn't realise much. We didn't even realise we were making or a career or anything, we were just having fun. I used to do jazz gigs and jam sessions but we were so busy with Joe we didn't really get a lot of time to do things like that. Joe was also upset when I left him to go to Jack Parnell. In fact he was astounded: "People don't leave my band until they have their own hotel or their own business. What are you going to do? You're just a young fellow and you shouldn't leave my band until you have your own business and some sign of security". I know what he was talking about now, but unfortunately at that time I didn't know what he was talking about, I just wanted to go and play with Jack Parnell's band (1953/4). It was after I came to be with Jack Parnell that I started to get involved going to the various clubs in London, like the old Mapleton Street Club, Club51 and those kind of places. Club 11 had started up with all those guys from around the Ronnie Scott days and they all started up with Tommy Pollard. I remember spike Robinson, I guess he was in the navy at that time and he used to play down at the Club II with Tommy. I remember hanging out with all those people like Denis Rose. I was always interested in solfeggio, I learned a lot of music through solfeggio and Denis Rose was an expert. We used to write exercises on the wall in the rehearsal room down below Club II. We would play them and Denis would teach me a lot of things about singing and playing. I learned quite a lot from Denis. Around that time I was listening to a lot of Stan Getz. He was a big influence on me, I liked that kind of playing a lot. It was only in later days that I began to realise that the elder statesman of the jazz scene was Coleman Hawkins. continued top right...

continued from bottom left... I didn't appreciate Hawkins and Lester Young and Ben Webster and Duke Ellington then. It was later on that I became involved with that kind of listening. At that time, when I was younger, it was more like surface things I was listening to - not that Stan Getz is a surface thing. I've always loved his playing dearly and still do. After Jack Parnell I was with Tony Crombie's small group (c1954). We had Dizzy Reece and Les Condon on trumpet, Sammy Walker and myself on tenors, Harry South played piano and Annie Ross was on vocals. We had quite a time with that band, it was a good band. Bobby Breen was a singer there too. Unfortunately, it all ended up for me in a terrible fiasco in Liverpool. One night Sam Walker and I were billed as "The Battle of the Tenors". We played Lester Leaps in and it really did get into a battle. Sammy started leaping about all over the stage, doing all kind of antics that I didn't really approve of. We got into this terrible fight after the gig and one thing led to another, and it led to me just bowing out of the band. I couldn't deal with that kind of thing. Probably I could deal with it now. I could take it now, but at that time it seemed a regrettable thing to me. Unfortunately then, my emotional level wasn't as developed as it is know and I tended to show my emotions a little bit too severly. It developed into something that I didn't really care for, so that was the end of that. I was playing tenor with Tony's band but I started off when I was fourteen playing the alto for a couple of years. Then I went into another band in Scotland and to get into that band I had to change to tenor. It wasn't until I went with the Humphrey Lyttelton band that I really started playing the baritone. At that time Humphrey had two saxophone players, Tony Coe and Jimmy Skidmore. Jimmy got sick and had to have an operation so Kathleen Stobart started deputising for Jimmy. She played quite a few jobs, then there was something she couln't make so they called me to deputise and I started playing with the band on tenor. I had such a good time with the band and I'd never experienced such a feeling of security and love and, well, just general wellbeing. Up until then all my experiences with the music business, with the exception of Joe Loss, had been very sort of insecure. In Humphrey's band the music wasn't only good, but the money was good, and the conditions were good as well. I felt secure and felt that I would very much like to play in this band. Humph and I became good friends and we still are. I just wanted to be in the band, Eventually, Jimmy recovered and came back to the band and that was when I started playing the baritone. So then we had a saxophone section, Tony Coe, Jimmy Skidmore and myself on baritone. We had two brass, Humphrey and John Picard, so we had a five piece front line. Then Humph started having different people write arrangements for the band, like Eddie Harvey and Harry South, people like that, and we started to develop a great ensemble sound. The band just developed from there. We still played all the old things but we also incorporated a lot of new things into the band. But then Humph was never one to come down and say, you know, you had to play this style or you had to play a certain way. Everybody was free to play the way they felt they should play and it's always been like that, with Humph. Even when I play with him now I never have any problems with style or anything like that because everybody just plays the way they play and it works out perfectly well. I was with Humph for eight years (1958/65) until I went to the States in December 1965. I had been to the States with Humph's band for two or three weeks in 1959. I got to New york and spent the whole time just going round the jazz clubs. I remember saying to Eddie Taylor when we got on the plane to come home "I've got to come back here sometime" and sure enough six years later I came back to New York City. I went entirely on spec, I didn't have a job to go to. After a difficult six months Jake Hanna and Nat Pierce helped me to get a seat in the Woody Herman band and I started to work regularly...