Please pass on the sad news that legendry
Leeds trombonist and band Leader Ed O’Donnell died in his
sleep on Thursday 13th February. He was 87 and
it was his birthday. Circa 1948, when he was about 20 years
old, Ed formed The Vernon Street Ramblers, one of the first
jazz bands to emerge in Leeds after the Second World War.
The band took its name from the street on which the Leeds
College of Art was situated and several of its members were
students there. Several private 78 rpm recordings of the
band exist.
Later Ed became a founder member of Bob Barclay’s Yorkshire
Jazz band along with fellow Vernon Street Ramblers Alan
Cooper and Diz Disley. The band became one of the leading
bands in the country and often travelled to London to play.
On one occasion their trumpet player, Richard Hawdon, slept
in and missed the train to London. Somehow Ken Colyer was
recruited to deputise in time for the gig. This brought Ed
to Ken’s attention. Ken called on Ed to fill the trombone
chair when he escaped from Chris Barber’s clutches and
formed his own band to put into practice what he had learned
in New Orleans. This was much to the chagrin of Mac Duncan
who had been telling all and sundry that Ken would select
him for his band! Mac and Ed were good friends and often
practiced together in Leeds.
Ed
spent some time playing in Ken’s band but eventually grew
tired of “scuffling” and sleeping three to a bed with the
likes of Acker and Ken and returned to Leeds and an easier
life. Never the less he remained a life long friend of both
Ken and Acker. Ed spent the rest of his life running bands
in Leeds and helped to launch a number of outstanding
players including Martin Fox, Jim Fuller, and James Evans.
He performed his last gig with his band about a fortnight
before his death and it was a great success. Ed remained
passionately devoted to the New Orleans style of jazz up to
his death. Some one came up to him at a gig and said “I see
your still playing that old Bunk Johnson stuff”. “What else
is there?” was Ed’s reply.
The Requiem Mass will be at 10.00am on Tuesday 4th
March at the Our Lady Of Lourdes church - 130 Cardigan Lane
Leeds LS6 3BJ
The cremation service will be at 11.40 at Lawns wood
Crematorium, Otley Road (A660), Adel, Leeds LS16 6AH. A New
Orleans Style parade band will escort the hearse up to the
chapel and play outside as the coffin is carried into the
chapel and again as the congregation leaves.
A
wake will be held afterwards at Armley Conservative Club on
Armley Ridge Road Leeds LS12 3LE.
Please refer any enquiries to me
Thank you, in anticipation,
Don Macpherson (0113
2947151)
25/04/14 -
ED O’DONNELL – the doyen of Leeds Jazz
By Andrew Liddle
Published in the May 2014 edition of
Just Jazz Magazine
The first time
I saw Ed O’Donnell was in the late 1960s and he’d already
been playing with great distinction for more than twenty
years. I’m pleased to have been able to enjoy so much of the
rest of his career, countless gigs in so many venues in and
around his native city of Leeds and farther afield, and to
have been able to interview him twice for this magazine, to
mark his 80th and 85th birthdays.
The Yorkshire Post newspaper had taken in recent years to
referring to Ed, in its entertainments section, as the
‘indestructible’. No man is and, sadly, there will be no
more gigs because Ed passed away, gently in his sleep, on
14th February, a matter of hours after the occasion of his
87th birthday. It was only a week or so after he had raised
the roof with his band at Thornton Watlass, in the Yorkshire
Dales - and only a matter of days before he was due to play
again in Bingley, near Bradford.
Had he done this gig, it is not difficult to imagine how it
would have gone because in so many ways all Ed’s gigs were
the same – and this is meant as the highest compliment and
not a criticism. It is a matter of fact that the Ed
O’Donnell Band always sounded the same, regardless of
personnel. Over the decades there were numerous changes as
players came and went, but the one constant – apart from the
maestro himself – was the New Orleans’ style and repertoire.
Some people call it ‘style creep’, the subtle way a band’s
style shifts over time. I asked him once how he avoided it.
‘I think I dominate them,’ he said with a twinkle, ‘make
them see we play New Orleans or not at all!’
Certainly this tall, slim, heavily bearded man, who put the
remarkable longevity of his strength down to his wartime
experiences as a Bevin Boy coal miner, always did it his
way, which was like no others. No one else ever stripped
down so readily to a colourful vest, usually after the first
solo and regardless of temperature. No one else ever
terminated his own vocal with that revolving hand wave, a
sort of self-mocking acknowledgement of the crowd’s
applause. In many ways, he was pure Vaudeville, rolling his
eyes in search of a lyric’s innuendo; embracing his own
heart when apparently overcome with emotion; jabbing his
index finger into his ear to check his own voice when
singing a slow Blues; tailgating with joyous extravagance;
lumbering from side to side when delivering Moose March; or
staring fixedly into the middle distance to appraise some
else’s solo.
And his patter never changed. True, a joke or aside might
disappear for a decade or more only to suddenly resurface
when least expected and all but forgotten. Before the last
number, he would flourish his old pocket-watch and study it
intently. At the very end, he would lurch into a lengthy
exhortation, inviting his audience to tell their friends,
neighbours, in-laws, outlaws, rentman, gasman, postman (the
list was interminable) to tell their friends (etc., etc.)
that the Ed O’Donnell Band was … He didn’t have to complete
the phrase because everybody did it for him, before he added
in confirmation ‘The only game in town!’ I asked him once
where this came from. ‘I’ve said it for so long, I can’t
remember,’ he said, before adding he thought he might have
heard it first in a Western film.
When talking during the break he could be persuaded into
unpacking one of his tremendous anecdotes about some of the
people he’d played with, often referring to the more famous
by surname only, as Cooper, Disley, Colyer. Only his mate,
Acker, escaped this. When asked whom he most admired in
Jazz, he said without a second’s hesitation, ‘Jim Fuller, a
brilliant musician and a very modest man.’ A wonderful
tribute to his former trumpeter whose career had been
terminated by arthritis.
Great entertainer that he was, Ed could showboat with the
best but never at the expense of his music. He had nothing
but contempt for those who felt it necessary to dress up in
fancy hats and waistcoats, preferring instead to dress down,
in fact, and let the music speak for itself. In truth, he
didn’t have much time for any other kinds of Jazz. ‘Bunk is
our God,’ he observed on stage. Apparently someone once
approached him and said, ‘I see you’re still playing that
old Bunk Johnson stuff!’ Ed’s withering reply was: ‘What
else is there?’ Privately he would talk encomiastically
about Jim Robinson, George Lewis, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith,
Leadbelly and, perhaps surprisingly, Jimmie Rodgers, the
white ‘Blue Yodeller’, to whom he introduced me, and the
Carter family. I cannot honestly remember him mentioning too
many others, however.
In 1948, Ed joined The Vernon Street Ramblers, which took
its name from the street on which the Leeds College of Art
was situated where several of its members were students –
and where one day Ed would become a lecturer on diamond
mounting and hand-engraving. It was one of those
life-changing moments that come completely by chance. ‘One
day,’ he explained, ‘I was walking through the city and
heard this most fantastic music coming from an upstairs room
of the art college.’ He quickly made his way to the source
and discovered Alan Cooper, on clarinet, Diz Disley, on
banjo, Pat Webb, on cornet, Henry Moore on drums and Ted
Fenton, on trombone. Ed took to sitting in with them and
evcntually ‘eclipsed’ (Ed’s word) Fenton.
Soon Ed became a founder member of Bob Barclay’s
ground-breaking Yorkshire Jazz Band, originally called the
Twin City Washboard Stompers, the suggested name change
coming from Graeme Bell, over from Australia. Pretty soon,
they were in London making those legendary Tempo recordings.
Ed always remembered with great affection those nights, at
the Adelphi and at the Metropole, in Leeds, with Dick Hawdon
on trumpet, ‘Happy’ Harker’, clarinet, later replaced by
Cooper, Bob Barker, tuba, Eddie Encale, banjo (later
Disley), Art Rigg, piano and ‘Woody’ Wolstenholme, banjo.
It was not long before he was leading his first band, the
Paramount Jazz Band, formed with Jim Leonard, on trumpet and
‘Sleepy’ Green, piano, Raymond Hill, drums and John Cooke,
on banjo. Before long he added schoolboy clarinettist,
Martin Boland, with whom he was soon to start the White
Eagles, a band still very much in existence sixty-five years
on, but which in those early days played at The Peel and The
Royal.
It was in 1954 that Rex Harris in the Penguin History Of
Jazz identified Ed as a trombonist of great promise, one of
the best of the new crop. It is doubtful the eminent Jazz
critic would have done so had Ed remained in Leeds, but by
then, of course, he had been headhunted by Bill Colyer and
was based in London, playing with Ken Colyer’s re-formed
band, forming a life-long friendship with Acker Bilk, with
whom he shared digs. When I asked Ed if he had any regrets
about leaving Colyer’s band, he rolled his eyes forlornly
but said forthrightly that he had none: ‘You can never
regret decisions you made in life because you made them for
good reasons at the time’. One such reason was the near
impossibility of surviving in London on six pounds a week.
Returning to Leeds, Ed played for a time with Keith Smith’s
Huddersfield-based band, before being briefly bitten by the
Skiffle bug, playing bass (‘affecting to’, as he put it)
with The Steel Drivers. Soon he was putting together another
very strong band with Jim Fuller and clarinettist Martin
Fox. This was the best of times, as Ed remembered it,
playing all around the West Riding, at the height of the
Trad Boom, at students’ unions, rag balls, sometimes after
hours at ‘lock-ins’ in pubs without a music licence.
‘Sometimes we got a quid apiece, sometimes fifty bob,’ he
recalled. ‘We certainly didn’t do it for the money!’
In 1988, he was part of the reunion of the Yorkshire Jazz
Band, filmed by Yorkshire Television, with the surviving
members: Cooper, Disley, Hawdon ,Wolstenholme and, on tuba,
Jim Bray in place of Bob Barclay who had passed away.
Anybody who saw it could never forget the sight of the
impressively bearded figure walking grandly into his home
from home, the Adelphi, sporting a deerstalker. Another
reunion came in 2004, in memory of Ken Colyer, performed at
the Purcell Room, South Bank, London, attended by such
luminaries as Ian Wheeler, Stan Greig, Micky Ashman, Ray
Bowden and Ed’s old mates, Diz and Acker.
Decades came and went but Ed played on and was active to the
very end. It is a matter of record that his last gig was the
sunday lunchtime session at Thornton Watlass, on 2nd
February, 2014. And it was some band with Arthur Stead on
trumpet, Frank Brooker, clarinet, Richard Speight, banjo,
Annie Hawkins, bass and Barry Wood, drums.
Ed was buried on 4th March, the Requiem Mass being held at
Our Lady of Lourdes Church, Leeds. A New Orleans parade band
escorted the hearse to the Lawnswood Crematorium, Adel, and
played again as the congregation left, in a deeply moving
tribute to the man who for more than sixty years had
dominated Jazz in the Leeds area. The wake was held
afterwards at Armley Conservative Club, which Ed attended on
most Tuesdays, sitting peacefully in the taproom, listening
to the Jazz band playing in the concert room, no doubt
appraising it according to its closeness to the spirit of
New Orleans.
He is survived by his wife Ann, his two daughters, Frances
and Kate and grandchildren, Naomi and Nathaniel. Our
thoughts go out to them.
My own thoughts turn back to the first time I saw Ed, the
first of so many ambrosial nights in the Adelphi. The
Tetley’s beer, brewed a stone’s throw away, flowed like
water and tasted like wine. I was a young man and Ed was in
his prime. The Jazz was simply wonderful to hear, echoing
down Briggate. I found myself running up those stairs and
experiencing the most joyous flooding of the senses as I was
hit by a hot fug of fags, beer fumes and music blissfully
loud and stomping. No flower power junkhead of the time ever
got a buzz like that.