Dizzy Reece’s Legacy from Windrush to New York

In October 1959, Jamaican trumpeter Dizzy Reece left London for New York on the liner Liberte, taking his wife and daughter with him. At the quayside, he was met by Alfred Lion of Blue Note records, the label that had already released his celebrated album, Blues in Trinity. [produced in London by Tempo boss and Jazzwise writer the late Tony Hall – Ed]. Bob Parent’s photographs, taken on his arrival, show a large African drum in Reece’s luggage. Within a couple of weeks, he was in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in New Jersey, playing that drum on Africane, a little­-known Art Blakey album not released until 1979.

I have often wondered where that instrument came from. I finally got a chance to ask him on phoning him early last year in New York.

“It’s right here beside me, in my living-room,” said Reece, speaking just days after his 93rd birthday. He told me about finding the drum. A fascination with African rhythms was running high in jazz circles in 1956 when he and drummer Phil Seamen went to see the Senegalese Ballets Africains of Keita Fodeba at London’s Palace Theatre. Backstage, they met the drummers, then, after the troupe left town, Reece saw the drum in a pawnshop. He bought it for £9 and has kept it to this day. Importantly,
he says, “I celebrate the African who made it.”

Eleven years earlier, in June 1948, Reece arrived in Britain on the m/v Empire Windrush together with his saxophonist friend, Sam Walker. Long before the internet made research a relatively simple matter, I went to the National Archives at Kew to examine the passenger list for this emblematic voyage. I planned to write about the musicians on board, several of whom self-identified with an alternative trade, music not yet being seen as a serious occupation. My tally of entertainers reached over 30 eventually, with Alphonso Reece, at 17-and-a-half, among the youngest.

Reece became an admired figure in British modern jazz circles. However, Europe permitted progress only so far, and in 1959, New York was his only alternative. After emigrating for a second time, he recorded several albums for Blue Note, the first non-American to do so. He played with all the big names in jazz, composed, broadcast, and wrote about music, and today, now aged 94, has kept his head above water for over six-and-a-half decades. In Jamaica, he is celebrated as an important artist, while remaining a somewhat elusive figure elsewhere.

In 1959 I saw Reece in concert at the Recital Room on the South Bank and got his autograph. He was playing with vibraphonist Victor Feldman, and accompanied by local bebop legends, Tommy Pollard, Sammy Stokes and Phil Seamen. I have seen him several times since, but never managed an interview. It was partly because of the affection in which he was held by his old friend Maggie Hayes, formerly married to saxophonist Tubby, that I persevered. Maggie persuaded him to see me but although I was often in New York, the time was never right. The occasional phone call has had to suffice as I struggled to fill in details of his earliest days in England, aided by the recollections of friends and associates. It’s a story that has never been told.

He was born Alphonso Eglesfield Woodford Reece in Kingston, Jamaica, on 5 January, 1931. Cecil, his father, played piano for silent films, his mother was Pearl. He attended St Aloysius School until his parents’ marriage broke down. To curb his unruliness, his mother sent him, aged 11, to Alpha, the Kingston trades school run by nuns, renowned for its rigour and musical training.

As a youngster he witnessed Alexander Bustamente, Jamaica’s fiery labour leader, campaigning in the streets of Kingston during a strike. He was impressed with ‘Busta’s’ nationalist rhetoric, and would have liked to have joined in the workers’ struggle, were it not for his disciplined regime.

He started on baritone horn in a brass band, aged 12, making his professional debut two years later, as a trumpeter in Jack Brown’s 12-piece swing orchestra. He learnt more about jazz on visits to older trumpeter Pete Pitterson, in the company of Sam Walker, then known as ‘Little Sammy’, before forming the Be-Boppers, with fellow trumpeter Sonny Bradshaw, the first modern jazz group to broadcast over Jamaican radio, with a line-up that included guitarist Ernest Ranglin and trumpeter Roy Stephens, scion of a celebrated musical family. Pianist Delray Stephens, Roy’s elder brother, travelled with Reece and Walker on the Windrush, together with two younger brothers, trumpeter Leslie, and double-bassist Owen, another graduate of St Aloysius.

During the journey, Reece and Walker played with the brothers’ band, following them to Liverpool where they had relatives, on arrival. While Reece continued to play a few dates with them, Walker joined Jamaican dancer, Herman McKay, a longtime resident, in his Latin-American combo. Over the August bank holiday, after a mere few weeks in the city, the newcomers were caught up in a sequence of serious disturbances. These three days of racially-motivated attacks, directed at Indians, Africans, West Indians and other people of colour, filled columns in the local newspapers at the time, while remaining poorly-documented to this day.

Reece and Walker were on their way to see their countryman Bobby Breen, a singer and earlier settler, when they came under attack. While Reece escaped injury, Walker was not so lucky. He was injured, as was McKay, out securing a contract for his band when the incident occurred. Walker and McKay were arrested, and charged with two others with being armed with an offensive weapon with intent to wound. All four pleaded guilty, but claimed self-defence.

In court, the extent of McKay’s injuries raised suspicion, with questions from the bench about police behaviour. Eventually, the cases were dismissed on appeal.

Overnight, Liverpool had lost its allure. On hearing of industrial work in the Midlands, Reece and Walker moved to Birmingham, closely followed by McKay. They were reunited with other Windrush alumni at a hostel in Causeway Green near Oldbury, where they formed a band to play for weekend dances. Aubrey Henry was on drums and Harry Wilmot, future father of entertainer Gary, on double bass. For a while, Reece shared a house with guitarist Norman Preston and saxophonist Granville Edwards, son of a bandmaster in Hanover Parish. Edwards, too, played with the Stephens band on the crossing. He would stay in Birmingham for a while, forming a band, before settling finally in Manchester in 1952.

Despite their growing numbers and the solidarity and support of fellow Jamaicans, the newcomers continued to encounter prejudice in Britain’s second city, most notably from groups of Polish ex­-servicemen, challenging them for the favours of local women at dances. As Harry Wilmot’s brother, Allan, singer with the Southlanders, put it, “The Poles think they’re the pretty boys, but the girls, of course, go for the West Indians. So they fight.’

It was because of this racial animosity that the hostel management made the unwise decision early in 1949 to segregate the Jamaicans from the Poles and the British. Such discrimination produced considerable resentment on the part of the Jamaicans, increasing the atmosphere of tension. That August, police were called to a riot at the hostel. Armed with sticks, stones, razors and chairs, Poles surrounded the Jamaican quarters, even attacking one man with bricks as he lay in bed. He was joined by three Poles at the hostel sick bay, all four of them severely injured. Discovering the situation on returning to the hostel was enough for some residents. Requesting a police escort, several of the Jamaicans returned to their quarters, packed their bags and left.

A month later, yet another saxophonist arrived from Jamaica. Andy Hamilton, from Port Antonio, had once played for Errol Flynn on his yacht, but now he had been caught, secreting himself on board a banana boat bound for England. In London, he served the mandatory prison sentence as a stowaway, then headed for Birmingham.

He found Reece and Walker packing their bags. “I asked them why they go. They say because of the prejudiced people give them a hard time. They said ‘Why you want to stay?’ I said, Nobody going to run me away.” True to his word, Hamilton stayed put, to carve out a secure reputation as a community bandleader and activist, and form an enduring partnership with pianist Ron Daley, an ex-RAF arrival on the Orbita, four months after the Windrush.

Eventually, Reece became a prominent figure on London’s modern jazz scene, a ubiquitous presence wherever bebop was played. And yet his was no easy ride. The contradictions of a world where black musicians are regarded as deities and kings, yet where individuals face disrespect and disdain, has been obscured in histories of British jazz. Reece became famous, yet his journey to acceptance in a virtually all-white environment was fraught with difficulties. This article is a small attempt to acknowledge and describe the dichotomies in this early period.

In London, Reece found a nightclub run by Happy Blake, a drummer from Trinidad. In Kingly Street, a narrow thoroughfare behind the Regent Street stores, this was in a premises formerly known as The Nest, a popular haunt for visiting American musicians in the 1930s. Blake preferred to spend his days at the racetrack and his nights playing cards, rather than running a dub, so when he found two Caribbean ex-RAF officers who flourished in the nightlife, he left them in charge.

Edward Scobie was one of these, a burgeoning broadcaster and journalist from Dominica known to this writer. Scobie described their location in “a nest of little clubs”, among them the nearby Bag O’Nails, famously patronised by Guards officers and jazzmen, while functioning also as a brothel.

Scobie recalled the night Reece turned up at Happy’s, carrying his trumpet in a brown paper bag, and asked to sit in. He took one look at the youth with his rumpled suit and uncombed hair and was unimpressed. “I said ‘Look, if you want to practice, come and play after the job’. I never thought Dizzy would amount to anything. He reminded me of that [some time later, when] I did a broadcast for the BBC about his music!”

With saxophonist Goflett ‘Pet’ Campbell, another school friend from St Aloysius, Reece played regularly in the big bands assembled for Caribbean dances. He tried his luck in the clubs again when Club Eleven, the musicians’ collective, moved into the old Blue Lagoon premises in Carnaby Street. Here again he and Campbell got the cold shoulder. It was with some degree of shame that drummer Laurie Morgan and early member Dave Davies admitted that despite holding the greats such as Ellington and Charlie Parker in high esteem, disparaging remarks were made about “unschooled West Indians”.

Reece refused to dwell on rejection. He set about improving his technique instead, spending a year in the woodshed, to emerge as a pretty fair player. People took notice. Before long he was in the top-flight of British modernists, and recording for Tempo. He developed an entrepreneurial streak, as well, launching The New Birdland with Sam Walker, later Club Zan-Ze-Ba, at 39 Gerrard Street, subsequently premises of the first Ronnie Scott’s. He promoted concerts, too, in the company of Noel ‘Wizard’ Simmons, another talented and forgotten trumpet-man from Jamaica.

Reece continued to work on the Continent, often with leading Americans, but back home in England, the limitations of the local scene were becoming increasingly obvious. The influential A&R man Tony Hall played Reece’s Tempo recordings to Miles Davis who made encouraging remarks, and other touring Americans applauded his ‘feel’ for the music. Miles’ comments made him the talk of the town.

In 1959, Blue Note’s Alfred Lion came to England to check him out. He travelled to Ilford where the trumpeter was playing with drummer Tony Kinsey and liked what he heard. He was taking a chance on Reece, Lion told Tony Hall, but he saw something special in him and secured him the sponsorship of Blue Note. Within a year, Soundin’ Off, Reece’s third album for the label, was a Cash Box ‘Jazz Pick of the Week’.

Thanks to Dizzy and Rica Reece, Jack and Ann Cooke, Ron Daley (aka ‘Sam Browne’), Dave Davies, Granville Edwards, Andy Hamilton, Maggie Hayes, Syd Lissner, Laurie Morgan, Pete Pitterson, Edward Scobie, Owen Stephens, Cynthia Sesso, Sonny Bradshaw, Jean Wallis and Allan Wilmot.