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For much of the late 1920s and 30s, the BBC broadcast a different
dance orchestra “live” every night of the week, from 10.30pm to
midnight: Ambrose from the Embassy Club on Saturday, Harry Roy from
the May Fair on Friday, Lew Stone from the lavishly appointed
Monseigneur Restaurant on Tuesday – and so on, creating a huge
following of tens of millions
of avid listeners and boosting sales of the bands’ recordings.
The BBC created its own dance orchestra, led first by Jack Payne and
then Henry Hall. In an era othewise blighted by economic depression,
some musicians and band leaders could make good incomes, with Ambrose
reputedly losing £28,000 in one night’s gambling at Monte Carlo!
They were the pop stars of their day.
In 2008, the BBC (to their shame - and despite an avalanche of protests)
decided no longer to broadcast regular programmes of British Dance Band music.
Social history aside, it is perhaps the music which matters most today. Although those thousands of broadcasts are nearly all lost in the ether, 78rpm recordings survive and are regularly re-released. The best of these recordings show what had been achieved by the British Dance Bands, such as HMV’s “house” band, the New Mayfair Dance Orchestra, whose musical director from 1929 to 1934 was Cambridge educated Ray Noble. Noble combined his skills as an arranger and composer – he wrote “The Very Thought Of You”, “Cherokee”, “Love Is The Sweetest Thing” and “Goodnight Sweetheart”, to name but a few – with an innately musical sense of style and good taste, creating some of the most enduring and musically satisfying recordings of all time. Noble’s 1929-34 ensembles were assembled for recordings using the very best players from other bands, especially that of influential arranger Lew Stone and such was the success of their recordings, both here and in the United States, that Noble was invited to open th e Rockerfeller Centre’s Rainbow Room in 1935 with an orchestra assembled for him by Glenn Miller (although Noble was allowed by the American Musicians’ Union to bring his drummer Bill Harty and the now legendary vocalist Al Bowlly with him from England.) Ray Noble’s orchestra was a huge success and Noble himself became a household name in the USA, appearing in films with his orchestra or as an actor and starring in the radio shows of Burns and Allen and others.
The best British Dance Bands brought tremendous style, technical perfection and emotional warmth to their performances – surpassing the requirement to provide music for dancing – ranging from the bittersweet longing of Ray Noble’s “Maybe I Love You Too Much” or Lew Stone’s “I’ll Never Be The Same”, through novelty and comic songs to Ambrose’s virtuoso “Embassy Stomp”, the “hot” style of Nat Gonella or Harry Roy and the ultra-smooth sophistication of the PDO’s predecessors at the Savoy Hotel, Carroll Gibbons and the Savoy Hotel Orpheans. Jack Harris and his orchestra recorded a wonderfully warm version of “Once In A While”; Lew Stone exuberant and exciting versions of “The Continental” and “Milenburg Joys”; Ray Noble used the jazz talents of Freddy Gardner, Lew Davies, Nat Gonella and the diminutive bass player Tiny Winters to invigorate “You Ought To See Sally on Sunday”, “Who Walks In When I Walk Out” and many other glorious 3 minute 78rpm sides. This music matters today because of its quality, it s uniqueness and because it is our own musical heritage - to cherish and keep alive.
The quality of some of the songs themselves, (as opposed to the way they were interpreted by the orchestras of the time), has long been recognised and the songs of Cole Porter and the Gershwins, for example, are feted in their own country much as “classical” composers such as Schubert or Schumann are. We are perhaps not so respectful in the UK of the superb work of our own composers such as Noel Coward, Ray Noble, Vivian Ellis or Ivor Novello – and this applies equally to our heritage of dance band music, often considered superior to the work of its contemporary American counterparts.
The best music of the British Dance Bands has an unique rhythmic bounce and smoothness, sometimes flavoured with jazz and swing, evocative of a lost world of nightclubs and champagne and great songs which tell the story of their time. Radio listeners could be transported by the music to an imaginary world of sophisticated, elegantly dressed people dancing and making witty conversation in the “Art Deco” (as we call it now) surroundings of impossibly glamorous clubs and hotels such as the Embassy or the May Fair – and the Prince of Wales or the glamorous Duke of Gloucester might be seated nearby... The PDO’s aim is to evoke a little of this magic for its audiences.
Michael Law
More information www.pdo.org.uk
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