* En anglais uniquement
As one of England's leading trad jazz exponents,
Ken Colyer's influence would have been confined to his own country were it not for a spin-off that would inadvertently lead to great changes in the music world at large. Self-taught on trumpet and guitar,
Colyer was a founding member of
the Crane River Jazz Band (1949 to 1953), a New Orleans-styled band that he left in late 1951 in order to join the Merchant Marines with the intention of shipping out to New Orleans itself and jamming with local legends. Upon his return to England in March 1953,
Colyer joined a group founded by
Monty Sunshine and
Chris Barber that soon became
Ken Colyer's Jazzmen. As in the Crane River group,
Colyer's shows included a "band within a band" segment that purported to educate audiences about the roots of jazz, playing a guitar-based, highly rhythmic mutation of American folk music that became known as skiffle. When
Colyer left
the Jazzmen in 1954, the group coalesced around
Barber and its banjo player,
Lonnie Donegan, who went on to have a hit skiffle record "Rock Island Line" that caught the imagination of a Liverpool youngster named
John Lennon. Beginning in 1954,
Colyer split his time between leading trad jazz groups as a trumpeter and skiffle groups as a guitarist, recording frequently for English Decca.
Colyer's melodic
Bunk Johnson-influenced lead trumpet gave his jazz bands a distinctive flavor of their own, while his skiffle groups had a "Blacker" sound than those of most English skifflers, grounded in the
Leadbelly 78s that
Colyer brought back from New York when he was 19.
Colyer's jazz band of the mid-'50s rivaled
Barber's group as the leading British trad band of the day, featuring such sidemen as
Acker Bilk,
Ian Wheeler, and
Mac Duncan.
Colyer would lead bands in the '60s and '70s with time-out for bouts with illness, running his own KC record label, appearing at his own club Studio 11, and returning in the early '80s at the helm of
the All-Star Jazzmen. ~ Richard S. Ginell