George Webb (musician)

George Horace Webb (born October 8, 1917 in Camberwell , South London, † March 10 or 11, 2010 ) was a British pianist, bandleader and music organizer who became known as the co-founder of English traditional jazz in the late 1940s.

Life

Webb was the son of an artist who performed in London's Music Halls . His family later moved to Belvedere, Kent , and Webb worked in the assembly of machine guns at Vickers-Armstrong near Dartford . At the time of the outbreak of war he began to be self-taught on the piano and to organize music events in the factory canteen. In 1940 he put together a jazz band whose members played in the style of early jazz they knew from records. Enthusiastic about New Orleans jazz from his youth , he founded the Bexleyheath Rhythm Club , where jazz records were heard.

From 1941 the band appeared under the name George Webb's Dixielanders in the Red Barn Pub in nearby Barnehurst ; Their role model was King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band from 1922 to 1924. One of the visitors was the recently demobilized Humphrey Lyttelton , who soon became a permanent member of the Dixielanders . In the post-war years, the band managed to establish itself in Great Britain; Occasional radio appearances and finally recordings followed. Musicians who played at Webb also included Wally Fawkes , Eddie Harvey and Owen Bryce . Although the Dixielanders' music was considered raw and unpolished, they played with great enthusiasm; Webb was later referred to as " the father of British traditional jazz ".

In 1948 the formation broke up and Webb joined Lyttelton's newly formed band as a pianist. From 1951 he began to work increasingly as a music organizer; so he organized the Sunday sessions in the Shakespeare Hotel in the Woolwich district , which took place on behalf of the Hot Club of London until the early 1960s. In the early 1950s, recordings were made under his own name for Melontone and Decca Records . In 1955 Webb was active in jazz shows promotions and booked bands and singers for the expanding club and concert market. After leaving jazz shows after ten years , he founded his own music agency, which worked with a variety of rhythm and blues and jazz artists . This agency ran successfully until 1973 when Webb put his private fortune into organizing a jazz festival on the Isle of Man . When the construction fell victim to a fire before the festival began, it lost almost all of its investments.

In those years Webb was rarely active as a musician; It was not until the early 1970s that he started playing regularly again, touring Europe as a companion to Jo Starr and reactivating the Dixielanders for a short time in 1973 . In 1974 he took over a pub in Stansted , Essex , which he used as a venue. In 1985 he gave up and moved to the Erith district and still performed occasionally; in 1998 he was a guest soloist at the celebrations of Humphrey Lyttelton's 50th anniversary on stage.

Web links

• Portrait page ( Memento from October 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Obituary in the Telegraph 2010
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e} ´ Obituary in The Times