Wally Fawkes

Wally Fawkes (* 21st June 1924 in Vancouver ) is a from Canada originating since 1931 in the UK live jazz - clarinet player and a full-time artist , cartoonist and illustrator .

Wally Fawkes left Canada with his family at the age of 7 in 1931 and came to England, where he has lived in the London area ever since and became a British citizen. At the end of the 1940s he was a founding member of Humphrey Lyttelton's revival band and remained in this formation until 1956, which had developed from “revivalism” to mainstream jazz during this period . Since then he has continued to work periodically with Lyttelton and Bruce Turner , Keith Ingham and Stan Greig , but remained an amateur musician. In the early 1970s he played with George Melly and John Chilton in the Feetwarmers Band .

He became better known from then on as a cartoonist under the stage name Trog ; he created the cartoon Flook , which was popular in the 1960s. He worked for many years on the texts for the cartoon. a. with George Melly, Barry Norman , Humphrey Lyttelton and Barry Took . The comic strip Flook appeared in the Daily Mail newspaper from 1949 to 1984 . Central characters of the comic were a little boy named Rufus and his animal friend "Flook". An eye disease forced him to quit his work as a cartoonist in 2005 and he concentrated more on playing the clarinet.

Career as a jazz musician

During the war years, Fawkes began playing in jazz bands. He once joked that because of the time spent in underground bomb shelters , people who lived in London became troglodytes , and he adopted that name for one of his early jazz bands, Wally Fawkes and the Troglodytes . After the group disbanded, Fawkes adopted 'trough' as ​​his pseudonym. In 1947 Fawkes took a weekly course at the Camberwell School of Art in London , where fellow students such as Humphrey Lyttelton and Francis Wilford-Smith took part. Fawkes had been a member of George Webbs Dixielanders , a semi-professional jazz band, since 1944 , with Lyttelton playing the trumpet. When Lyttelton left the Dixielanders in January 1948 to form his own jazz band, Fawkes went with him and stayed with the band until 1956, when it went from "revival" to "mainstream". The fact that his own bands were henceforth called "mainstream" hardly bothered him. Since then he has teamed up with Lyttelton again and again and, despite being very talented on his instrument, is (in the best sense of the word) an "amateur". He has never lost his admiration for playing with Sidney Bechet (with whom he was recorded in 1949 as part of Lyttelton's band). He played with George Melly and John Chilton in the Feetwarmers Band in the early 1970s.

literature

• Richard Cook and Brian Morton : The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings . 8th edition, Penguin, London 2006, ISBN 0-141-02327-9

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biography: Wally Fawkes - The British Cartoon Archive - University of Kent. May 27, 2013, accessed May 15, 2018 .