A Conversation with Jeremy

Because that's where the music is most itself. After 1930 it gets arranged, smoothed out, written for dancing halls of a thousand people. Before 1930 — in those first recordings — it's small, loud, collective, and entirely alive. A cornet, a clarinet and a trombone improvising together around a shared tune, with the rhythm section pushing them forward. That's the sound that captured me.

Honestly? Out of boredom and love in equal measure. We're all parents at Ealing Junior Music School — we sit there every single Saturday while our children learn. One week somebody brought a stand, then a cornet came out of a cupboard, and the parents quietly started playing in the next room. We called ourselves the 'Very Senior' orchestra, because we are — very senior, next to the juniors. It was a joke that stuck.

It means I've spent an unreasonable number of evenings with old recordings and reference books, and I can usually tell you who played on a side and roughly when. In practice it means I assemble the arrangements and choose the repertoire — keeping us honest to the era, so we're not drifting into swing or Dixieland nostalgia that misses the point.

Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings from the late 1920s. Start with 'West End Blues' and 'Muskrat Ramble'. Then go back to the Original Dixieland Jass Band's 1917 records to hear where it began. You'll hear the whole story of the decade in those few sides.

To keep this music in the air, in a small room in Ealing, played the way it was meant to be played. And maybe — I hope — to send a few people down the rabbit hole, into the recordings and the history, the way I went years ago.