Billy Jones

Billy Jones is quoted as saying he was taught to play jazz by ‘a coloured musician’ who worked as a pianist in London clubs before the First World War. This man’s identity has never been established…and the story may in any case be apocryphal. Be that as it may, in 1920 Jones was leading a small group at Rector’s Club on Tottenham Court Road, which was owned by W.F. Mitchell, Billy Jones at 70 – still from a 1963 Pathé short.  Who also ran the Hammersmith Palais de Danse, where the Original Dixieland Jazz Band were by this time in residence. When the ODJB needed a replacement for J Russell Robinson, who returned to New York to work for WC Handy, Billy Jones was on hand to take up the job. He recorded nine sides with the band before they in their turn went back to the USA. Thereafter, apart from one coupling for Parlophone with his own Dixieland Band, these four previously unissued piano solos for Decca (accompanied by an unknown drummer on all but the last) are his only other known recordings. Just why Decca decided not to issue them is unclear: technically and musically – apart from a slightly muffed start on Maple Leaf Rag – I can hear no obvious faults, so presumably the listening panel thought them too un-commercial for the time. Certainly, Jones gives them all, especially Ringtail Blues a very modernistic interpretation, and maybe this counted against them. In the 1940s and 50s, Billy Jones ran a pub in Chelsea, where he played piano and sang – reputedly the only man who knew the entire lyric of Maple Leaf Rag.