Gerry Moore

In Gerry Moore we meet Britain’s first full-blooded professional jazz pianist and one of the few who managed to make a living from the music for most of his life; he seems also to have been a man who enjoyed controversy. When times were hard, as they often enough were in the 1930s, Moore was prepared to abandon the drinking clubs, where he could play as he pleased, to take routine, better-paid jobs; he joined Victor Silvester’s strict-tempo dance orchestra. According to Jim Godbolt (A History of Jazz In Britain, 1986, Grafton Books), this decision produced a storm of criticism from his musical colleagues. But the band’s “stultifying monotony” led to his departure after a few months and “a blistering attack on the [strict tempo] format” in the Melody Maker. Silvester angrily replied in kind. But there’s another side to this story: British Dance Bands On Record (Rust & Forbes, 1987, General Gramophone Publications), based on the EMI files, shows Moore as being Silvester’s pianist on all but a couple of sessions from August 1935 to July 1939; and Moore recorded a considerable number of strict-tempo piano solos in that period, supervised by Silvester: tracks 9, 10 and 13 – 15 are so labelled on the original issues. But he clearly had a deal of latitude in what he played and these are excellent jazz solos. It’s unlikely two men would have continued working together if there had been as much bad blood as Godbolt suggests: the most likely explanation is that Moore and Silvester musically needed each other and agreed, however strongly, to differ – outside the recording studios! Perhaps they both also realised that there’s no such thing as bad publicity…Although Gerry Moore claimed one of his major influences was Earl Hines, his style on these first mid-30s records is much more an original blend of Teddy Wilson and Jess Stacy, whose characteristic end-of-phrase ‘shakes’ are particularly in evidence on Brown Sugar Mine – Rhythm Lullaby, whilst Gerry Building, for example, adds some fine Walleresque touches in the up-tempo sections. May Write Blues and Jammin’ are surely two of the finest piano solos recorded by a British musician: the latter, in particular, is musically and technically superb. Moore is accompanied by a drummer on Jammin’, and a string bass is added on the next two titles; if Rust and Forbes are correct that he was still with Victor Silvester at this period, then these are likely to be Ben Edwards (drums) and George Senior, the regular rhythm section from that band; Moore’s sign-off flourish on Crazy Rhythm is exactly as it would have been on a routine Silvester performance, which rather confirms this was the case. Whatever his earlier compromises, Moore was always a modernist and experimenter; he died in 1993, aged 90, having spent his post-war years exploring some of the more obscure reaches of be-bop and beyond.