Salut! Live

Andrew Curry writes: We noticed a while back that the guitarist and singer Wizz Jones had celebrated his 85th birthday this year, and we mentioned it on our Facebook group. But we realised that we’d never written about him properly here on the site.

He pops up in our articles about other people in a way that reflects his own position in folk: always there in the history of the British folk music scene over 60 years or so, always collaborating with the best people, without feeling the need to take centre stage himself.

(Wizz Jones at the Cambridge Folk Festival, 1978. Photo: Tony 1212 via Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0,)

He’s played with everyone—the Facebook post mentioned among others Clive Palmer of Incredible String Band, Eric Clapton, Billy Connolly, Martin Carthy, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and other assorted Pentanglers, even Sonic Youth. He’s helped to nudge people’s careers in the right direction: for example suggesting to the then Ralph May that he should take the stage name Ralph McTell.

His own records always include material from other people, as well as his own work, and he seems to listen widely. I’ve always liked his version of Touch has a memory (lyrics by the late Clive James, music by Pete Atkin) but that is probably because I’ve been a lifelong fan of Atkin and James’s songs.

The most famous example of someone covering one of his songs is Bruce Springsteen.

Bruce opened with Wizz Jones’s When I Leave Berlin when he played to 55,000 fans in Berlin in 2012. As Jones said of this afterwards, “He did forget to mention that I wrote it.”

Wizz Jones was maybe lucky with his timing. Born in 1939, he grew up in the London suburbs and came of age just as the repressed 1950s turned into the looser 1960s. Being able to play the guitar and being willing to rough it meant that you could travel. Europe, in the early 1960s, was a place of wonders. And that’s what he did.

Wizz, of course, was not his given name—it came from a nickname his mother gave him.

The 21-year old Wizz pops up a bit closer to home, in a BBC television report on beatniks ‘invading’ the Cornish town of St Ives in Cornwall, whose councillors have responded by banning them from pubs and cafes. He sings a little improvised blues on camera:

“it’s hard times in Newquay, if you’ve got long hair”.

Looking back at that piece much much later, Jones was a bit embarrassed about his brash confidence. The reporter was Alan Whicker, later much parodied, but undoubtedly one of the great early British television journalists, with a deserved reputation for putting people on the spot. He certainly gave the St Ives councillor he spoke to a torrid time. Jones talked to him, off camera, about being influenced by Kerouac’s On The Road. Whicker said he thought some of the passages in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums were terrific. Jones hadn’t read it, but bluffed.

I’ve been able to see Wizz Jones play a couple of times in the last decade, during his 70s, on both occasions at the Bush Hall in west London, It’s an intimate venue that seems like a perfect fit for him.

On the first occasion, he was unexpectedly opening for the Steve Tilston Trio, another singer he’d helped along the way. On the second occasion, he was playing with Ralph McTell, on one of the string of dates they did after they finally recorded two records together in their 70s—About Time and About Time Too.

I wrote up the Steve Tilston gig at another blog at the time, and this is what I said then about Wizz Jones’s set:

“He opened his set with the Henry Hipkens’ song, That’s How I Learned To Sing The Blues [there’s a version below], and it included a version of Jesse Winchester’s Black Dog and Jackson C. Frank’s Blues Run The Game, a Bert Jansch favourite. The guitar playing was fine, and his voice has held up pretty well (arguably it’s better now than when he was younger, it’s deepened a little as he’s got older.) In fact, it was a beautifully constructed set...

“But Tilston chided Jones gently from the stage later on: ‘You could have played some of your own songs, Wizz. They’re just as good.’”

The gig with Ralph McTell was a contrast in styles. They had shared the songwriting on the records, and McTell’s songs were notable for their straightforward melodies and choruses. Wizz Jones was a better guitarist than McTell, but the songs he had contributed were more elaborate, a bit more complex, a little less easy to remember.

Jones played at the 2013 concert at the Royal Festival Hall to mark what would have been Bert Jansch’s 70th birthday, and I was told a story about that by one of the concert promoters. I’m sharing it here because I think it reflects well on him.

If you were at that concert, you’ll remember that the line-up was packed, not to say sprawling. The only way the economics worked was if the performers agreed to play for the Musicians’ Union’s then minimum rates. This made for some delicate conversations when booking some of the artists.

When the promoter got to this part of the conversation with Wizz Jones, he asked how much it was. The promoter told him the amount. His reply:

”That seems like a lot of money for coming to the Royal Festival Hall and playing a couple of songs. Do you mind if I give some of it away?”

After the Steve Tilston gig, my wife and I bumped into Wizz Jones as we were leaving the venue. He had stayed, of course, to watch Tilston’s set:

“[M]y wife said to him that I’d told her he’d been around the British folk scene all his life, and with a fine reputation, but without the limelight falling on him. ‘Ah yes’, he said. ‘The ubiquitous Wizz Jones’.

And off he went into the night, guitar in hand, to get the tube home. That’s the only time I met him. But perhaps the reason he’s less famous than he deserves to be is that he’s completely comfortable in his own skin.

(Wizz Jones and John Renbourn playing Bert Jansch’s ‘Fresh as a Sweet Sunday Morning’ at the Lunar Festival in 2014.)