I don't know what happened to my disc, which I didn't take with me when I moved to London. It may have been broken and binned sometime before that, though the likelihood is it was among the items chucked away some years later during an intensive bout of springcleaning conducted without my knowledge.
It wasn't the most treasured item lost in that unexpected purge - I don't spring up in the middle of the night yearning wordlessly for the its return - but at a time when it seems that almost every sacred relic from childhood or adolescence can be magically restored - I've just been watching some Chad Valley Give-a-Show Projector slides on youtube, for heaven's sake - then the absence from the ether of Roll It, Red b/w Animal Crackers by the Harry Donaldson Orchestra (Vocalist: Sanky Franks) is, I beg to suggest, some kind of a loss.
Listening to it on the Rigonda stereo system described in earlier posts it packed a punch, even though you couldn't quite call it rock'n'roll. It was recorded, according to a book about one of the musicians involved, in 1953, which is an interesting time for rock'n'roll. As the previous post about the Flamingos' work around that time states, rock'n'roll backing for vocal groups was not yet standardised in the way it would become a couple of years later for companies like Chess and Vee Jay, and musicians' jazz leanings could still be expressed openly.
It's possible - probable, even - that "Roll It, Red" was a nod to "Roll Em, Pete", Big Joe Turner and pianist Pete Johnson's immortal ditty frequently cited as one of the songs which began, or at least firmly pointed the way towards, rock'n'roll. It was first waxed in 1938 and redone many times over the decades, sometimes under different titles; I think it's called "Alright Baby" on the recording of John Hammond's famous Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall.
The superb Atlantic recording of the song on Turner's Boss of the Blues album was still a few years away (1956) but that's the version I first heard, courtesy of Motherwell Library, though I can't remember whether that came before my discovery of the Sanky Franks 78. The word "Roll" would have been incentive enough to take a punt as my conversion to rock'n'roll had taken place several years before I wandered into the McLellan Galleries that weekend.
What I heard, when I took the record home, was something every so slightly corny, the vocalist more enthusiastic than assured, but that awkwardness was part of its appeal: it didn't quite know whether it was jazz or rock'n'roll, though as it got into its stride it was clearly more One O'Clock Jump-type riffing than Haley's immortal summons of: "One, two, three o'clock, four o'clock, rock ..."
There was a cornball opening, clearly rehearsed, because when the orchestra leader (presumably) opens proceedings by saying: "Hey Sanky, try to get a kick out of it!" the singer goes straight into it without time to catch his breath. We are not being vouchsafed a glimpse into the tensions of a recording session.
The lyrics, insofar as I can recollect them at this distance, don't add up to much:
Roll it, roll it, Red [something something something] too,... or thereabouts. But the lack of - well, I want to say "distancing artistry" - adds a strange appeal. This is human, fallible music - not that the musicians sound amateur, you understand, but they just haven't got - well, whatever it is that rock'n'roll has. Sam Phillips would have given them a hearing but ultimately spat them out, however polite and considerate he might have been about it.
Someone's rollin' the best of all - Jack, oh Jack it's you ...
In a way the B side is better, because you don't expect much of Animal Crackers, a kids' song made famous much earlier by Shirley Temple. This time the introduction is by Sanky himself, the first line unaccompanied and shouted, not sung, as though a count-in to determine the rhythm and cue the orchestra:
A-N-I! M-A-L! Animal crackers in my soup!
(sings) Animal crackers in my soup,
Lions and tigers loop the loop ...
I once spent an afternoon in the basement of the Vintage Magazine Shop, now no more, in Soho, looking at the photographs on English sheet music covers from, I think, the forties and fifties. It wasn't that the images were particularly bad but there seemed no literal or metaphorical airbrushing: human beings with blemishes peddling unreal dreams, which was kind of reassuring.
Just as there exists somewhere a posed photograph of Carl Perkins wearing a leathery toupee outside a theatre (possibly an English one in 1968, as in the image with the Cashes above), pointing his finger and trying to look cool; he doesn't, but he's Carl Perkins and it doesn't matter.
The only information anywhere online about Roll It, Red and Animal Crackers is taken from Jean-Pol Schroeder's book Bobby Jaspar: Itinéraires d'un Jazzman Européen, 1926-1963. It's written in French, and it's almost forty five years since I passed my French Higher, so what follows is based on an online translation service.
Jaspar was "a Belgian cool jazz and hard bop saxophonist, flautist and composer ... married to the jazz singer Blossom Dearie", according to the discogs website.
In 1953 he spent summer with his mother in Belgium and recorded Animal Crackers and Roll it, Red on July 2nd in Brussels "without great intent" the automatic translation says. Little recking that sixty five years later here we'd all be. Well, I'd be.
His colleagues Benoit Quersin, bassist, and Jean-Louis Viale, on drums, "are panic" - anxious about the session? - but "the purpose is strictly food order" - meaning, I suppose, to earn a crust, or that it was a bread-and-butter session, run of the mill. Also taking part are saxophonist Emile Chantrain, pianist-singer Sanky Franks ("aka Frans Sans") and a Maltese Hawaiian guitarist, of all things. The recordings, so it's declared, "add nothing to Bobby's glamor"; the record came out under the collective name of Sanky Franks accompanied by the Harry Donaldson Orchestra, the surname "Donaldson" or "West" (I'm not sure which), described as "a straw name. A bogus Anglo-Saxon deposit", presumably to be brushed off later by those involved.
And that is all we get, Schroeder now hastening to the discussion of a "Much more interesting" acetate from the same year - which, for one reader, anyway, it cannot be.
The detail that Sanky Franks was a pseudonym for Frans Sans (or vice versa?) led me to a photograph of him on discogs (top), leading a 1967 band or orchestra called the Peanuts.
"Het Goudland", otherwise "The Gold Land", was a 1966 stage play by the Belgian dramatist, novelist, poet etc Hugo Claus, adapted from a work by Hendrick Conscience described in the latter's online Encyclopaedia Britannica entry as "the first Flemish adventure novel.".Sans seems to have been the MD for the show, staged by the KNS (Koninklijke Nederlandse Schouwburg or "Royal Dutch Theatre") company in Antwerp, so this modest disc appears to be an original cast recording. It's a flexi-disc, so probably hard to find, presumably a promotional tool. Below is what may have been an insert, or possibly a flyer for the show. The fact that Sans features prominently suggests he may have taken an active part in the show beyond twirling his baton.
So what was Sans's background? Could "Sanky Franks" have been a role he essayed for a moment thirteen years earlier, playing at being a singer, like Anthony Newley, freed from the need to demonstrate the intensity of those shackled to the profession for life? I recall that on both sides he certainly sounded like he was enjoying himself. Liberated by the pseudonym, was this his one and only chance? Was the "panic" some of the musicians felt at the session fear about the prospect of backing someone who wasn't taking the event too seriously? Or was it about a sense of shame in lending support to a form of music cruder than jazz? Benny Green, it may be remembered, played sax in Lord Rockingham's XI and wore sunglasses to disguise his identity. But that was in 1958; would rock'n'roll or rhythm and blues have been seen as infra dig to musicians recording a session in Brussels in 1953?
I don't know. But what I can say is that, according to my memory, Roll It, Red swings if it doesn't rock, and even if Bobby Jaspar and the others only lent their talents to it to get some grub, more than twenty years later it gave me some pleasure as it powered through the Rigonda speakers in my long-ago bedroom, and I dearly wish I could hear it one more once.
If any CD compilation were likely to include Roll It, Red it would, I suspect, have been this three-disc set ...
... but, alas, it doesn't.
And yes, I know that hearing the record after however many years might turn out to be a massive disappointment, and were it easily accessible via spotify or wherever I wouldn't have felt impelled to write any of this ...
Yet once on a time, let it be recorded for future generations, I sure got a kick out of it, and that remains real enough. Sanky done goed.
Links:
There is a piece about Bobby Jaspar and Blossom Dearie on the jazzwax site here. It seems to have been an idyllic marriage although he died tragically young after complications arising from a heart operation.
Jean Pol Schroeder's Bobby Jaspar: Itinéraires d'un Jazzman Européen, 1926-1963 appears to be out of print, as I can't find it on the publisher's website, but it seems fairly easy to pick up secondhand.
Postscript:
A couple of small footnotes to the above. There isn't much under the name "Frans Sans" online but the Jazztime Europe blog contains a chronology of Jack Sels which includes the information that the Peanuts, presumably featuring Sans, took part in a concert on 22nd October, 1954 at Modern Music Society (Kulturele Beweging De Nevelvlek) in Antwerp and on 27th October the following year a group called the Modern Jazz Sextet, including Johnny Evans, Frans Sans, Carlo Bauwens, Eddy Johnson and Remy Caseur played at Het Bloemenhof, a cafe-restaurant (below) in the Belgian city of Aarschot. Who was playing what instruments is not mentioned but this reinforces the idea that Sans was primarily a musician.
There is also a much more recent sighting. Possibly. A 2013 Reuters piece entitled "Villagers in last stand to save Belgian ghost town" describes the plight of Deol, a village near Antwerp, under threat because of plans to expand the port. At the time of writing there were thirty inhabitants, down from one thousand, and "looting, squatting and neglect" seemed to seal its doom. Frans Sans - perhaps the same man, given that Het Goudland was performed in Antwerp - is quoted at the end:
"I think the village is dead now and you can’t reanimate a dead calf," said Frans Sans, who lived in the village for most of his life but left about four years ago.
There is a 2014 piece about Doel in the Guardian here. I don't know the current situation.
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