Sans Everything

In 2019 I wrote a piece about a 78 rpm record which I'd picked up at a jumble sale or record fair in Glasgow in 1975 or 1976. The disc was credited to the Harry Donaldson Orchestra, the vocalist one Sanky Franks. The side I preferred began with a voice - Donaldson? The producer? - advising: "Hey Sanky, try to get a kick out of it!" - and as far as I'm concerned he did. 

When I left the family home I foolishly left the record behind, along with a lot of other stuff;  some years later a massive clearout which I only learnt about after the deed had been done meant that letters, books, music and even the odd piece of art vanished forever.

Yes, yes, I'd been foolish to assume that a little corner of the family home would remain forever mine but it was a painful lesson and that erasure of memories, or at least the precious objects triggering so many memories, remains a hard blow. 

This may help to explain why it felt important to find out whatever I could about that record, which isn't listed on discogs or other online sites. I didn't dream it into being, and I wanted to hear it again if I could, or at least find out as much as I could about it, to make it substantial, solid again, one thing retrieved from oblivion.

I discovered that it had been recorded in Belgium in 1953 and that Belgian-born saxophonist Bobby Jaspar, who later married the singer Blossom Dearie, had been a sideman on the session. "Harry Donaldson", however, was probably "a straw name", according to the automatic translation of a French discographical book about Jaspar, "a bogus Anglo-Saxon deposit", and the sides - one entitled Roll It, Red, the other a version of the Shirley Temple song Animal Crackers - were not of any great artistic worth, at least according to the Jasparcentric author who considered the session "strictly food order", the recordings "add[ing] nothing to Bobby's glamor."

This didn't seem fair - I liked 'em, anyway, even if they weren't exactly in the business of breaking musical boundaries. Roll It, Red, essentially an amalgam of Big Joe Turner's Roll It, Pete and the swing theme One O'Clock Jump, wasn't slick but had a human feel, as opposed to the kind of rock'n'roll recordings which seem to have come out of outer space, so different from what's gone before that it's difficult to imagine ordinary mortals standing in front of microphones to produce such otherwordly noises. No, the disc I found was nothing like that at all; "homely" would be the best way to describe its two sides, not transatlantic.

I suppose Roll It, Red might well have been a cynical early attempt by non-Americans (and non-Brits, in this case) to cash in on the rock'n'roll craze but whatever the musicians' intentions the end result was something irresistible - to me, anyway. Sanky Franks might have not had the range of Big Joe - who has? - but he certainly seemed to be enjoying himself, and the Basie-style riffing towards the end of the record tied things up nicely. (Count Basie used to be involved in early Alan Freed concerts; swing and rock'n'roll are not that far removed from each other.)

It felt to me like music which was within reach, just as Lonnie Donegan's take on American songs opened up possibilities to a generation in Britain. I had, and have, no musical ambitions but Sanky's enthusiasm, far beyond his technical ability as a singer, had great charm. And Animal Crackers, slightly rocked up, was agreeable too. I used to sing the latter, Sanks-style, to myself and others in 1976. 

I discovered from the Jaspar book that "Sanky Franks" was an alias for Frans Sans, a pianist and singer who led a group called the Peanuts and was known on the Belgian jazz scene. The name seemed so distinctive that when I came across an article from 2014 about the abandoned Belgian village of Doel, quoting someone of that name about the impossibility of the place becoming prosperous and populated again as "you can't reanimate a dead calf" I assumed that I had finally tracked my quarry down. 

Which sparked all sorts of thoughts in my head. Perhaps he could be induced to tell me more about the recording session and his motivation for cutting those songs - if nothing else, I could surely impress upon him the faithfulness, over those many years, of my enthusiasm for a record he might have forgotten about, and perhaps I'd be rewarded by a memory flickering in his eyes, momentarily animating  him, and then the bright beam of my interest could be extended further, irradiating all the survivors in that near-deserted place, filling them with a renewed sense of hope. 

That last detail was perhaps an associative leap in seven-league boots, but a more localised and modest result seemed within the bounds of possibility. I had been prompted by reading of doo wop authority Todd Baptista's account of tracking down Gilbert Warren of the Orchids, a great but little-known doo wop group who recorded eight sublime sides for Parrot Records, the Flamingos' second label, before splitting up. Warren was not particularly forthcoming and seemed to remember nothing until the songs were named by Baptista, then and pleasure and pride sparkled for a moment - even if it didn't lead on to a comprehensive interview.

Still, some token of recognition, however brief - a wistful smile, even - would be something to help bring the record back for me. But how to contact Frans Sans? There seemed no obvious way, so there I left matters, moved on to other things ... then I recently discovered that an artist, Jeroen Janssen, had not only been interested in the notion of a deserted village but had actually visited Doel, kept a visual journal there and published a book - and he knew Frans Sans. Sketches by Janssen and Sans can be found online, depicting the same landmarks in that near-dead place, Sans's drawings rather more primitive in execution. 

When I contacted Mr Janssen, however, I was disappointed to learn that the Frans Sans he knew in Doel had been born around 1958, five years after that beguiling recording. And I couldn't ask his namesake about the possibility of his being the singer's son as this Frans Sans had died a few years ago: no neat ribbon to tie up this investigation.

I would dearly like to hear that record again. Perhaps if it had been one of the legion of recordings available to hear online at the click of a mouse it would be a different story; as it is, all I have is a memory, around fifty years old, of those two performances. They have not been numbed by familiarity, in the way that Why Do Fools Fall in Love, say, or other rock'n'roll numbers have. Those phoney Yanks, Franks and Donaldson - possibly they were even the same person? - remain forever on a crackly 78, sans remastering, sans declicking, sans reverb, sans everything. Were the sides even recorded in a professional studio or perhaps a living room or church hall? I don't remember any acoustic trickery, which is also part of the appeal, along with the limitations of that cheerful vocal: unlike some towering performance by a rock'n'roll great where it would seem the height of impudence to interpose oneself as an observer at the session Sanky Franks would, I feel, have invited, even been grateful for, such encouragement. 

And now where do I go? In a world where the entire history of recorded music can be accessed in the blink of an eye, Roll It, Red remains elusive, spinning further and further away from me. I know approximately when my remaining belongings were disposed of but at any point did someone further down the chain sort through the seeming trash for signs of anything which might have a resale value? 

A teacher once told us the story of a shabby Glasgow scavenger reprimanded by a local busybody as he was going through some dustbins. Pulling himself up to his full height, he rebuked his interlocutor: "Madam, I have been raking in midgies all my life." Could it be that somewhere along the chain one such midgie-raker salvaged something from my jettisoned pile of personal effects, maybe even my precious disc? 

If it had been determined that an item thrown away as rubbish held a possible clue to a murder, at what point after its disposal would it become impossible to recover? I can think of numerous detective series on TV where smelly investigations, with seagulls overhead, have been conducted, usually by the tec's sidekick or some lowly policemen, at a municipal dump. But who, tramp or lawman, would think to place any value in a shellac disc by an unknown group - especially in the UK, where "Stormy Weather" is more likely to be small talk than a doo wop collector's Holy Grail? Barry Humphries said that one of his jobs when young was the smashing-up of 78s, no longer wanted in the age of vinyl. Who knows what sonic treasures were lost forever as a result? How may copies of Roll It, Red b/w Animal Crackers were manufactured? How many of them came under the hammer - not in the good auctioneering way - and when? Were there little Barrys employed in every country, intent on smashing these obselete sound carriers to smithereens, all to create a bit more space to sell music via the latest medium?

In time vinyl would face its own reckoning, of course, especially when CDs seemed to offer permanence and absolute fidelity, a double whammy to the interregnum of the humble cassette. In recent years, as you will know, vinyl has been making something of a modest comeback; as anyone who has tried it will know, it might be easy to scratch a vinyl LP but it's much harder to destroy it than a shellac disc, only too happy to shatter if you chance to drop it. And as for a flexi-disc, the clock starts ticking the moment a stylus is first lowered onto it.

Another of the casualties of that spring cleaning was a superb sketch, which I must also presume is no more, the work of a dear friend who is now a famous artist. I lament the loss of that drawing, given to me in payment for a round of drinks during our student days, although there is some satisfaction in thinking that the person who threw out all my stuff missed the opportunity to make some money: he might have been incapable of seeing the value in most of the other objects but discovering that he had also thrown away something readily translatable into hard cash would undoubtedly have been as a knife in his side - though it's too late now to pass on such information.

Sanky Franks was, as I've said, an alias for Frans Sans, but as far as I can tell "Sans" is not a common surname in Belgium. Could it be that both names were intended to be reminiscent of "Frank Sinatra", targetting the impulse purchaser in a record shop or the elderly clueless aunt seeking a gift for a nephew ("I know you said you liked that American singer, Dear ...") There is no "Harry Donaldson Orchestra" to be found online, other than a reference in that Bobby Jaspar book, but there was a Great American Songbook writer called Walter Donaldson, and an orchestra leader called Harry James, so the cut-and-shut nomenclature sounds plausibly American. As for the song's getter of kicks, "Frans Sans" sounds more cartoonish than human, but if that is yet another alias for the singer-pianist then perhaps the coining of such a surname was intentionally provocative, boldly calling attention to its nothingness, its transparency, its elusiveness, as in those lines from Shakespeare's The Seven Ages of Man paraphrased earlier:

... Last scene of all, 
That ends this strange eventful history, 
Is second childishness and mere oblivion; 
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Whatever the answer, there was certainly a Belgian musician who answered to that name (Sans, that is, not Shakes) and who led a jazz group called the Peanuts in the 1950s and 1960s; details of a few gigs can be found online. And there is even a sacred relic or two around. As mentioned in that earlier post, Sans may have been the musical director behind a flexi-disc with music from a play staged in Antwerp in 1966. 

And I recently found an LP online compiled from  performances at the Jazz Bilzen festival the same year, which includes a track by the Peanuts. Copies seem to go for a minimum of £70, however, which is more than I'd wish to pay for the possibility of hearing that familiar voice again - especially as it's not indicated whether their featured number, Chicago, comes with what used to be known as "vocal refrain". 

 

Jazz Bilzen - named after the Belgian city in which it was held - had been started up the previous year but this annual event was soon overrun by rock groups and the Peanuts - described in the sleevenotes as "represent[ing] the old style in Jazz Bilzen 66" - do not seem to have been offered any subsequent bookings in the days of Procol Harum and the like.

The LP's sleevenotes don't say what other numbers were played by the Peanuts during the festival. Which makes me wonder whether Roll It, Red might possibly have been performed live - perhaps as a jokey interlude during a Peanuts concert? Rather than the surname being a joke to share with those in the know could the use of an alias have been indicative of a sense of shame about participation in the session? Was the 1953 recording a way of making a buck at a time of desperate need, a diabolical pact only entered into on the understanding of strict anonymity? If the Peanuts were indeed trad jazzers, as those liner notes appear to suggest, any nod in the direction of rock'n'roll or sundry other musical travesties might have been seen by diehard fans as beyond the pale - at least if they were anything like some unyielding audiences in the UK when Humphrey Lyttelton decided to expand his band's line-up. Roll It, Red was recorded in 1953, the same year that saxophonist Bruce Turner, newly recruited by Humph, was greeted at a concert with a banner declaring: "GO HOME DIRTY BOPPER".

Yet even if that recording was just a way of making a bit of cash that may actually contribute to the sense of fun it transmitted to me twenty-odd years later: with no artistic reputation at stake, opinions of record reviewers immaterial and the satisfying clunk of a bit of change - all, perhaps, that he needed or expected from the transaction - already in his back pocket, maybe the shapeshifting Frans was free to let himself go and get a kick out of the song. The recent biography of Jake Thackray has many sad passages as stage fright began to take hold, but even in his later years he could still delight and captivate an audience on occasion - always provided that the opportunity snuck up on him, as it were, was not pre-planned and he wasn't faced with a rigid crowd expecting  something which he no longer wanted to provide.

Selfconsciousness is the enemy of Art. I remember reading that Louis Armstrong and his fellow musicians would be be rolling on the floor, kicking their legs up and laughing uproariously after recording some of the Hot Five recordings: those sides may be seen as the great man's artistic peak, revered by generations of critics and fans, but in the moment the musicians were just having a ball, the hand of history - or even that of Joe Glaser - not hovering anywhere in the near vicinity.

Armstrong had, of course, had earnt that enjoyment, having got to that point through a long apprenticeship, first by getting to know his cornet inside out during his time in the waifs' home then by playing with, and learning from, his mentor, King Oliver. But even allowing for the possibility that Frans Sans didn't have precisely the same innate talent or history of rigorous application to his craft that doesn't mean that the particular set of circumstances which brought him in front of a microphone in 1953 didn't allow him to become, at least momentarily, airborne - and to lift at least one listener up with him as a result. 

But now I suppose my quest, such as it is, is at an end, with no satisfying conclusion, or at least no conclusive answers. In his later years did Frans/Sanky think much of the record, if he thought of it at all? Was it indeed a quick attempt at a cash-in by a jazz buff at the behest of a record company, quickly forgotten by both once it became apparent that it wasn't, after all, going to flip, flop and fly? Will I ever come across another copy of the record - and for that matter, how did a Belgian disc manufactured in 1953 end up being sold for a few pennies in 1970s Glasgow? Who owned it before me and why did they sell it on or donate to a worthy cause? And why, knowing I have come to a dead end, does this squarish attempt at rock'n'roll haunt me still? 

I can provide a partial answer to that final query at least. The object, the holy relic, hasn't become tainted by travelling with me to London and adulthood. It has no existence other than in the bedroom where I spent the days of my childhood and there, in my imagination, it remains. 

At the click of a button I can be transported to Green's Playhouse in 1972 and the first concert I ever attended - and grateful as I am for the opportunity to do so I am also aware that each revisiting devalues, or at least confuses the memory of, the original experience - partly because the bootleg is such poor quality, and partly because my response when listening now is overlaid with memories of other performances, and I cannot be that excited and captivated thirteen year old seated in the left hand balcony, never wanting the afternoon to end. 

But the Harry Donaldson Orchestra and Sanky Franks can't disappoint me because they live only in my head, a direct line to my younger self: three minutes of excitement and enjoyment, however sincerely or insincerely intended, captured in 1950s Belgium then unlocked in 1970s Scotland when I flipped the stylus on the Rigonda turntable over to 78 and became a thing in the non-existent Sanky's dream.

 

An earlier post about this record:

Its (rhythmic) wails were as of Jaspar, or Why I got a kick out of Sanky