A leader of the jazz bland

There was a time when John Dankworth was Johnny, but somewhere along the line gravitas descended and gelded the informality; possibly it was the CBE he got in 1974. Whatever the cause, something similar had already happened to his music. Once a sturdy standard-bearer for the bop revolution in Fifties jazz in Britain, it donned borrowed clothes - Shakespearian, Dickensian, even astrological - and though they were always well cut, the passion that might have filled them succumbed to the decencies of intelligence and craftsmanship. And, as he and his wife, singer and actress Cleo Laine, climbed the steps to international celebrity, they metamorphosed into an institution, giving it bricks-and-mortar expression in their music centre at Wavendon.

It's a thrust towards gentrification which his autobiography, perhaps unwittingly, mirrors. Dankworth, born in London in 1927, was from a middle-class, Methodist, suburban family - neat and clean and well advised - to whom jazz was a glimpse of chaos and the antithesis of respectability. Somehow, though, the potential for conflict was never realised; the tone of Dankworth's manicured prose suggests that everyone was too intelligent, too controlled and just too polite to let the situation get that far.

But he must also have been utterly single-minded and focused, qualities he showed later in leading a big band for over 10 years, to prevail. And talented. He taught himself clarinet, a canny choice, since he could argue that his inspiration, Benny Goodman, could also draw on the cloak of classical respectability. On the basis that if you can't lick 'em, at least steer 'em in an acceptable direction, he was sent to the Royal Academy for proper musical training.

As his career shows, he made the most of it. The clarinet, swing and traditional music yielded to the alto saxophone and bop - the "revolution" in the title, a musical and social uprising of black American jazzmen in the 1940s led by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, which upset the apple-cart of the earlier styles. Dankworth, young enough to absorb the radicalism, had firsthand experience of it through working in bands on the liners that regularly sailed to New York. He also had the education and skill to stamp his own mark on the rebellion when its ripples crossed the Atlantic. Inevitably, he buffed some of bop's rough edges and tried to put manners on some of its more raucous sounds. The most celebrated early example was the Dankworth Seven of the 1950s, where youthful exuberance burst through the structures and even the leader sounded as if someone had lit a fire under him.

However, art for art's sake never paid all the bills. Compromises were made, especially with the big band. That's show business. But they were always done with professionalism and respect for the craft, and though he also increasingly wrote scores for film and television, Dankworth kept warming his hands at the jazz flame.

Trouble is, it gave off less heat and light as time progressed - as does his autobiography. It would be difficult to turn his strong-minded wife, Cleo, into a shadowy figure, for instance, but this comes close. And Dankworth, who has packed more variety into any single year of his career than most of us manage in a lifetime, could almost qualify as the leader of the bland when it comes to describing its circumstances. Take 1940s New York, where he tasted life on the musical barricades. Then, as now, the Big Apple in every sense, it's recalled without being evoked. Ultimately, that goes to the core of the book. Like Dankworth's music, it's not striking enough to linger in the mind, yet too interesting to be dismissed as dull. And if that sounds like knocking the food in a restaurant and then complaining that the portions are too small, try the CD which accompanies this book; it's got only two tracks.

Ray Comiskey is Irish Times jazz critic

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