Arthur Young

Arthur Young was reputed to have very large hands - a useful attribute for a pianist, if he wants to play ‘stride’, where the ability to stretch easily to a tenth in the left hand is a great asset – Young is said to have been capable of spanning a twelfth! Whether or not this was true, he was a pianist of considerable ability, but his solo work on record is sparse. He was born in Edinburgh in 1904 and studied medicine, but turned to the piano and won a Gold Medal at the Edinburgh Music Festival. By 1926 he was working for Jack Hylton; then, after recovering from a severe car crash, which doesn’t seem to have affected his playing, he spent some time in Europe, before returning to London, where he recorded with Joe Venuti in 1934. His playing career was again temporarily interrupted, when he was injured in an air-raid in 1940. By this time, he was leading his Swingtette, with Stéphane Grappelli on violin, in the sedate atmosphere of Hatchett’s Restaurant on Piccadilly and had taken to playing the Novachord, a novelty keyboard that was the first commercial polyphonic synthesizer…and not an instrument that was likely to endear him to jazz lovers or fellow jazz musicians! But about a year earlier, in 1938, he recorded a set of acetates of a suite of four compositions by Art Tatum, which he wrote whilst he was on a visit to the UK. These were probably made as reference copies for the publishers – Peter Maurice. Sadly, only three of the four have survived (of Jade there is no trace) and were rescued by Chris Ellis when the Peter Maurice building was being cleared out. Tatum was not noted as a composer, and these are therefore almost unique examples of his work; certainly, as far as I can tell, he never recorded them himself. Arthur Young’s interpretations, especially on Sapphire and Amethyst, are extraordinarily close to what we might have expected from the master at this period, without in any way being stylistically slavish copies. They show just how good Young could be, when there were no commercial considerations at stake; these solos are without any doubt the finest surviving examples of his playing.
By the end of the Second World War, jazz had a turned a harmonic and stylistic corner; a second generation of British pianists was quicker and better prepared to learn the ‘modern’ style of playing. One of them, George Shearing, was among the vanguard of this new wave. His work has been extensively re-issued, though some of his contemporaries - Dill Jones, for example – are almost forgotten figures now. But, I trust, this CD will show that there was some genuine talent on the British piano scene in those earlier days, which, when it was given the chance, could shine as brightly as many more famous names of the period. (Max Easterman)