Acker Bilk - Just About As Good As It Gets

Before Acker went pop

The Somerset musician Acker Bilk was at the front of the trad boom in the early 60s, but from the mid-50s he and his Paramount Jazz Band had been playing a less commercialised form of New Orleans jazz.

This collection features Acker playing clarinet with Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen in 1954 and then his band’s work for Esquire, Dobell’s and Storyville, as well as five tracks with Acker as part of Bob Wallis’ band. There are two versions of Postman’s Lament, one with Acker’s vocal and one with Ken Colyer’s, but this 37-track collection is mostly instrumental. Perhaps just as well, as Acker, Ken and Bob Wallis are all trying to sing like Louis Armstrong.

If you’d been in a Bristol jazz club in the mid-50, you might well have heard Acker playing like this, already tired out from a hard day’s work as a blacksmith. Acker’s clarinet has a lovely tone, which in time would captivate all those strangers on the shore, but the banjo, a feature of most trad bands, becomes irritating. At times it sounds like they kicked off together and hoped that they would finish at the same time.

Smith & Co | SCCD 1144

Reviewed by Spencer Leigh
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