Kenny Ball & His Jazzmen

Genres:	Jazz • Musicals & The Arts
Descriptive "tags":	jazz • 60s • trad jazz • easy listening • swing years • pop • oldies • british • trad • very cool • ballroom • weallgetold
Decades Active:	1960s • 1970s • 1980s • 1990s • 2000s

Biography

Kenneth Daniel Ball, 22 May 1930, Ilford, Essex, England. The most successful survivor of the early 60s UK ‘trad boom’, Ball played the harmonica and bugle in a local band before switching to the trumpet. Having previously played alongside Charlie Galbraith for a BBC radio broadcast and deputized for Britain’s leading dixieland trumpet player, Freddy Randall, Ball joined clarinettist Sid Phillips’ band in 1954 and formed his own dixieland-styled Jazzmen four years later, between which times he worked with Eric Delaney, George Chisholm, Terry Lightfoot and Al Fairweather. The Jazzmen did not record until the summer of 1959, resulting in the single ‘Waterloo’/‘Wabash Cannonball’. Signed to Pye Records, his first hit was in 1961 with Cole Porter’s ‘Samantha’, originally from the Bing Crosby / Frank Sinatra movie High Society. This was followed by the million-selling ‘Midnight In Moscow’, which reached...

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