Blue Plaque installation to celebrate jazz musician Kenny Clare to take place on 4th November 2015.
Friday, October 30, 2015
Drummer Kenny Clare is to be honoured with the installation of a Blue Plaque on his east London home in Richmond Road, Leytonstone. Press release attached.
The National Jazz Archive has forwarded the following press release;
Salute to world renowned big band drummer.
Acclaimed big band, swing and jazz drummer Kenny Clare has been recognised with the installation of a Blue Plaque on his east London home in Richmond Road, Leytonstone, where he lived in the 1950s. Renowned on both sides of the Atlantic, Kenny Clare was in demand from many top bands and singers.
The London Borough of Waltham Forest enthusiastically operates a Blue Plaque scheme which celebrates many aspects of local history and cultural heritage. For several years, the National Jazz Archive, located in Loughton Library, Essex has been working with Waltham Forest to identify the residences of jazz musician in the Borough, which covers Leyton, Leytonstone, Walthamstow and Chingford. This project is part of the telling of the Story of British Jazz that the Archive began during the 3-year period of funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund 2011–14.
Kenny was born in 1929 and spent his early years in Leytonstone. Highly regarded by drummers such as Buddy Rich, Kenny Clarke and Louie Bellson, Kenny began his playing career in the late 1940s with the Oscar Rabin band before joining Jack Parnell. For an extended period in the 1950s and early 1960s he was featured with the John Dankworth and Ted Heath bands and in 1963 began playing with the Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band.
From 1972 he worked with many bands in the UK, US and Europe, did extensive work for radio, television, commercials and on film sound tracks. The list of singers and musicians that Kenny performed with include some of the jazz greats of the 20th century – Ella Fitzgerald, Dame Cleo Laine, Stephane Grappelli, Johnny Griffin, Harry James and many more. He was a particular favourite of Tony Bennett who interrupted a UK tour to appear at a benefit night in tribute to Kenny following his death in 1984.
Kenny Clare’s Blue Plaque joins those already installed for great jazz musicians from this corner of London – Sir John Dankworth, Dave Shepherd, Jackie Free and Kenny Wheeler. The next plaque due for installation is for Freddy Randall, a great trumpet player who played a major creative part in the post-war British jazz revival.
The Kenny Clare plaque will be installed at 105 Richmond Road Leytonstone E11 4BT on Wednesday 4th November at 2pm.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5647514,0.001612,16z
More information about Blue Plaques honouring jazz musicians in Waltham Forest is at http://www.nationaljazzarchive.co.uk/blogs?id=64.
The National Jazz Archive is a registered charity based in Loughton Library in Essex. It was founded in 1988 by Digby Fairweather and holds the UK’s finest collection of written, printed and visual material on jazz, blues and related music, from the 1919 to the present day. The Archive holds more than 4000 reference books, specialist periodicals and bulletins spanning over 600 titles, archival material, artwork, ephemera and photographs. It is open on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday from 10am to 1pm.
The Archive’s vision is to ensure that significant jazz material should be safeguarded for future generations of enthusiasts, professionals and researchers.
The Archive received a Heritage Lottery Fund grant in 2011 that supported a three-year access development project enabling the collection to be fully conserved and catalogued for the first time. Significant items have been digitised and are now accessible online.
A second Heritage Lottery Fund grant was awarded to the Archive in Autumn 2015 for an intergenerational jazz reminiscence project, that will begin in January 2016.
The National Jazz Archive, Loughton Library, Traps Hill, Loughton, Essex IG10 1HD
http://www.nationaljazzarchive.org.uk