John Davies

• Born: March 20, 1927
• Died: May 25, 2004, England
• Active: '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, 2000s
• Genres: Jazz
• Instrument: Remastering, Transfers Representative Album: "Jazz Classics, Vol. 1"

Biography

Sound engineer John R.T. Davies was among the world's premier specialists in restoring and remastering classic jazz recordings. John Ross Twiston Davies was born March 20, 1927 in Sussex, England -- the son of a dermatologist, he began playing piano at the age of four, later studying the drums as well. Between 1945 and 1948 he served with the Royal Signals, and while stationed in Austria he began playing guitar; upon returning to the U.K., Davies also picked up the banjo, playing in Gerry Mulligan and George Melly's band. He next picked up the trombone, teaming with tuba-playing brother Julian and cornetist Ken Colyer in 1949 to form the revivalist combo the Crane River Jazz Band; credited with almost single-handedly launching Britain's trad jazz boom, the group resurrected classic New Orleans-style material from the likes of Bunk Johnson and George Lewis, playing together in one capacity or another for 40 years. In addition to working a day job at Heathrow Airport, Davies also moonlighted behind Acker Bilk, Monty Sunshine, Steve Lane, and Cy Laurie, and over time, he added saxophone to his repertoire. But he remained, first and foremost, an obsessive jazz record collector: In 1952, he purchased a disc-cutting lathe and a primitive magnetic tape recorder, bootlegging copies of the Dave Brubeck album Jazz at Oberlin when import issues rendered the album unavailable in British retail outlets. From there, Davies expanded into more above-board dealings, recording sessions for Doug Dobell's 77 Records and founding his own Ristic reissue label. Over time, Davies devised a series of remastering techniques he called "decerealistation," painstakingly removing the clicks, pops, and scratches on 78 RPM records; most notably, he adapted the optical film soundtrack method eliminating clicks by scraping tiny notches of oxide off magnetic tapes to within a few thousandths of an inch to reduce the sharp transient. Over the years Davies remastered the complete catalogs of artists including King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, among countless others -- his slow, perfectionist methodology clashed with the cost-conscious business practices of major labels, and he worked mostly for small niche labels like Frog, Retrieval, Timeless, Hep, and Jazz Oracle. In 1959, Davies joined the cheeky trad jazz unit the Temperance Seven, a nine-piece group of Chelsea College students unable to read music yet capable of playing multiple instruments apiece; adopting the stage name Sheikh Wadi El Yadounia and wearing a fez, Davies served as their de facto musical director in addition to playing saxophone and trombone. The Temperance Seven proved an unlikely phenomenon: clad in velvet frock coats and wing collars, their appearance on television's Juke Box Jury -- where they played the show's theme on phonafiddles, a sousaphone, and a banjo -- made them overnight sensations, with vocalist Paul McDowell causing a frenzy among female fans comparable to that of Elvis Presley. EMI Records producer George Martin helmed their 1961 chart-topper "You're Driving Me Crazy," and while rock & roll (most notably another Martin-produced act, the Beatles) would soon push the Temps' quaint, nostalgic music back into the margins of public interest. The group continued performing live until the end of the 1960s. Davies later reunited with fellow Temperance Seven alum/cornetist Alan Swainston-Cooper and American journalist/clarinetist Dick Sudhalter in the Anglo-American Alliance; from 1972 to 1975, he also led the 28-piece New Paul Whiteman Orchestra, a group based on transcripts of bandleader Whiteman's original arrangements dating back to the 1920s. During the 1990s, Davies led his own Gentle Jazz group and occasionally sat in with Crane River and Ken Colyer memorial bands. But most notably, advances in recording technology enabled him to supplement his analog remastering processes with faster, easier digital components -- his expertise was by now so advanced that he was sometimes able to produce reissues with fidelity far better than the original recordings. Davies also expanded his purview beyond traditional jazz into everything from the classic vocal pop of Bing Crosby to the Greek rembetika music of the 1930s. He had just completed an eight-CD set comprising the known recorded canon of blues legend Bessie Smith when he died of cancer on May 25, 2004. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide

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