“It was a terrific concert,” said John Bennett. “The show overran by half an hour and the audience carried on stomping even after we’d played the National Anthem.”
In 1963, Pye’s managing director, Louis Benjamin, returned from Tokyo with Kyu Sakamoto’s “Sukiyaki”. Ball had a hit single with the melody in both the UK and Japan and as a result, he made the album Tribute To Tokyo. He also recorded an album of marches for the Japanese market. “We did a week at the Tokyo Prince Hotel,” he recalled, “then we toured all over Japan. We made an album on our day off and they wanted marches. It didn’t matter where the marches came from but I’m not sure how the Singing Nun got in there with ‘Dominique’. Maybe that’s because we did it all in 12 hours with a lot of beer.”
The band recorded “Hello Dolly in competition with Louis Armstrong and Frankie Vaughan and its success led to Ball recording “Mame” and “Cabaret”. He also had success with Lennon and McCartney’s “When I’m 64”, a song he re-recorded at the age of 70. “”I always felt that McCartney had a feeling for trad jazz,” he said. “‘When I’m 64’ is rather like a tune called ‘Jazz Me Blues’ from the ’20s.”
With clarinettist Andy Cooper joining in 1967, and adding the show-stopping “I Wanna Be Like You” to their repertoire, Ball and his Jazzmen developed a terrific stage act and played at the wedding reception for the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1981. Despite their success, did it bother Ball that they hadn’t had acclaim from more serious quarters? “Not at all, because we’re working musicians and even jazz musicians have to pay the rent. All I could do was play the trumpet and I’m still learning that bugger.”
Spencer Leigh