Tea & Jam

On the stage it looked and sounded like a rich, ripe American swingfest. The unrehearsed band, including a West Indies Negro drummer and three American G.I.s, played all around such jazz standbys as Body and Soul and Sweet Georgia Brown, and really got hot on Benny Goodman's old Don't Be That Way. Pace setter was the hot sax of Private Arthur Pepper, formerly with Gus A.rnheim's band--where Bing Crosby first got his start as a soloist.

But the audience was a very different matter. The 1,400 young Britons (at about four shillings a head) in London's Adelphi Theater last week were about the age of U.S. jitterbugs, but they wore starched white collars, sat quietly and attentively, trying to understand. Nobody romped in the aisles, though a few bold souls gently stomped their feet. The two-and-a-half-hour jam session was broken by a 15-minute intermission, so that the audience could have tea.

The man who brought jam to tea-drinking Englishmen is a 30-year-old R.A.F. musician named Sidney Gross. Before the war he was a night club guitarist who liked to play American style with a few friends after hours. Then he heard the Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw bands play for the R.A.F. "When most English players hear Americans, they are so depressed they want to put their instruments away," says Gross. Instead, he wanted to go and do likewise.

Last winter he got leave, scurried to London to round up some musical cronies, rented a hall in suburban Wembley. He packed the hall for three concerts. In the concerts at the larger Adelphi Theater he has had to turn away crowds. Last week's show at the Adelphi sold better than the last time the London Philharmonic played there. To the first session Gross invited a handful of notables to come and hear for themselves. Sir Adrian Boult, Pianist Myra Hess and Composer Benjamin Britten sent regrets, but Mrs. Anthony Eden came, and wrote a fan letter. Tenor Richard Tauber stuck it out for two hours, then said politely: "This is ... a complete change from the music to which I am accustomed."

Said one of the U.S. musicians of his reticent audience: "They don't get it. I don't mean that the English don't scream. That's superficial. I mean they don't get it and the musicians don't get the contact."

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