Monaghan’s king of swing
QUESTION Who is Ireland’s most successful jazz musician?
BY general agreement of Ireland’s jazz lovers, the country’s most successful jazz musician is Paddy Cole. Not for nothing is he known as ‘Ireland’s king of jazz’.
Paddy, from Castleblayney, Co. Monaghan, began playing music in the showband era when he was just nine years old. He spent his early years in the music business entertaining audiences all over Ireland and Britain before he was asked to join the Capitol Showband. He became that band’s clarinet and saxophone player.
One of the early stories about Paddy concerns his first car, a Volkswagen Beetle. When his mother found out he’d paid for it with a bank loan, she said the Rosary on his behalf for a week.
By the end of the 1960s, the showband era was drawing to a close and Paddy and other showband stars formed a new band called The Big 8. It performed for seven months of the year in Las Vegas for several very successful seasons, but Paddy eventually decided he’d like to spend much more time in Ireland. The result was a new band, The Paddy Cole Superstars, which made its debut in October 1974, playing mostly country and pop music, with a dash of Dixieland.
This new band did well for the rest of the 1970s, but in 1981, Paddy decided to retire from show business. That year, he took over a pub in his home town of Castleblayney, and became a publican for the next 12 years. But his musical genes weren’t dormant for long and by the early 1990s he had returned to his former musical life including solo performances in many parts of the world as well as performances at home.
However, in 2006, Paddy received a tax bill of €834,000 from the Revenue Commissioners. His name appeared on the list of tax defaulters for having a bogus non-resident account and other undeclared offshore assets. He blamed this on poor financial advice he had received.
He has long been celebrated for his jazz repertoire and his immense skills as a musician.
Meanwhile, he has been chairman of Ireland’s performers’ collection agency, Recorded Artists Actors Performers Ireland since 2002.
Apart from Paddy, Ireland’s other highly successful jazz musician was guitarist Louis Stewart, who died in 2016. Born in Waterford in 1944, he began playing with the showbands when he was just 13.
In 1968, he was named best soloist at the prestigious Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.
He played and toured up to the end of the 1970s, first with Benny Goodman then with George Shearing.
Stewart also made many jazz recordings; his first was published in 1975 and his last in 2013. When his 1995 album Overdrive was released, he was described as one of the all-time jazz greats. Dawn Neary, by email.
QUESTION Why is a throw at the wicket in cricket or at a fair known as a shy?
SHY has two definitions in Dr Annandale’s dictionary of 1917. Both ‘to start away from an object that causes fear’ and ‘to throw obliquely, probably from the verb skew, usually used colloquially’.
If something was thrown awkwardly towards him, my father would say: ‘What’s this, a cockshy?’
I have always associated the word with indifferent attempts at winning coconuts in fairgrounds.
However, Henry Hargreaves, a pupil at Burnley Grammar School in 1760, wrote in his diary for March 11, which was Shrove Tuesday: ‘We only had one lesson today and then we club’d at cocks.’
Bennett’s History Of Burnley tells us that ‘on Shrove Tuesdays, the school held an official cockfight and bonfire’ and that ‘most cockfights in the 18th century were really cockshies, in which the boys threw stones at a bird that had been trained by hard experience to dodge the missiles... this was an annual event until 1795 when the school authorities abolished it.’
Any bird that escaped was reported to have been claimed by the headmaster.
So both definitions, dodging and throwing, seem to apply. Kathy Fishwick, Rossendale, Lancs.
QUESTION How dangerous are cows?
FURTHER to the informative answer to this question, my mother used to say: ‘Never go between a cow and her calf. This is when cows are most dangerous.’
A cow will chase after you, while a bull will put its head down and charge, so when it comes thundering towards you, all you have to do is sidestep it. Mike Benson, Bedford.
THE figures quoted previously omitted to say which breed is more likely to cause harm.
From my many miles of countryside walking, the one breed that always gives problems, whether they have calves or not, is the totally black Holstein Cross. These are large cows with a bad attitude to anything that crosses their sight line. Val Bowers, Bournemouth, Dorset.
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