All that jazz

He has written more than 20 books. He has broadcast programmes about Nicholas Hawksmoor, Henry Purcell, John Cage, mesmerism, and the friendship between Haydn and Nelson. But there are two great passions in his life: Oxfordshire and jazz.

Since the 1970s, he has lived in Wheatley, which he says is “a marvellous village to be involved in”. He cannot think of many other places which would have raised £1,000 for the local organ fund by organising a music drama about Purcell and Dryden, using singers from Glyndebourne and New College School.

He also loves the Oxfordshire countryside, having tramped over acres of it with a succession of dogs. The latest pet is a beagle called Napoleon who likes exploring Port Meadow and the woods on Shotover Hill. The dog’s idea of a day out is “to tramp as much of the Thames path as possible”.

Alyn’s passion for jazz started even before he was a toddler, when his father returned from Hong Kong with a stack of records — classical as well as jazz — which introduced the youngster to Fats Waller, Duke Ellington and Earl Hines, as well as Gigli and Caruso.

Soon he started picking out on the piano (with one finger) the tunes he heard on those records Alyn had always wanted to play the double bass, which was too big for a young lad, so he played the cello until he was about 13 and could buy a half-sized bass. When he came to Oxford to study English at St Edmund Hall, he ran the University Jazz Club.

When singer George Melly came to perform at the Roebuck in Market Street, Alyn was proud of persuading him to resume touring. Melly was fascinated by Joyce, a man who used to sell hot dogs from a minivan on the High Street.

As Joyce put mustard and tomato ketchup on his face to look like makeup, Melly turned to trumpeter John Chilton and said: “We don't see stuff like this in London. We must start touring again.” Thus began George Melly's years of entertaining audiences with accompaniment from John Chilton's Feetwarmers.

Yet another of Alyn’s interests is art. He co-wrote the catalogue for St Edmund Hall's picture collection, and he won a place at the Courtauld Institute to study for a doctorate in British Romantic painting of the 1940s.

However, Alyn was drawn to work in publishing: for Macmillan and then Blackwells. He confesses that “like a lot of gamekeepers, I always fancied life as a poacher” and, in 1988, he wrote his own first book, a biography of Fats Waller. BBC Radio 3 asked him to turn the book into a series and, at the same time he started presenting a jazz programme on Fox FM.

huis began a broadcasting career which now occupies much of Shipton's time. He currently presents Jazz Library on Radio 3 every Saturday — the latest in a long line of jazz series — but he has also produced a variety of programmes, including the seven-part At War with Wellington (with Peter and Dan Snow). He wrote and directed five docu-dramas about life in the infantry in 1808.

Alyn also remembers accidentally knocking over the sound engineer while flying a Malaysian humming kite for a Radio 3 programme about kites, and being hypnotised by Paul McKenna for a show about mesmerism.

The book about Fats Waller was followed by many other biographies of musicians, such as Bud Powell, Doc Cheatham and Dizzy Gillespie. Alyn also wrote A New History of Jazz, which fills nearly 1,000 well-researched pages. It won him the Jazz Writer of the Year accolade in the British Jazz Awards.

He also helped George Shearing write his autobiography, visiting the pianist at his summer home near Stow-on-the-Wold. When the book was finished, Shearing showed Alyn his gratitude by giving him an hour’s solo recital. Alyn says: “It was an honour that meant more to me than almost anything in my life.”

Writing books about your favourite musicians may sound fun, but jazz musicians can be eccentric or awkward. When Shipton wanted to write about pianist Sammy Price, Sammy kept him waiting in the roughest part of Harlem at dusk. Later Sammy confessed: “I figured if you were prepared to stand there for 30 minutes waiting for me, you had to be serious about my book!”

Alyn's latest book is a biography of Jimmy McHugh (the first biography of the songwriter), entitled I Feel a Song Coming On. McHugh is not a household name but he wrote well-known songs like On the Sunny Side of the Street, I Can't Believe That You’re in Love with Me, Don't Blame Me and I’m in the Mood for Love. The first song he wrote with his long-time collaborator, Dorothy Fields, was called Collegiana and described college students taking a new degree in dancing. Fields’ lyrics rhymed ‘pedagogue’ with ‘go to bed agog’.

Shipton says that he was interested in McHugh because “he had an effect on jazz, on revue, on Broadway, on Hollywood, on the Cotton Club, and on the careers of many great singers from Frank Sinatra and Shirley Temple to Carmen Miranda and Perry Como.”

He started the book after interviewing Jimmy McHugh's grandson, who invited him to Los Angeles to inspect the large archive of material about the composer that his family had collected.

Among many other interesting insights, the book tells how McHugh began writing songs for revues at Harlem’s famous Cotton Club. When the club wanted a new band to play for its opulent floor show, McHugh recommended a bandleader called Duke Ellington, who became famous during his three-year residency at the club.

The book is launched at the Albion Beatnik bookshop, 34 Walton Street at 8pm tonight (Thursday December 3), where Alyn will read excerpts from the book, play music by McHugh and speak about Jimmy's extraordinary life.

As if all this activity were not enough, Alyn is the jazz critic for The Times, writes a bi-monthly column for Piano Magazine, and gives lectures at the Royal Academy of Music. He has played the bass with such bands as the Ken Colyer Jazzmen and Vile Bodies (the latter led by sadly-missed Oxford author Humphrey Carpenter). In 2002 he bought a plot of land in SW France and built a house there. He loves the quiet rural life and finds it an ideal atmosphere for writing.

Although he still plays the double bass with various ensembles, writing and broadcasting are his main occupations - primarily to convey his love for jazz. He says: "I want to prompt people into listening to great music and finding out more about its past and its background".

He adds: "Danny Barker [the New Orleans guitarist whose reminiscences helped Alyn with some oral histories] once wrote me a long letter, saying it was down to my generation to make sure the music that he and his peers had done so much to create was not forgotten or misunderstood".

His many broadcasts and books have certainly achieved this.