Allow me to introduce myself...my name is Denny Ilett...if you’re trying to work that surname out just say “eye-let” and you’ll be close enough.
I was born in Reading, UK at the tail-end of the ‘60’s. There’s a reason for that; Dad was a baby in the East End of London when the bombs started to drop and the whole family moved out...Reading seemed as good a place as any at the time I suppose. A lovely young lady called Dorothy caught his eye one day and so a few years later I come wriggling into the world.
By that time Dad had managed to turn himself into a pretty mean trumpet player and was a regular fixture at all those clubs (most if not all now gone) that conjure up romantic feelings in any lover of the 60’s music scene in England....the Bag O’ Nails....the Ricky Tick...the Uppercut....the Ram Jam...Blaises...I think the world is a poorer place for not having clubs with names like that anymore!
One of the bands he played those places with was called ‘Soul Trinity’ and around the time of my conception the ‘Trinity’ were doing support tours & gigs with Cream, John Mayall, Arthur Brown (who bounced me on his knee when I was a baby, although thankfully he refrained from setting my head on ‘fire’) and some bloke who’d recently arrived from the States called Jimi Hendrix (no-one knows what became of him!!!) among others.
All that coupled with the greats of New Orleans jazz disturbing the peace on our council estate (that stuff cannot be listened to quietly!) and I suppose it was inevitable that I would grow up with music ‘in my blood’ (if you’ll forgive the cliche) I now see it as a privelage; those nights being woken by the whole band piling into our place, the sound of lively chat and Louis Armstrong wafting upstairs. Learning how to listen to music properly. (I still annoy people by insiting that certain notes in a solo get played over and over again!)
I always felt out of place at school. My mates liked Bowie, The Sweet, T-Rex etc....I liked Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and a load of other people they hadn’t heard of.
They liked hanging around makeshift ‘shrines’ like the bus stop & the phone box...I liked playing the trumpet and listening to Dizzy on my own.
Later on they did things like revise for exams...I (although I now regret this) didn’t give a moments thought to any of that. Why should I? I knew from the word go that the only thing in life worth doing was playing & listening to ‘real’ music.
So, out of school, 16, with no qualifications & nothing more important to do than sit in my room and listen to some Dizzy!

Not that it was all trumpets! I had already by that time had my ears teased by the likes of Lonnie Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy, T-Bone Walker and Django Reinhardt and I also loved the sound of a good Big Band (Basie, Harry James, Ellington). I began to think about chords and envy those who played an instrument that could ‘do’ them. I thought ‘maybe I should learn the piano’.

It was a ‘noise’ from my brothers bedroom that I can now look back on and say... ‘that moment changed my life’. There I was, quite happy with my trumpet and my trumpet player records. Rock music meant nothing to me. Jazz was the only ‘real’ music. That was until that ‘noise’ (I soon identified it as ‘Foxy Lady’) made me sit up and listen...What the fuck was that?? Whatever it was I knew I needed to find out more. I took to sneaking into my brothers room after he’d left to go out with his girlfriend. I felt for all the world like Howard Carter breaking into Tut-ankh-Amun’s burial chamber. The treasures before me!! Are you Experienced...John Mayall Bluesbreakers with...who?...Eric Clapton?...Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac (how can there be TWO bands called Fleetwood Mac I thought?)...albums with no writing on them at all...double albums with only 4 songs on them (seems like Jazz!)...even the odd triple album...It was all too much. My brothers room became like Narnia, a whole new world of sound and discovery where I would go and discover as often as I could (or as often as he’d go out with his girlfriend)
A supernova had exploded in my musical universe. I was somehow able to take all I loved and understood about Satchmo & Jelly Roll Morton and love and understand this stuff in exactly the same way!!!
This giddy journey went on for several months as night after night I would find more and more brand new (to me) gems among that shelf of records. Events seemed to suddenly be mapped out for me...First, there was a whole day of Rock stuff shown on the TV (does anyone remember that day?? what was it called again?) I finally got to see footage of Hendrix (they showed the documentary made in 1973) and Led Zeppelin and others....THEN, my brother came home one day with a guitar!! If memory serves me correctly it was a Sattelite Les Paul-copy, it was the greatest thing I’d ever seen and I had to get my hands on it. It was on that guitar that I learned my first open chords. It was on that guitar that I thought “Oh well, I’ll just have to become the worlds greatest guitarist without that fucking F chord!” It was on that guitar that I learned that I was no longer to be a trumpet player because now I could play solos AND chords. I could be the whole Count Basie orchestra if only I knew what the chords were!! I had so far cobbled together a few Pentatonic ideas, a passable “Paranoid” a creaky “Stairway” (one with nails poking out where the old carpet had been ripped up) and that A minor chord. You know the one. D & G strings played at the 5th fret & everything else open. (A while ago I was laughing with Andy Crowdy, my mate and a great Bass player about the moment one discovers things on the guitar like that. “I wrote about 17 songs when I found that chord” he said.) Fantastic! However, it wasn’t nearly enough. I must learn ‘Jazz’ chords...quickly...now!!
Enter a friend of my Dad’s. His name was/is Ian Cruickshank
(historians of 1960’s English Rock will know him as Spit James from the Keef Hartley Band. Ian/Spit is on the rare classics “Halfbreed” & “Battle of Northwest Six”.)
At this stage though, Ian had turned away from Blues/Rock and metamorphasised into a purveyor of fine Django-flavoured fare. Ian showed me how to play the chords for ‘I can’t give you anything but love’.......in F!!!!!!.....It was the breakthrough I needed. It occured to me that in order to play anything you only had to play something......correctly. II-V-I is II-V-I regardless of the song title, right? It was amazing. Within a few weeks I had a (chordal) repetoire of 100’s of tunes and Ian, recognising that his efforts were paying off gave me a gig!! I still remember it, playing rhythm to Ian’s lead on a set of Django tunes and standards. At the end he gave me £5.00.
I had just turned professional.
Now I was able to expand my listening even more. So far I had Page, Beck, Clapton, Green & Hendrix as guitar gods. Now I could add Django, Joe Pass, Wes, George Benson, Charlie Christian. Then it occured to me that what Jimi & Eric were doing was a louder version of what T-Bone Walker did 20 years before them. Music really was all the same! These records slotted right in next to my old Louis Armstrong & Roy Eldridge albums like jigsaw pieces and more and more I agreed with Duke Ellington’s remark that there are only two styles of music; good and bad!
Other local Jazz groups started to ask me to do gigs. That was great because those bands had drummers and I could learn to ‘comp’ on top of the 4-in-the-bar style I’d learned in the Django-band. I could also play electric guitar in these bands. I had graduated to an Antoria Les Paul Copy and a Carlsboro amp! My fate was now firmly sealed, I was to live my life as a professional musician (or..self-unemployed as my Dad says!) I have spent the almost 20 years since that £5.00 gig doing just that from Andover to Adelaide....little ‘turning points’ at regular intervals along the way. Still trying to play what I can hear. Still trying to be honest about it. I still love ‘Foxy Lady’. I get goosebumps whenever I hear it.
I still love T-Bone, Lonnie Johnson & Django. And I still love Louis & Dizzy which I guess means I haven’t changed a bit since the days when I’d wake up in the middle of the night and lie there listening to those amazing records until I fell back asleep again...