Listen to extracts from “Melody In Percussion” by Sydney Dale, on the Impress Library Label (IA 398, UK, 1970).

Lovely old Syd Dale. I imagine him to be an unassuming English bloke with sensible shoes. In fact, had he not found his musical groove courtesy of the 1940s big band explosion, he might have ended up as a rather unassuming engineer for the chocolate manufacturers, Rowntree, where he had begun an apprenticeship at the age of 16. Phew, saved by jazz!

He is probably most well known for the work he did for the KPM Library in the late 1960s, including ‘The Sounds Of Syd Dale’, and for striking out on his own in 1971 to form his own music library, Amphonic.

This particular LP, on ‘Impress’, charms me mainly because of its brilliant use of a huge array of tuned and standard percussion instruments: crotale, glockenspiel, vibraphone, marimbaphone, xylophone, tubaphone, tubular bells, boo-bam(!), bongos, triangle, maraccas, guiro, queeka & timpani, and no, I haven’t made any of them up. If you went to primary school in the mid seventies you probably had a host of those and other toys to use during music lessons. If only we all could have made such sweet music instead of the hideous cacophony we doubtless produced.