It was a great pleasure and privilege to meet Mike Meddings for the
first time in 25 years, at the (London) Player Piano Group's AGM and
dinner at Leatherhead last Saturday.

When I first heard about him, Mike was a kind of supernova off the
edge of the known player-piano galaxy. If I visited friends in
Birmingham and spoke of player pianos (the local term 'Brummagem' is
actually the more accurate as the place was 'Bromwichham' a long
time ago) they'd say "you must have heard of Mike Meddings, he plays
a pianola with a jazz band".

Yet for some reason there is no Midlands player group with whom the
PPG could gossip, so supporting detail via the grapevine was thin.
Apparently he was transcribing jazz records to roll - this was a
little time before John Farrell got going - but quite how was
unknown. I was travelling a lot at the time, but never got to any of
Mike's gigs because he always played on Mondays and Monday was my
office day in Kent 120 miles away.

Now I can tell you more. Mike's a most affable character, looking
not unlike a canny and weathered New England crab boat skipper, a
bit hunched these days with arthritis which was what brought his
activities to an end. A good jazz pianist, he had (I hesitate to
invoke Mozart in this context) John Farrell's ability to listen to a
performance and write down the whole thing in score.

Round about 1975 he and an engineering friend (a familiar phrase
when it comes to one-off roll perforators) got together and devised
a manual roll punch, based on the Leabarjan but with more punch
flexibility and a option to float the timing to assist in
syncopation. Using this he began to make his own rolls of jazz
standards, concentrating on Jelly Roll Morton, whose rolls were
known of in England but never met here.

These rolls were not constrained in their layout by bar lines but
were a free-flowing hand-played arrangement - I suppose you could
say a Mike Meddings reproducing roll minus the dynamic coding. They
were played on an upright player - I believe an Aeolian-fitted
Broadwood, though Mike can correct me - which the band ensured
followed him around without effort. I was somewhat reminded of
Horowitz and his mobile Steinway when I heard this.

From my Brummagem contacts I can confirm that Mike was very popular
indeed. For a time he played in a Solihull pub and a banker I knew
in Solihull said that Meddings night was Tokyo subway night - you
could only get in sideways, with force.

He was invited to play at Aston University which had a good concert
grand Steinway. Here he was able to borrow a 65/88-note pushup like
my own and this booking became a regular fixture until a new
Director of Music was appointed who vetoed any further performances,
on highbrow grounds which surely even then were becoming
anachronistic. (Jelly Roll was on the BBC's classical music station
Radio 3 the other day, not in a jazz slot, but in a wide-ranging
program entitled "Discovering Music" !) Mike went to the
university's Chancellor and found he had been attending his gigs
there semi-incognito, had become a fan and was wondering why they
had stopped. The Director of Music was overruled, but by then the
band had made another booking nearby and shortly after that
arthritis struck. This was about 13 years ago.

Now, as Karl Ellison has told us, Mike's unique rolls have become
available to us all by being made masters for a new series of Jelly
Roll Morton rolls under the New England label. Wonderful !

Mike had brought four of his rolls with him and invited Julian Dyer
to play a couple of them on my pushup, which converts the
Leatherhead Institute's respectable Reid Sohn (rebadged Samick)
upright into a player for the evening. Things went fine until
halfway through "Big Fat Ham" when suddenly Julian stopped. The roll
had become about a third of an inch wider ... handmade indeed ! The
pushups have screw-expandable takeup spools so we were soon on our
way again.

I hope Mike won't object to my telling this doubtless flawed version
of his story, but I think it's of interest. He was, in the media
phrase, "famous for 15 minutes" and now people will know why and
when. I wish him good luck in his fight with arthritis.

And now, a complete digression on Jelly Roll Morton, since we're on
the subject. A friend of mine who was a Morton fan with me at school
48 years ago (we thought of JRM in the far distant past, 10 years
after his death !) was in America about 8 years ago and heard that
there were other Morton rolls besides the jazz ones. It was said
that he had mentioned to someone that he had picked up a bit of
money making ragtime rolls before the First World War. Nothing
obviously 'Jelly Roll' is known from that era but I have a Jelly Roll
Blues of c1915, a recut on the Ragtime Recollections label, which is
heavy and four-handed in the usual way for the time, but has some
very Mortonesque touches. Could it be that he did sit down and play
though some ragtime standards for the original makers, and they
massaged them into their Tin Pan Alley format ? Contributions
invited.

This friend has the entire 1938 Library of Congress recordings made
by JRM with Alan Lomax prompting him, several hours of them. It's
now both astonishing and sad that this man, indisputably jazz's
Johann Sebastian Bach, thought more of his card tricks and the
"notoriety diamond" in his front tooth than his piano playing. We
forget, too, that he was something of a minor gangster and carried a
loaded revolver around with him - though partly that would just have
been thanks to his obsession with death and people wishing him ill.
How long would he have lasted fame in the 1960s, I wonder ? Not long, I
dare say. Serene old age wasn't his style.

Another, final, digression. An Armenian immigrant in London tells me
that "Leabarjan" originated in Armenia as "Leiabarzhian". It's said
like "Leabarjan" with an English J but you pronounce the first
syllable as two, something like "lay-a".

Meaning: "Leia" is a name, "barzh" is the same as "burg" or American
"boro" and "ian" means the same as in English, someone from that
place or group, so: Leiaburgian. Just so you know.

Dan Wilson, London