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Just for fun… a video of the Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band playing I Can’t Dance, I Got Ants in my Pants, the Nat Gonella classic from 1934.

Filmed at the Jericho Tavern (see the recent Oxford pub guide) on a Friday night with a near-sellout crowd. The trumpet solo is a bit boring, but it was late in the evening and the trumpet player was getting tired….

Not many people these days, even in Britain, have heard of Nat Gonella. In the 1920s, he was the first British musician to take jazz out of the hotel salons and play it to a working class audience in the music halls of London… it was a quiet revolution that changed popular entertainment in Britain forever.

Gonella’s style of jazz was raucous, populist and sing-a-long: a far cry from most of the jazz we hear today. I hope the performance above recaptures some of that spirit – if it doesn’t, here’s Nat Gonella’s band in the mid-1930s in a clip filmed by Pathé: