Jazz
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Dudley Moore – from film scores to funk

We all know he was a great comedian, but Dudley Moore was also one of Britain’s finest jazz pianists. To mark the 80th anniversary of his birth on 19 April, here are 10 of his best piano pieces 

Dudley Moore
 Dudley Moore … Piano man. Photograph: ITV/REX/ITV/REX

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Dudley Moore Trio: Bedazzled

Dudley Moore’s best-known song is the recurring theme from the 1967 movie Bedazzled. It was most memorably delivered by a fictional psych-rock band called Drimble Wedge and the Vegetations, with Peter Cook deadpanning the lyrics (“I’m not available / You fill me with inertia”). It has since been covered by everyone from Tony Hatch to Nick Cave. Moore recorded several instrumental versions, none better than on this 1971 appearance on Australian TV, where he recasts the heavily flanged rock song as a gentle bossa nova.


Dudley Moore Trio: Theme from Not Only … But Also

Not Only … But Also, the hugely popular TV sketch show that Moore hosted with ook between 1964 and 1970, was infamously subjected to a Taliban-like degree of cultural vandalism by the BBC, which scrubbed nearly all episodes of the show in the early 70s. Sadly, Decca and Atlantic haven’t been much more attentive with the albums and singles that the Dudley Moore Trio made in the 1960s and early 70s – most have long been out of print and have never had a CD or digital release. The quirky, angular, Thelonious Monk-inspired theme to Not Only … But Also – the B-side to Pete and Dud’s 1965 Top 20 hit Goodbye-ee – has virtually vanished from the internet. You’ll find some snippets of Moore playing it on (retrieved) videos of the TV show, but a full recording is not available – except from my own 45rpm copy – which I’ve uploaded here. 


Dudley Moore Trio: Duddly Dell

Another victim of Decca Records’ neglect, Duddly Dell is now only available on the net in the form of this rather scratchy 45rpm pressing (although it was included as a bonus track on Cherry Red’s CD issue of Moore’s 1962 debut album last year). Best known nowadays as the theme tune to Radio 4’s Quote Unquote, this quirky two-minute track was produced by George Martin and was originally the B-side to his 1961 debut single Strictly for the Birds. It shares the same chord sequence as the next track, My Blue Heaven (in the same way that Charlie Parker’s Ornithology borrows from How High the Moon), and contains glancing references to a host of jazz standards. It also features Hugo Boyd, the Dudley Moore Trio’s original bass player, who died in a car crash in the south of France not long after this recording. Moore – a former organ scholar at Magdalen College Oxford – played the church organ at Boyd’s funeral.


Dudley Moore Trio: My Blue Heaven

This 1928 Donaldson and Whiting standard is probably best known for the 1956 Fats Domino version, but it’s been recorded over the years by everyone from Sinatra to Doris Day to the Smashing Pumpkins. It was also a Moore favourite, the opening track on his 1965 album and a song he regularly performed live. It’s a fine showcase for his idiosyncratic improvisational style: his left hand pounding away like Art Tatum, his right hand creating crystal clear bell-like ripples in the very highest octaves of the piano. There’s also a shorter (and slightly less musically interesting) version of him playing it on Not Only … But Also.


Dudley Moore Trio: The Look of Love

Moore’s most famous role is, of course, as the aristocratic drunk in the movie Arthur, where he slurs, drawls and stumbles his way through a script with perfect comic timing. His piano playing often has a similar quality. The challenge faced by any jazz pianist is to make his or her instrument – with its 12 evenly tempered notes – bend or slur, in the same way a violinist or a trombonist can. Moore, a prodigious child violinist, has a signature sound that deploys grace notes and florid curlicues to give the impression that his piano is a fluid, pliable instrument. Even on this throwaway cover version of the Bacharach and David classic he is a joy to hear. He’s not banging out a tune so much as purring it, starting a few semitones from each intended note and then seductively easing up or down until he reaches it.


Dudley Moore Trio with Marion Montgomery: Close Your Eyes

As a teenager, Moore played the organ and led the choir in his local church in Dagenham, Essex, and he’d often use his voice in trio performances. Here he accompanies Marion Montgomery – the smoky-voiced, Mississippi-born, UK-based jazz singer with a more than passing resemblance to Scarlett Johansson – on a swinging version of the old Bernice Petkere ballad Close Your Eyes. After an impressively bluesy solo, he starts to play a countermelody while singing along – comically but impressively – a minor-third higher than his piano line. For another example of Moore harmonising with a guest singer, check out his version of Lennon and McCartney’s If I Fell, featuring Cilla Black. Moore mixes a baroque harpsichord arrangement with a complicated falsetto countermelody that makes Cilla giggle so much that she can barely complete the song.


Dudley Moore Trio: Just in Time

Moore’s long-time drummer Chris Karan remembers how Dudley was obsessed with the pianist Oscar Peterson, painstakingly transcribing Peterson’s entire solo on Falling in Love With Love (“the score was virtually all black by the time he’d scribbled in every note,” said Karan). This performance of the Adolph Green/Betty Comden/Julie Styne standard Just in Time plays like an Oscar Peterson masterclass, copying all of his bluesy licks, ripples and trills. Moore also recorded the song for the 1962 album Beyond The Fringe … And All That Jazz (recently rereleased by Cherry Red Records).


Peter Cook and Dudley Moore: The LS Bumble Bee

This started out as a sketch on a Christmas 1966 edition of Not Only… But Also which featured John Lennon (making his third appearance on the show) and was released as a single in January 1967. In a 1981 interview, Moore says that he was poking fun at the media furore about LSD, particularly Lennon’s Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds (although the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band wasn’t actually released until June of that year). Musically, it’s more influenced by Brian Wilson’s byzantine harmonies on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and is a magnificent pastiche of nascent psychedelia – musique concréte burbles, heart-tugging chord changes and blissful lysergic imagery.


Dudley Moore Trio: Amalgam

Moore’s self-titled 1969 album was his first set of entirely original material, with bassist Jeff Clyne replacing Moore’s long-time sidekick Pete McGurk (who tragically killed himself the previous year). This sprightly, morning-fresh piece of continental minimalism – reminiscent of 21st century sampladelic acts such as Koop – has been slowed down and sampled by several European hip hop acts. Another cracking track from the same LP is Pop and Circumstance, a set of tangled, Bach-like chord changes over a rock beat.


Dudley Moore Trio: Song for Suzy

By 1970, many jazz musicians – in fear of being rendered irrelevant by rock music’s onward march – started to grow their hair, wear bell-bottoms and experiment with the textures of rock. Moore was not immune to this, trying out electric keyboards, getting his bass players to switch from upright to electric, and playing with rock beats. Song for Suzy (written about his first wife, Suzy Kendall, to whom he was married between 1968-72) is a funky instrumental, with Moore singing in a wordless falsetto, which actually reached the Australian top 10 in April 1971. In 2011 it was also covered – rather well – by Aussie funk band the Jackson Dodds Trio. Dudley’s music remains pretty popular down under – the 2003 debut single by Adelaide hip-hop trio Hilltop Hoods is based around a sample from Moore’s 1970 track The Staircase.