I was a callow youth of 18 or so when our local folk club announced next week, Diz Disley (this is around 1971). We dutifully paid our 25p or so and were treated not only to an evening of much hilarity but to the most astounding guitar playing I had ever seen up to that point - mostly delivered effortlessly in support of some novelty song item or other. At a time when myself + peers thought we had done well to master the chords to "The Last Thing on my mind", "House of the Rising Su" or, just possibly, "Anji", here was someone who was playing all over the fingerboard, as happily in Bb or Eb as in the standard "folk" keys of C, D, G and A (or occasionally E if you could master B7); played chord types we had never encountered before such as 6ths, 9ths, augmented and diminished; kept up a contantly moving bassline by clever choices of voicings and inversions; played passages in octaves a la Django, as well as single string lead lines - the list goes on. Needless to say most in the audience (if they even recognised what was going on) were dumbfounded and went away vowing to figure out at least one new chord, even if it took a few years! Actually for me I think the material went in somewhere deep and took a number of years to re-emerge via a subconscious process, helped along by hearing a number of other "folk" acts with occasionally "jazzy" leanings such as Steve Goodman (on tour from the US), Dan Hicks (US) and Nick Barraclough/Telephone Bill and the Smooth Operators (UK), Stan Gordon and others, and the whole style began to make a bit more sense and become enjoyable to play for oneself... Personally I do not hear a lot of Django in Diz' lead lines, more the trad jazz in which he was steeped (and especially in his fast strummed chordal solos, of which you can see some on the Stephane Grappelli in San Francisco filmed concert). He was still playing folk cluubs and festivals in the 80s at least in tandem with his jazz work, most of his jokes and one-liners becoming as traditional with the fans as the songs, but still wowing them in the aisles as well as passing the torch to other younger players such as Chris Newman and (I gather) Chris Flegg. Indeed it was not until pondering these lines plus doing a re-write of the wikipedia article that I realised how much of my own style I owe to Diz via the well known folk process of osmosis. Here's hoping he is jamming with his heroes in the sky.

- Tony