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Brian Arthur Lovell Rust (b. 1922) first got hooked on jazz via the Jack Hylton Ork and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and moved on quickly. While he was too young to have seen the ODJB, he did eventually meet drummer Tony Spargo.
He claimed that at the age of three years he had heard a record of Yes Sir, That's My Baby by the Denza Dance Orchestra (a pseudonym for Ace Brigode) and as a result he received a good deal of criticism for what appeared to be a precocious claim. The recording concerned was made in June 1925 and was issued in the UK soon after, and it is entirely possible that Rust heard it and remembered it when he was only three or four years of age. Given his demonstrations of phenomenal memory later in life it is likely that his claim was justified.
Soon he was seeking out shellac by, pretty much, all those names we know. Leaving school in 1938, he worked for the Bank of England, an un-jazzy workplace, but the salary was ample for him to keep up with the British re-issues of classic jazz that had come onto the market.
Because jazz players from the early 1930s released records under various aliases, Brian got tired of buying records 'on spec', hoping that the Corona Dance Ork was in fact the Memphis Five. He found a Stateside contact who wanted British dance band releases and so, by swapping, he built up a rather good jazz collection. Jack Teagarden was the first major musician he questioned about early jazz and, he was pleased to slip 'T' a copy of one of his earliest discs, a 1928 Victor waxing, with the Roger Wolfe Kahn Orchestra, She's a Great, Great Girl. Later, Louis Armstrong was equally pleased to stay up late with Brian, lounging in the seclusion of a big car, privately discussing his early canon too.
Some of the collectors in Britain developed a liking for jazz and began exchanging lists of jazz recordings and fledgling discographies even before Schleman and Delaunay published their pioneering books. This documentation of jazz was largely of white musicians such as Red Nichols and Bix Beiderbecke but there was interest in Duke Ellington...