Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Woolf Phillips

Orchestra leader who epitomised postwar big band style on the radio and at the Palladium
Thu 21 Aug 2003 04.47 EDT

Almost all of the big band leaders who featured on 1940s BBC radio, in its most influential and popular era, were the sons of Jewish immigrants, and from London's East End. While their parents had wanted them to play the violin or piano, the sons found they could make more money fronting orchestras.

Shows such as Variety Bandbox featured big bands - Ambrose, Geraldo, Joe Loss - and their leaders were all from that background. Loss was a musician, but most of the others just looked good in white tie and tails, waving a stick. But then there were the Phillips brothers.

Sid was a successful band leader; his brother Woolf, who has died aged 84, was, in some ways, one of the most successful of them all. He played on the "wireless", he also performed with some of America's greatest names. As conductor at the London Palladium when it was regarded as the western world's temple of variety, it was his band that accompanied the young Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland - and Sammy Davis Jr.

It was also an age when British musicians were worrying about transatlantic competition and the Musicians' Union placed impossible restrictions on visits by their American counterparts - which meant no Duke Ellington or Benny Goodman orchestras. So the two men played the Palladium as "visiting artists" and the band that was to Take The 'A' Train with Ellington, and accompany Goodman's clarinet was Phillips's. A British orchestra never had such an opportunity.

Phillips came from a musical family. All three of his brothers had had orchestral careers. He was educated at a great, but unsung school - Mile End's Central Foundation School. There a string of children of immigrants who later became industrialists, as well as entertainers, learned the usual subjects - and how to speak the English language, and about the way of the British world.

Phillips wanted to get into the music business, so he joined a music publisher at a time when such organisations were vital to songwriters. At 14 he was an employee of Campbell Connolly, a firm whose stamp was seen on the top right-hand side of the label of countless popular 78rpm records. He was a staff arranger for composers oblivious that their work was in such immature hands. It was Sid, then arranging for Ambrose, who taught him how to orchestrate. And when Woolf came up with one piece of music, he sent it to the band leader, who recorded it - thinking that it was Sid's work.

Woolf had already flexed his muscles as a player as well as a writer. At 13, he had what became the first of thousands of engagements - playing tenor sax in a band working a one-night stand at Lord Rothschild's home.

If that sounds like the typical East-End-boy-turned-musician story, there was one difference. Woolf was, unlike most of the inhabitants of Jewish London along the Mile End Road, a cricket fanatic - Sid took him for lessons at the Aubrey Faulkner cricket school. He was even offered a contract to play for Lancashire, but realised that while cricket was a passion, his time as a player would inevitably be limited.

After Campbell Connolly, he worked for the Lawrence Wright company, but the playing bug had bitten deep, and he had a short apprenticeship as a trombonist, touring with the Teddy Joyce Juvenile Band. It taught him too, how to be a real conductor, not just a front for a glamorous orchestra.

He became writer-arranger for big bands and conducted, for rehearsals, those of Joe Loss and Harry Roy, frequently taking the helm when they were broadcasting. Soon, he was playing for a man regarded as the "king" - Ambrose, working with the band on a Moss Empire variety theatre tour - although it was fronted by Evelyn Dall, a blonde considered sexy enough to bring in the punters. And he was with Ambrose at Piccadilly's fashionable Café de Paris, just before the outbreak of war.

For six years, Woolf played with the Royal Army Medical Corps band, mainly in Africa and the Middle East, and by 1945 he was the RAMC's musical director. But on leave, he continued playing and, while encamped around the country, he orchestrated for Harry Roy and several of the pieces were recorded.

He remembered a radio show from those days when Irving Berlin came along to hear his music. "I must congratulate you, sir," Berlin told him.

"He called me sir," Woolf would recall. "'Thank you'. I was 25!"

It was the beginning of his glory years. His RAMC band, at its best as a concert orchestra, was good enough to provide backing for Pathe News, one of the two newsreels which dominated pre-TV British cinemas.

Postwar he worked with Ambrose at Ciro's nightspot and arranged for Geraldo (Gerald Bright) alongside Wally Stott and Robert Farnon. From 1947 to 1949, he was the man fronting - and behind - the then famous Skyrockets who made many records for HMV. The band was popular with audiences, and musicans including the young John Dankworth and Kenny Baker.

Phillips was a peerless variety conductor, which was why he was so successful at the Palladium, and he played for the last performances of Max Miller and George Formby. Post-Palladium he would drive to one of what was then the West End's most glitzy nightclubs, the Pigalle, and there became a favourite society bandleader. He also broke into early TV, and composed the theme for What's My Line.

Then, in 1966, the Singin' In The Rain star, Donald O'Connor, suggested Woolf could do well working in California. Woolf and his wife eventually settled in Camarillo. He worked as an accompanist and musical director, was a sometime president of the American Society of Arrangers and Composers, conductor of the Camarillo Symphony and, more importantly, captain of the California Cricket Association.

He married Sylvia Brower in 1948. She survives him, as do their son, daughter and five grandchildren.

· Woolf Phillips, band leader, born January 5 1919; died July 11 2003