Diz Disley

Diz Disley
Disley (centre) at the 1981 Essex Festival, England
Background information
Birth name	William Charles Disley
Born	(1931-05-27)27 May 1931 Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Died	22 March 2010(2010-03-22) (aged 78) London, England
Genres	Jazz
Occupation(s)	Guitarist, graphic designer
Instruments	banjo guitar
Years active	1950s-2000s
Associated acts	Ken Colyer Cy Laurie Sandy Brown Kenny Ball Alex Welsh Stéphane Grappelli Biréli Lagrène

William Charles "Diz" Disley (27 May 1931 – 22 March 2010) was an Anglo-Canadian jazz guitarist, entertainer, and graphic designer. He is best known for his acoustic jazz guitar playing, strongly influenced by Django Reinhardt, for his contributions to the UK trad jazz, skiffle and folk scenes as a performer and humorist, and for his collaborations with the violinist Stéphane Grappelli.

William Charles Disley was born, to Welsh parents then overseas for work, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. When he was four, his parents moved back to Wales, then five years later to Ingleton, North Yorkshire, England, where his mother worked as schoolteacher. In his childhood, he learnt to play the banjo, but took up the jazz guitar at the age of 15, after being exposed to the playing of Django Reinhardt via a neighbour, Norry Greenwood; as Disley recalled, Norry taught him the chords to "Miss Annabel Lee" and "Try a Little Tenderness", in the summer of 1946.

Disley showed an early gift for drawing, and on leaving school enrolled at Leeds College of Art, a college with a reputation for student music making in particular trad jazz, and was soon playing with his fellow students in the Vernon City Ramblers and, shortly afterwards, the newly formed Yorkshire Jazz Band alongside trumpeter Dick Hawdon and clarinettist Alan Cooper. Diz did his National Service overseas in the Army from 1950–1953 after which he resumed his studies in Leeds and began selling cartoons to national newspapers and periodicals. In 1953 Disley worked for a summer season in Morecambe, Lancashire, in 1953 as part of a comedy harmony group, the Godfrey Brothers, still playing banjo, and then moved to London, where he joined Mick Mulligan's band, along with George Melly. Melly described him as having "a beard and [...] the face of a satyr en route to a cheerful orgy". Subsequently he worked with, and occasionally recorded with, most of the leading London-based "Trad" bands of the day including those of Ken Colyer, Cy Laurie, Sandy Brown, Kenny Ball and Alex Welsh, mostly on banjo but occasionally doubling on guitar. His first love, however, remained the music of Django Reinhardt, in particular the sound of the pre-war Quintette du Hot Club de France, and in 1958 he formed his own quintet to replicate that sound, employing the talents of Dick Powell on violin, Danny Pursford and Nevil Skrimshire on rhythm guitars, and a range of double bassists including Tim Mahn; recordings of this outfit have been released retrospectively on Lake records in 2011, also featuring a classic Disley self-portrait cartoon on the cover.