Visionary percussionist and Tibetan singing bowl expert Frank Perry was born in Hampstead London on Friday 25th June 1948. He began his interest in music-making during his final term of school in the spring of 1964 showing an immediate, remarkably advanced facility with rhythm and drums. In one and a half hours he was performing ‘co-ordinated independence’ (which had taken his instructor five years!) That’s as much teaching as he ever got.
Some weeks after that he was able to execute a one-hand roll a la Joe Morello – friends of his that were in the audience at Black Cat Bones gigs, would inform him of how the rest of the audience were looking for the ‘other’ drummer! (Frank playing with one hand what one would usually expect a drummer to perform with two hands).
This didn’t exactly endear him to the lead singer, whose harmonica solos weren’t always getting the attention desired. In 1963 he affiliated himself with the ‘Beats’ (Beatniks) listening to modern jazz (Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Modern Jazz Quartet, etc) and also folk music (Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry & Brownie MaGee, Jessie Fuller, Joan Baez, etc) and later (65), Oriental classical and religious music from India, Japan, Tibet, and China, also hitching around the country and finally abroad in Europe ending in Morocco for several months.
Towards the end of ’64 he began playing with a rhythm & blues band that he named ‘Abstract Sound.’ In the summer of 1966 he joined the Chicago Blues band the ‘BlackCat Bones,’ featuring the late great Paul Kossoff on lead guitar of FREE fame.
The group played regularly at the famous London club ‘The Marquee’ backing top black blues artists from the U.S.A. notably Eddie Boyd and ChampionJack Dupree. The band, considered to be one of the top two blues bands at that time, had support groups such as Jethro Tull and Ten Years After, whilst very often they were sharing the bill with groups such as Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac.
Both Kossoff and Perry left the band in early 1968. Kossoff to form FREE, and Perry in February to explore the very cutting edge of avant-garde FREE-jazz.
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