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Max van Gelder (12 February 1916 – 2 October 2004), professionally known as Max Geldray, was a jazz harmonica player. Best known for providing the musical interludes for ''The Goon Show'', he was also credited as being the first harmonica player to embrace the jazz style. Geldray was born in the Netherlands and played jazz in England, Belgium, France and his home country, before settling in Britain at the outbreak of the Second World War; he was wounded during the Invasion of Normandy. He appeared in nearly every episode of ''The Goon Show'', providing one of the musical interludes and the closing music for each programme. After ''The Goon Show'' series finished in 1960, he settled in the US, where he worked as an entertainer in the Reno casinos alongside the likes of Sarah Vaughan and Billy Daniels. Moving to Palm Springs, he eventually became a part-time counsellor at the Betty Ford Center. He was married twice and has one son. Geldray died in 2004 at the age of 88. ==Early life (1916–46)== Geldray was born Max Leon van Gelder, on 12 February 1916 in Amsterdam, Netherlands to Jewish parents.〔 His father, Leon van Gelder, was a commercial traveller, and his mother was Margarite, née Baillosterky.〔 By 1922 Leon was the European Manager for Maja perfume and the family moved out of Amsterdam to Bilthoven. Both parents could play the piano—Leon was self-taught and played by ear, while Margarite was classically trained—and it was Leon who started to teach Geldray how to play. He developed love of jazz music after hearing Louis Armstrong on the radio in 1928; Geldray later wrote "how could anyone ''not'' love its energy, its vitality and the freedom of its form? And Louis Armstrong among all the players, became something special to me". In February 1930 Geldray heard a mouth organ player on BBC Radio and mentioned the performance to a friend, Hans Mossel, owner of a music shop in Amsterdam; Mossel had ordered a chromatic harmonica the previous week and gave it to Geldray, who practised assiduously. By 1934 Geldray had made some appearances on Dutch radio and formed a band with eight others; an agent named Franklin billed the group as "Mac Geldray and his Mouth Accordion Band", changing the surname of the principal to the name he retained for the rest of his life. With his performances, Geldray became the first person to play the harmonica in the jazz style. A change in the format of the band to a quartet and the introduction of a new manager led to a six-week tour of English theatres in 1937, accompanying the comedian Tom Moss; the band changed its name to "The Hollander Boys".〔 During the tour Moss introduced Geldray to Jack Hylton, who invited him to play in his orchestra for the evening. On his return to the Netherlands, the harmonica band broke up and Geldray travelled alone to Brussels, where he found work playing with the dance orchestra at the club Le Boeuf sur le Toit, where he remained for a year. He then worked with a dance band in The Hague, before joining the house band at the Ostend Casino, the Johnny Fresno Band .〔 He would meet a number of influential acts who were booked to play the casino on occasion, including saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, the English bandleader Ambrose and French bandleader Ray Ventura.〔 Ventura soon offered Geldray a job and in 1937 Geldray moved to Paris.〔 While in Paris, he went to the ''Hot Club de France'' and played with jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt,〔 a musician about who Geldray asserts, "I can honestly say that I have never heard anyone better". The two became close friends and played together often.〔 With the invasion of France by German forces in early 1940, Geldray travelled to England, where he realised he would be safer.〔 On 20 September 1940 he joined the Royal Netherlands Motorized Infantry Brigade, part of the Dutch army exiled in England. During the war he continued to play and appeared on BBC Radio; in 1942 he was part of the entertainment laid on for Princess Elizabeth's sixteenth birthday at Windsor Castle.〔 During the course of 1942 Geldray also met Sarah Prentice, a 26-year-old Scottish variety artiste, whose professional name was Zaza Peters; the couple married on 18 January 1943.〔 Geldray took part in the Normandy landings with the Prinses Irene Brigade, but was injured by a bomb blast and spent time in a military hospital.〔 Although he did not incur long-term injuries, he suffered from recurring nightmares in the following years.〔 After the liberation of Amsterdam, Geldray travelled to the city to find his parents who had been resident when the Germans invaded. He found that both parents and his sister Xaviere had been killed in a concentration camp by the Nazis.〔 At the end of the war, Geldray returned to Paris and once again found work with Ray Ventura's orchestra for two years, before returning to London in 1947.〔〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Max Geldray」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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