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Oct 1

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‘An Unexpected Pleasure’

The Jazz Couriers (left to right): Ronnie Scott, Bill Eyden, Tubby Hayes, Colin Bates, Terry Shannon

In his heyday, Tubby Hayes was universally accepted as the the finest jazz musician Britain had produced. Good enough to perform at the Half Note in New York in 1961 (in front of an opening-night audience including Miles Davis) and to take the place of an indisposed Paul Gonsalves in Duke Ellington’s saxophone section at the Royal Festival Hall in 1964: these were the sort of accolades that entered local legend.

There have been several generations of British jazz musicians since Hayes died in 1973, aged 38, after a heart operation, and it’s no longer unusual to hear world-class music from local players. There’s also no shortage of recordings from remind us how good Hayes really was, and now there’s a new three-CD box, titled An Unexpected Pleasure, containing unreleased studio and live sessions from 1958 to 1972, full of further evidence of his stature.

It was co-compiled and annotated by Simon Spillett, a tenor saxophonist who is the appointed curator of the Hayes story and published a definitive biography, The Long Shadow of the Little Giant, back in 2015. As long as Spillett is around, time will be not be allowed to erase Hayes’s name from the historical record, and the new box does a useful supporting job in that regard.

Based largely on sessions for BBC’s weekly Jazz Club, it opens with half a dozen crackling tracks from 1958 by the Jazz Couriers, the two-tenor quintet co-led by Hayes and Ronnie Scott, with the young Jeff Clyne replacing Colin Bates on bass in the line-up seen in the photo above. Their version of “Just One of Those Things” is about as hip as such things got back then, its rocket-propelled tempo suiting Hayes perfectly. Three tracks recorded as a guest with the Kurt Edelhagen Big Band at a German festival the following year include a gorgeous arrangement of “Round Midnight”. A jump to 1962 shows the influence of Kind of Blue on “Modes and Blues”, a Hayes original from a fine BBC session with his quintet, with Jimmy Deuchar on trumpet, augmented by three extra brass, and the leader doubling on vibes.

The second disc opens with four tracks the quintet in 1964, Hayes now adding flute to his armoury, before the scene switches to Oslo and a 1966 version of “100% Proof”, Hayes’s 12-minute multi-themed big-band tour de force, here performed with the orchestra of Thorleif Østereng — well played if indifferently recorded, showing glimpses of an engagement with the avant-garde in some of the tenor work. The disc closes with four standards recorded by a new quartet with Mike Pyne on piano, Bruce Cale on bass and Tony Levin on drums.

Finally, the third disc covers the period between his arrest and conviction for possession of heroin in 1968, for which he was given a suspended prison sentence and put into a rehabilitation programme, and his death five years later. It begins with an exhilarating — asome might say slightly overexcited — remake of “100% Proof”, now retitled “200% Proof”, with his own big band, packed with British talent, including Kenny Wheeler and Peter King, and a thunderous double bass-and-drums team of Ron Matthewson, Jeff Clyne, Spike Wells and Tony Levin. Two closing quartet sessions, from 1969 and 1972, provide evidence of his interest in the work of John Coltrane and, particularly, Joe Henderson.

The set is a reminder of the days when the BBC recorded jazz groups at such places as the Aeolian Hall in Bond Street, the Paris Theatre in Bond Street, the Maida Vale Studios and the Hippodrome in Golders Green, with sympathetic producers and skilled sound engineers. It’s a blessing that many of these recordings, some of them taken home after the sessions by the musicians as copy tapes, are being brought into the light once again.

Hayes also features — along with Scott, Stan Tracey, Ronnie Ross, Dudley Moore, Tony Coe and many others — in Spillett’s latest book, Further Shadows. Subtitled “Essays on British Modern Jazz 1950-1975” and rich in anecdotes, it’s out this month, published by Jazz in Britain, on whose label An Unexpected Pleasure also appears. The book is accompanied by a two-CD set of its own featuring the stars of the time in various BBC and club locations, providing glimpses of many whose reputations might not match that of Hayes, but who were certainly worth their place alongside him.

Sep 28

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Bluegrass and Billy Strings

Somewhere in my head, I carry a little list of bands that represent perfect self-contained mechanisms, regardless of category: the Modern Jazz Quartet, Astor Piazzolla’s Tango Nuevo Quintet, and the Chieftains. Now there’s another: the band led by the bluegrass singer, guitarist and songwriter Billy Strings.

I’m late to Billy Strings; three Grammys late, to be exact, all for best bluegrass album of the year in 2021, 2025 and 2026. He’s been around for a while but I didn’t catch up until his new album, So Much for Goodbyes, which is one of the most enjoyable things I’ve heard this year — particularly a wonderful track called “Lucid Daydream”, which bends the bluegrass format in a very compelling way.

Last year Strings was invited to support Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson on a few dates of their Outlaws tour, and cancelled his own summer dates in order to do so. I found a clip of his cover of “Tangled Up in Blue”, not from the Outlaws shows but from his own gig in Hartford, Connecticut in July of this year, and I think it’s completely brilliant — nothing radical in terms of reinterpretation, but in sheer spirit and love of the material it’s up there with the very best of Dylan covers.

Like “Lucid Daydream”, it’s also a great demonstration of how good he and his band can be in what is anyway an idiom rooted in the joyous expression of instrumental virtuosity. He’s a superfine picker, kind of a turbocharged bluegrass Mark Knopfler, as the short solos on the Dylan song demonstrate, but he’s matched every step of the way by Alex Hargreaves on fiddle, Billy Falling on banjo, Jarrod Walker on mandolin, and Royal Masat on string bass.

Together they show how an old-time diasporic music form can be brought right up to the present. I’m just sorry it took me a while, in this instance, to find that out. But better late than never.

* The photo of Billy Strings, taken at a gig this summer by an uncredited photographer, is from his Facebook page. So Much for Goodbyes is out now on the Reprise label.

Sep 23

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Coltrane at 100

I loved jazz as soon as I discovered it, but it was when I heard John Coltrane that I realised it could take me to a different place. That would have been around 1960, and the first thing I heard was his solo on Miles Davis’s “Milestones”, on an EP. Then I used the money from my paper round to buy another EP, this time released under Coltrane’s own name.

Issued in the UK on the Esquire label, it paired “Bass Blues” and “You Leave Me Breathless” from his third studio album for Prestige, recorded in 1957. These were fairly conventional performances but I already knew, from reading Down Beat, that he was heading somewhere else. Soon there would be Coltrane Plays the Blues and Olé, which made that new direction very clear.

From the very start, though, there was that sound. You can hear it in the opening notes of his solo on “Bass Blues”. It was like nothing you’d ever heard before. Nothing like Lester Young or Dexter Gordon or Sonny Rollins. It spoke in a different way, to a different part of the brain. It wasn’t pretty in any normal sense. But it was immediately and transcendentally beautiful. Even then, it seemed to be searching for something beyond the tune, beyond the notes. I couldn’t put it into words then and I still can’t. I’ve never read anybody who really could.

Today, 23 September 2026, is the centenary of Coltrane’s birth. I could have listened to any of the favourites — the album with Monk from Carnegie Hall, “Mr Syms”, “Impressions”, “Africa”, “Alabama”, the whole of A Love Supreme, Crescent and Expressions — but instead I chose to honour his memory by listening to two of his most challenging albums, Om and Kulu Se Mama, both from 1965, They’re the sort of thing that gave critics the ammunition with which to attack his entire career, and 60 years later they still sound chaotic, beyond all structure and restraint and explanation, the product of a man searching for something beyond himself.

His death in 1967 robbed us of the chance to get answers from Coltrane himself, either in words or in his playing, to the questions raised by his later music. What did it all mean? That’s something we have to work out for ourselves. What I can give is my own interpretation of that thing he once said about wanting to create music that started in the middle and then proceeded in both directions simultaneously. To me, those directions are inward and outward, at the same time. That’s what his sound said, and still does.

* The photograph was taken by Chuck Stewart in 1964 is from the cover of Coltrane: The Definitive Visual Celebration of the Legend by Ravi Coltrane and Wayne Coyne, published this month by Ten Speed Press.

Sep 22

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Dialogue at Wigmore Hall

For 50 minutes at Wigmore Hall last night, the bassist Linda May Han Oh and the tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana delivered a lesson in how to take the finest material from the past and weave it into something that belongs firmly to the present. The Australian (born in Malaysia, of Chinese heritage) is the current answer to any question about which bassist you would choose to add energy and invention to your contemporary jazz group. The Chilean specialises in an unstoppable flow of creativity, her ideas developed with an unassuming virtuosity that places her at the forefront of the current generation of saxophonists.

They were re-examining material from their new duo album, Beneath Lifted Skies, starting with Sam Rivers’ “Cyclic Episode”, which quickly revealed the nimbleness and intimacy of their musical partnership: lines were wrapped around each other in a constantly evolving double-helix. “I’ll Be Seeing You”, a standard rescued from a flop 1938 musical, enabled Aldana to display the inspiration of Sonny Rollins in her improvising, manifesting a kind of serious playfulness expressed via a lovely middleweight tone and seemingly effortless fluidity of execution, matched by Oh in a solo full of a deep lyricism that also irradiated the bassist’s playing, from a different perspective, on Charles Mingus’s “Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love”. Bebop was taken for a 21st century ride on Bud Powell’s “Hallucinations” and a staggering, jet-propelled “Anthropology”, the unison statements of Charlie Parker’s tune taking the breath away.

It was a wonderful demonstration both of what remains possible with extensions of what we still call modern jazz and of the possibilities inherent in the conventional language of the two instruments. The album is terrific, but this performance stretched the tunes further in all sorts of interesting and compelling ways. This complex, brainy, sometimes witty, fundamentally interactive music created a world of its own, carrying the audience along its unfolding narrative, and it seemed a pity when they chose to disrupt the carefully built dramatic tension by introducing a couple of guest musicians, the altoist Will Vinson and the singer Jo Lawry. Both were excellent, in their ways, but I was glad to have the memory of those spellbinding 50 minutes of intense dialogue to take away with me.

* Beneath Lifted Skies is available via Bandcamp: https://lindamayhanoh.bandcamp.com/album/beneath-lifted-skies

Sep 17

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Woody Guthrie in Soho

At a few minutes after eight o’clock last night, in an upstairs theatre on a Soho alley, you’d have had a job persuading me that Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” is not the greatest song produced by the 20th century. Its performance came towards the end of Woody Sez, a stage show devoted to the life and work of the great poet-troubadour of America’s working class.

David M. Lutken, a Texan actor-musician who once studied in London, devised the four-person show (with its director, Nick Corley) and was playing the part of Guthrie, his lean frame and likeable delivery making him a good fit. “Deportee”, which Guthrie wrote in 1948 after reading a newspaper report about the crash in California of a plane in which 28 migrant farm workers were being deported back to Mexico, was sung as a duet with Raquel Chavez, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more affecting version.

But it wasn’t alone as a highlight of the evening. With Lutken delivering Guthrie’s story as a between-songs first-person narrative, we were also treated to rousing versions of “Pastures of Plenty”, “Ain’t Got No Home”, “This Train Is Bound for Glory”, “Jolly Banker”, “Vigilante Man” and several others, with “This Land Is Your Land” delivered as a closing singalong.

Chavez, Nyssa Grant and David Finch took occasional lead vocals and sang harmonies while switching between a variety of instruments: duelling fiddles, mandolin, dulcimer, autoharp, string bass, penny whistle, spoons, harmonica, Jew’s harp, banjo, six- and 12-string guitars and a dobro. Their deftness and enthusiasm, and some clever stage movement, ensured that the 80-minute show never dragged.

“Deportee” may have moistened the eyes, but elsewhere there was a lot of humour and fun. It was good to be reminded of a key source of inspiration for Bob Dylan, Ry Cooder, Bruce Springsteen, Rhiannon Giddens and many more, and also of the need for resistance in times when the greed and cruelty of the vigilantes and the jolly bankers threaten the common good.

* There are further performances of Woody Sez tonight, tomorrow and Saturday (17-19 September) at Underbelly Boulevard Soho, 6 Walker’s Court, London W1F 0BT: underbellyboulevard.com

Sep 14

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‘A Ritual for John Coltrane’

The centenary of John Coltrane’s birth in Hamlet, North Carolina falls later this month; many commemorative events will take place. Yesterday afternoon at Cafe Oto, in the first of four monthly Sunday matinee concerts, Evan Parker led something he titled ‘A Ritual for John Coltrane’, which turned out to be the sort of tribute that summons the spirit of the dedicatee without trying to mimic the substance.

I may have mentioned before that the first time I interviewed Evan, at his home in the early ’70s, I was impressed by a shelf of LPs with orange and black spines: Coltrane’s albums on Impulse, of course, in their original US editions. Over the years I learned more about his love of the great man’s work, and the inspirational effect it had on the development of his own playing.

Yesterday Evan sat at the centre of an expanded performance space, with his soprano saxophone and a suspended gong. He was flanked by Matt Wright, his partner in Trance Map, at a table with a laptop and a turntable, and by Filipe Gomes of Ramsgate’s Arco Barco studio, also with a laptop and other electronic devices. At the four corners of the space were a quartet of percussionists assembled by Mark Sanders, himself standing at an array of larger gongs, cymbals and small upturned bass drums, with Miles Levin, Jim Bashford and Tymek Jozwiak each seated at minimal kits of varying configurations.

After the room had fallen silent, Evan began proceedings by striking the gong. His strokes precipitated a very gradual accretion of sounds from the other players, creating an abstract tapestry of rustles, taps, pings and other noises, with the subtle infiltration of electronic sounds at its base. After many minutes of this, and a fade to a silence in which we heard Coltrane’s voice speaking about his desire for growth as a person, Evan picked up his soprano and began the first of several improvisations against the constantly shifting sound-quilt.

He is 82 now, more than twice as old as Coltrane was when he died in 1967. Yet his playing is still mesmerising in its unquenchable flow of invention, based on all the techniques of blowing and fingering developed over the decades and powered by circular breathing as well as a constantly active imagination. I suppose you could trace it back to Coltrane’s three-minute unaccompanied tenor cadenza on the version of “I Want to Talk About You” released on Live at Birdland in 1964 — staggering at the time, and still inspiring awe.

The use of the soprano saxophone recalled how Coltrane, once he had taken up the instrument, must have heard in it echoes of the double-reed rhiatas of the Sufi musicians of Jajouka and the shenai of South Asia. The tapestry of percussion effects, rising and falling in waves as the intensity surged, abated and then surged again, was a reminder of how, in his later years, Coltrane loved adding drummers to his ensemble — Rashied Ali, J. C. Moses, Algie DeWitt, Jumma Santos, Ray Appleton, Juno Lewis, Umar Ali, Joe Brazil, Babatunde Olatunji — in the attempt to realise the vision of a music that, as he once said, would start in the middle and move outwards in both directions.

As Evan and his colleagues made their way through a magnificent performance that lasted well over an hour before returning to silence, it was impossible not to hear in the saxophone’s flutters and skeins and multiphonics a direct evolution — entirely personal to Parker — of what Coltrane began more than 60 years ago. As I said, the best kind of tribute.

* ‘A Ritual for John Coltrane’ will be performed again this Friday evening, September 18, at Foyle’s Studio in the Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham.

Sep 13

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‘Everybody Digs Bill Evans’

On its own terms, Grant Gee’s Everybody Digs Bill Evans is an extraordinary film, fully deserving the accolades and awards coming its way. Adapted from Intermission, the 2013 novella by the Welsh writer Owen Martell, it concentrates on the months in 1961 following the car crash that took the life of the bassist Scott LaFaro, depriving Evans of his closest musical partner and throwing him into a a severe depression. The Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie delivers a finely drawn portrait of Evans’s sometimes mute anguish, compounded by his addiction to heroin and complex relationships with a lover and with his family.

Bringing the famous cover photo of Sunday at the Village Vanguard (the artist as ascetic, bespectacled intellectual) to life, his performance is fully supported by Valene Kane as Ellaine Schulz, Evans’s girlfriend, Barry Ward as his older brother, Katie McGrath as his sister-in-law, Bill Pullman as his father, and Laurie Metcalf,as his mother. All are superb, but Pullman and Ward are particularly adept at suggesting the mixture of concern, incomprehension and envy that makes this a compelling family drama.

Mark O’Halloran’s spare screenplay, Piers McGrail’s high-contrast black and white cinematography (erupting into saturated colour for sequences set in 1973 and 1979), the razor-sharp editing of Adam Biskupski and the wonderfully subtle score by Roger Goula are all of the highest quality, helping Gee to create as fine a cinematic depiction of a real-life jazz musician as I can remember. We get just enough of Evans’s music, in an opening sequence recreating the great trio — Evans, LaFaro and the drummer Paul Motian — playing a snatch of “Gloria’s Step” at the Village Vanguard in June 1961, to give those who don’t know the music a clear idea of what it was all about. The subtle use of archive footage artfully enhances the sense of period and place.

Although I’d recommend everyone to see it, and hope it achieves lasting recognition for the outstanding piece of work it is, I do have a lingering sense of disquiet. Is this actually the film that Bill Evans deserves? By concentrating on one harrowing episode of his life, certainly a legitimate subject for a novella, will it unfairly distort an appreciation of his place in the world? It’s a bit like reading Martell’s book without first having first read How My Heart Sings, Peter Pettinger’s definitive biography of Evans, published in 1998. Looking at the full arc of Evans’s career, there are questions that remain open. But Gee’s five-star film, so carefully focused and sensitively pitched, can really only be greeted with the warmest applause.

* The still from Everybody Digs Bill Evans shows Anders Danielsen Lie as Evans and Will Sach as Scott LaFaro. The film is in cinemas now.

Sep 9

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Where the time went

Sandy Denny was shy, impulsive, proverbially clumsy, liked a drink a bit too well, and was loved despite her frailties and peccadilloes by all who came under the spell of her voice and her songs. She died in 1978, aged 31, after a fall at home, the promise of a songwriter capable of coming up with “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” at the age of 18 sadly unfulfilled and her solo career destined to remain the subject of regretful conjecture. For all that, she remains a great figure of British music, as successive generations continue to discover.

Although Mick Houghton’s I’ve Always Kept a Unicorn, published in 2015, is likely to remain the standard biography, a new book titled Sandy Denny: A People’s History is a most valuable addition to the record. Compiled and edited by her daughter, Georgia Rose Lucas, who was nine months old when Sandy died, it consists of oral and sometimes written testimony from dozens and dozens of those who encountered the singer at every level of engagement, from fellow members of the Strawbs, Fairport Convention and Fotheringay, studio engineers and producers to old boyfriends, college mates, students’ union social secretaries and fans who worshipped from a distance.

Of the latter class, there’s the tale told by a man called Steffan Wennerlund, who saw in a British music paper a notice saying that Fairport would be playing a garden fete at Cropredy to raise funds for the village hall roof in the summer of 1977 and jumped on a flight from Sweden. As he made his way down a path, he saw Sandy getting out of a car with her husband, Trevor Lucas. She was wearing a long white dress. He wanted to say something as she passed, but found himself tongue-tied. She didn’t perform, which disappointed him. But there was a lasting compensation: “A beautiful picture I have in my memory of Sandy coming towards me on the path, in the evening light, in her white dress.”

There is a witness to her final public performance, at Byfield village hall a couple of weeks before she died. One of an audience of about 30 people, Lou Hart heard a solo set that closed with “Who Knows Where the Times Goes”.

Dave Cousins remembers the lines he wrote in a song about her: “Every time I hear your name, my eyes moist up with years / As every word you ever sang comes ringing down the years.” Joe Boyd, not surprisingly, has a shrewd analysis: “Sandy was a very confident musician but lacked confidence as a person. She was insecure about her looks and worried that she couldn’t keep Trevor by her side without giving him power and responsibility over her career, first in Fotheringay and then as producer.”

Linda Thompson has a lovely story about spending a day with Sandy at Muriel’s, the notorious Soho drinking club. Richard Thompson remembers how Sandy always got him to change her guitar strings — “as if this was a masonic ritual beyond her powers of understanding.” Dave Pegg points out that life touring with the Fairports wasn’t easy for her: “We never made it big enough to get the limo treatment and had to stay in basic hotels. She put on a brave face and became one of the chaps most of the time.”

Simon Nicol remembers “sleeping with her”. But to get more on that episode you’ll have to read this very worthwhile book, which is also pleasingly full of photographs, posters, tickets and cuttings — the memorabilia of a tragically short but extraordinary life.

* Sandy Denny: A People’s History by Georgia Rose Lucas is published by Spenwood Books: http://www.spenwoodbooks.com

Sep 7

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RIP Latimore

Latimore’s “Let’s Straighten It Out” is one of my favourite soul records of the ’70s. Or any time, come to that. Largely because of how it sounds, but also because of its difference.

Most deep-soul ballads are written from a solipsistic perspective: the singer is concentrating on him- or herself, bemoaning his or her loss and the consequent heartbreak. That’s understandable enough. Such a song enables the listener to make a very direct identification with the message, whether it’s “The Tracks of My Tears” or “Stay With Me, Baby”, or even something with a slightly more complicated narrative, such as “Any Day Now” or “Go Now”. But “Let’s Straighten It Out” does something different.

Sit yourself down, girl, and talk to me / Tell me what’s on your mind / Don’t keep on telling me everything’s okay / Cause if it was then you wouldn’t be crying…

The singer knows that something is badly amiss with his lover and he wants to know what it is. For five nights she’s been tossing and turning, crying in her sleep, not even saying good night. His entreaties are insistent but gentle and compassionate. The only concession to orthodoxy is the suggestion that “Instead of crying your eyes out, honey / You and me ought to be getting it on.” He just wants to know the truth, and where he stands within it, and he’s taking care to control whatever incipient anger that truth might provoke. It’s more like the approach a country music writer might take.

The death of Benny Lattimore, as he was born in Charleston, Tennessee, was announced in the New York Times‘s obituaries section yesterday. He was a couple of weeks short of his 87th birthday. If he never regained the peak of “Let’s Straighten It Our”, an R&B No 1 hit in 1974, he had a solid career as a singer and keyboard player, appearing — for example — on half a dozen tracks of Joss Stone’s debut album in 2003.

“Let’s Straighten It Out” was recorded for Henry Stone’s Glades label in Miami, Florida. The producer was Steve Alaimo, using the TK Records studio and some of its house musicians: the bass guitarist Ron Bogdan and the drummer Robert Fergusen, who play beautifully while staying out of the way.

You need to hear the five-minute album version rather than the 45 edit (or the subsequent Malaco remake) because Latimore prefaces the song with a lengthy and most beautiful electric piano reverie, creating a mood on a D minor / G minor vamp that sets up the first verse with a pause and a cleverly signalled shift to the G minor for the opening lines. His voicing of the chords is matched by the growl of the Fender Rhodes keyboard and the brilliantly subtle hiss of Fergusen’s hi-hat, opened on the AND of “one-AND” at the start of every other bar.

When I called my old friend Pete Wingfield to check a couple of musical points, he observed that it was a record embodying the “take your time” philosophy — something almost extinct in today’s music scene. It’s a relaxed record because the mood in the studio was relaxed, and the musicians were allowed to get on with doing their thing. Other examples might be Aretha’s “I Never Loved a Man”, Don Covay’s “It’s Better to Have (and Don’t Need)”, Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You” or Bill Withers’ first album.

Latimore’s singing on “Let’s Straighten It Out” might be that of a younger Jimmy Witherspoon. His voice is a manly southern baritone with plenty of nuanced passion but none of the post-Redding clichés. Everything is understated, even the jamming on the fade. You believe every word, every note. He’s gone now, but his song is immortal.

Aug 31

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John Tilbury, home and away

It isn’t often that I get to write about the noise of dust — which, in a form amplified by the Austrian soundartist Klaus Filip, turns out to be a sort of gentle crackling, used to accompany John Tilbury’s piano on a piece included in an elegant new boxed set called At Home. This beautifully designed little coffret features a mixture of recordings made at Tilbury’s house in Deal on the Kent coast and archive pieces dating back to 1970, when the pianist was already well established as a gifted interpreter of the compositions of Morton Feldman and John Cage and a collaborator with such adventurous spirits as Cornelius Cardew and other members of the improvising group AMM.

In the summer of 2022, Tilbury was to have taken part in the final appearance of AMM, held at Cafe Oto as part of the celebrations of the percussionist Eddie Prévost’s 80th birthday. Instead, health considerations led him to announce his retirement from public performance, meaning that his participation in the event was restricted, as I wrote here, to samples of his playing triggered by the guitarist Keith Rowe. That decision prompted Simon Reynell of the Another Timbre label to ask Tilbury if he would be prepared to collaborate on what became the contents of the box, selecting archive pieces and recording new ones. Over the course of 24 pieces and about 300 minutes, it provides a fine summary of what this master of keyboard minimalism has been up to when communing with his piano over the last six decades, with occasional assistance from partners.

Most of the music here is performed solo, but collaborators include the pianists Tania Chen, Sebastian Lexer, and (on Feldman’s Piece for Four Pianos), Philip Thomas, Mark Knoop and Catherine Laws. There are also the electronics of Rowe, on an improvisation recorded in a Leeds church in 2004, and Filip, on the piece from 2019 called “Dust and piano”.

The shortest standalone piece is Erika Fox’s “J.T. Bagatelle”, which fills its 1 minute and 55 seconds with elegant and unhurried figurations, composed earlier this year as a present for Tilbury’s 90th birthday and also commemorating their first encounter on their first day at the Royal College of Music in 1952. The longest, at 41:39, is “Sycamore”, a 2023 piece by John Lely, a former student of Tilbury, in which intervals — mostly minor seconds, it seems to me — are struck and allowed to resonate, sometimes overlapping; it’s like sitting by a pond and tossing in small pebbles two at a time, watching the effect of the ripples as they meet, merge and vanish — deadpan, but mesmerising.

The box’s first disc opens in the 14th century, with a concert recording of four pieces by Guillaume de Machaut arranged for the pianos of Tilbury and Chen by György Kurtág. Also represented are Feldman, Cardew, Howard Skempton, Christian Wolff, Christopher Hobbs, Michael Parons, Catherine Kontz and others. Several pieces are for the clavichord, which Tilbury acquired in 2015 and whose sound gives the music a slightly rickety ancient-to-the-future appeal.

There are also a couple of pieces in which Tilbury intones texts by Samuel Beckett. “What Is the Word”, Beckett’s final poem, written in 1988, was recorded to very dramatic effect with the organ in the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, during a concert in 2015. The fathomless pessimism of the second, “Pour rien”, is very affectingly delivered agsinst a plain setting for clavichord by Mark R. Taylor. There is also “For Samuel Beckett”, a 28-minute improvisation for the pianos of Tilbury and Lexer, recorded during a London Musicians Co-op festival in 2005.

At the moment my favourite pieces from the set are Cardew’s “Volo Solo”, written in 1965, recorded around five years later in unknown circumstances, full of abrupt angles and quick contrasts, bristling with the excitement of the new, and Mark R. Taylor’s “Five Nocturnes” (2014-16), which are at the opposite end of the emotional scale in their deliberate but never heavy-handed lyricism. In all these we hear the wonderful touch and timing of a man who, amid what he calls “the new dark ages”, has described himself as “a small island of archaic conservation”. This is much more than that.

* John Tilbury’s At Home: Domestic and Archive Recordings is on the Anothet Timbre label: http://www.anothertimbre.com

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