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Nov 15

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Asha Puthli at the Barbican

The 2006 EFG London Jazz Festival got off to slightly strange start for me. Why did I buy a ticket for Asha Puthli’s concert at the Barbican Hall? Curiosity, mostly. Because I’d interviewed her back in 1972, out of an interest in meeting the person Ornette Coleman had invited to sing on a couple of tracks of Science Fiction, his recently released LP, and because last night’s guest artists included the trumpeter Yazz Ahmed, the sitarist Anoushka Shankar and the tabla drummer Sarathy Korwar.

To be frank, I hadn’t kept tabs on Puthli over the past five decades, although I knew that she’d featured in the disco and fashion worlds. What I remember of meeting her was that she came from a privileged background in Bombay (now Mumbai), studied the tarana style of Hindustani classical singing from childhood, fell in love with jazz, arrived in New York in 1969 with scholarship to study dance with Martha Graham, and told me, in startlingly explicit terms, a story about being propositioned by a well-known free jazz musician (not Coleman).

Last night’s concert was billed as a “Cosmic Voyage”, and I had no idea what that might entail. I lasted an hour, during which Puthli — now 81 — turned up looking and sounding like a cross between Dame Edna Everage (diamante-encrusted spectacles), Daphne Guinness (extreme fashion sense), Amanda Lear (Studio 54 vibe), and Mae West (occasional dirty wisecrack). She fumbled through the running order and required reminders to introduce her guests, and her singing was not strong, needing the help she received from a supporting female singer.

Her six-piece band kept things in order, providing a platform for the cut-and-paste contributions of her guests. Ahmed played a couple of poised trumpet and flugelhorn solos, Shankar shredded — I think that’s the right term — on a cover of Bobby Hebb’s “Sunny”, and Korwar’s brief showcase suggested to me what a concert been devoted solely to the three guests might have achieved.

I don’t really know what the “Cosmic Journey” was all about, or what the almost-capacity audience was thinking as they laughed along at her semi-audible jokes. Maybe it all became clear after the interval. The man across the aisle who came as Truman Capote certainly seemed to enjoy himself. But I thought of other performances I’ve witnessed by female singers in their seventies and eighties, and I remembered how Mabel Mercer and Mavis Staples in particular could work around the inevitable loss of technical resources and still express their essence. That, I’m afraid, didn’t seem to be happening here.

Nov 4

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Stevie Wonder in Docklands

In February 1966 the 15-year-old Little Stevie Wonder astounded a packed crowd of 200 or so kids at the Dungeon Club in Nottingham, a gig which retains its place in local legend. Many of my friends were there, although I wasn’t. Probably I was working an evening shift on the local paper. But when I was told about it afterwards, I promised myself never to miss him whenever the opportunity arose.

Luckily for me, there have been several such occasions, including a fabulous mini-concert at a theatre in Cannes during a music business festival in 1974, a storming show with greater resources at Earl’s Court a decade later and a little semi-impromptu solo performance at Abbey Road Studios, whose nature and date I forget. Last night, in front of 20,000 people at the O2, he celebrated the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life by running through the entire album, including bonus tracks omitted from the original release.

I detest the O2. As a venue for music, it has all the intimacy and charm of an out-of-town shopping mall — which is basically what it is. But it was very good to see that the great majority of the audience could not have been born when Songs in the Key of Life was released in 1976. The place came to life as soon as he appeared, in front of a band that filled the stage. And it was instructive to hear how the audience joined in his call-and-response passages in a way that had been quite beyond his listeners at Earl’s Court in 1984.

He always brings great musicians, and the current touring outfit rests on the foundation provided by Stanley Randolph on drums and Nathan Watts on five-string bass guitar. There are five horns (two trumpets, trombone, alto and tenor saxophones), two guitarists, two keyboard players (one of then Greg Phillinganes), two percussionists, a harpist, a double string quartet (four violins, two violas, two cellos), and six backing singers (four women, two men). It’s enough to say that they made many of the songs sound more powerful than the recorded versions, despite the rather strident amplification. And there was a little between-songs riff on “Billie Jean” that, as I think Wonder said, could have gone on for ever.

He is 76 now, and his voice has lost a little of its elasticity, but not its musicality. He never did sound quite like anyone else, and he still doesn’t. It was at its best on the two songs that provided the highlights for me: first a rampaging “I Wish”, with those smeary horns figures digging into the chattering funk provided by the rhythm section, and second “Pastime Paradise”, which floored me when I first heard it — sounding like nothing I’d ever heard before — and was even more affecting last night with the live string section and a more aggressive edge.

In 1972, on the eve of the release of Music of My Mind, I had the privilege of talking to him on BBC2’s The Old Grey Whistle Test. He was the most thoughtful and interesting interviewee you could imagine. And although his songwriting output slowed after that astonishing run of albums in the ’70s, he remains the true successor to Duke Ellington: a musician who brings it all together and makes it his own.

Nov 3

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Tom Rush at the Union Chapel

As we listened to Tom Rush interpreting Jackson Browne’s “These Days” on Sunday night, it was impossible not to reflect that here was an 85-year-old man singing a song written in 1964 by 16-year-old. All time is eternally present, as the poet wrote.

Rush recorded “These Days” in 1970. He wasn’t the first, but Browne was among the songwriters whose work he promoted by placing their songs on his albums when they were still little-known. Others were James Taylor, who saw him as a mentor, and Joni Mitchell, whose “Urge for Going” was also in Sunday’s repertoire in Islington’s beautiful Union Chapel.

Renarkably, this was Rush’s first London gig since the 1960s, when he was one of many singer-songwriters touted as the “new Dylan”. Goodness knows why he’d never been back, because — for those who’d never seen him before — he turned out to be a wonderfully humorous raconteur as well as a still-agile guitarist and a singer who knows how to work around the limitations imposed by age.

We were reminded that here is a man who learned “Drop Down Mama” from Sleepy John Estes and “Panama Limited” from Bukka White at a time in the 1960s when he was at Harvard and sharing the stage of Boston’s Club 47 with those blues legends. And then he could veer off into the rousing country of Lee Clayton’s “Ladies Love Outlaws”, made famous by Waylon Jennings, or to the knowing senior-citizen wit of his own “The Remember Song”. “Siena’s Song”, written for his daughter when she was a child, proved enough to give doting fatherhood a good name.

And, of course, there was the song for which he will always be remembered: “No Regrets”, recorded for The Circle Game in 1968, made a hit by the Walker Brothers in 1975, its cadences now subtly reshaped by the lightly grizzled baritone of the man who wrote it, and still among the very finest of letting-go songs.

* Tom Rush’s most recent album, Garden Old, Flowers New, is available via his website: http://www.tomrush.com

Nov 1

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Stirring Beckett

If Mark Rothko’s paintings represent a visual approach to the condition of music, then Samuel Beckett’s poems, plays and prose are the literary equivalent. Not just the music of words: a music suggested by the words, beyond them yet intrinsic to their sounds and rhythms.

Stirrings Still was Beckett’s last piece of prose: nine pages, about 2,500 words, written between 1983 and 1987, which means it was finished two years before his death. And that’s what it seems to evoke: a man quietly contemplating his own mortality, time and loss and things undone, summoning flawed memories. As it opens, he sits at a table, watching himself “rise and go”.

Paul Griffiths reads Stirrings Still on a new album of that title, the words divided into 18 sections separated by music for string quartet written by the American composer Trevor Bača. Griffiths, whom I knew when he was the chief classical music critic for The Times in London throughout the 1980s, is a much decorated author (including three novels), librettist and lecturer.

He is not an actor, which means that inflection of the text is limited, and mostly the better for it. His is an ordinary voice, suited to calm reflection, not drawing attention to itself and therefore a good fit for this Beckett piece. The quasi-incantatory repetitions are allowed to speak for themselves, while a little trouble with his Rs adds a touch of imperfection and character. A Bill Nighy or an Ian McKellen might “sell” the lines better but the result would not seem so true.

What the speaker avoids in terms of drama and variety, Bača’s music supplies. The Jack Quartet — Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman (violins), John Pickford Richards (viola) and Jay Campbell (cello) — provide a repertoire of scrapes and swoops and sawing, unsettling harmonics, microtonal drones, hurtling zigzag patterns, and glissandi that judder like a train jumping its tracks, all laid out with beautiful timing and, in Manfred Eicher’s production, a sense of space and air. Only at the end do the narration and the music overlap, an understated effect to close a remarkable piece of work.

* Stirrings Still is out now on the ECM New Series label. The text is available, along with that of Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho, in a volume published by Faber & Faber as Company Etc. The photograph of Beckett is from the cover of Stirrings Still and was taken by Rosemarie Clausen.

Oct 17

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Rail excursion

Not often do I begin a review with a recommendation for the venue’s catering. In fact never, until now. But the Jazz Café POSK, situated in London’s Polish cultural centre on King Street in Hammersmith, extends a hospitality that includes its restaurant, where before last night’s gig by the Wobbly Rail Five I had a plate of herring with potato salad and a large slice of apple pie with cinnamon — all delicious — and came out with change from 15 quid.

In his days as a college radio DJ, Lou Reed titled his programme Excursion on a Wobbly Rail, after a tune on Cecil Taylor’s 1959 LP Looking Ahead. Ten years ago Wobbly Rail Five became the name of an occasional quintet fronted by the British saxophonists and long-time associates Chris Biscoe and Pete Hurt, with Liam Noble on piano and Steve Watts on bass. When they made an album in 2016, it was with Jon Scott on drums. Last night at POSK the drums were in the hands of Sophie Alloway.

It’s an interesting little group, playing quite intricate compositions that require sheet music and fairly intense concentration, occupying a part of the jazz spectrum also inhabited by Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols. Last night’s repertoire, based on the album, included Monk’s “Played Twice” (arranged for two sopranos, as if in homage to the group the late Steve Lacy once led with a second soprano, Steve Potts), along with pieces by Biscoe, Hurt and Noble, most of them including a nod to the high priest of bebop somewhere in their contours.

Noble is particularly good at that kind of thing, and his solos were notable for the strength of their angular architecture. Alloway responded brilliantly to the challenge of providing the detailed arrangements with the sort of cues and punctuations more normally required in a big band than a small combo, while retaining the intimacy of the conversation, swinging beautifully along with Watts and adding particularly effective cymbal textures.

Irregularly assembled, the band sounded a little stiff to start with but eventually eased into the evening in front of a smallish but enthusiastic audience, the horns warning up with Biscoe’s liquid soprano on Hurt’s woozy ballad “Lost for Words” and Hurt’s tenor digging into the contours of Noble’s “Ask Your Mother”, which bopped along like a soul-jazz tune with a dash of bitters.

A good gig, then, in one of London’s most welcoming jazz venues. And now that they’ve reassembled after a long hiatus, one hopes that the Wobbly Rail Five will get the chance to continue their journey.

* Jazz Café POSK’s future programme can be found at http://www.jazzcafeposk.org. There’s a Wobbly Rail Five page on Chris Biscoe’s website: http://www.chrisbiscoe.co.uk

Oct 14

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A vote of confidence

Last night I was honoured to be in the company of Yazz Ahmed, Donovan Haffner, Knats, Heidi Vogel, Iain Ballamy, Olivia Cuttill, Jean Toussaint and others as recipients of the 2026 Parliamentary Jazz Awards. The event took place at World Heartbeat, a venue close to the new US Embassy in Nine Elms. It was the 21st year of the awards, given by the All Party Parliamentary Jazz Group, and I was delighted to be given the Jazz Media Award.

As one does, I gave a short acceptance speech in which I said that 64 years ago, aged 15, I came runner-up in the Daily Telegraph‘s Junior Jazz Critic competition, and I’ve been trying to do better ever since.

The Telegraph‘s senior jazz critic at the time was Philip Larkin, a great poet but a very iffy jazz critic: enthusiastic about the early stuff in a duffel-coat-and-college-scarf sort of way, he detested almost anything modern (sample phrase: “the passionless creep of a Miles Davis solo”). He was one of those critics who decided pretty early on that things aren’t what they used to be.

That, I said, is not how I feel. Things are tough for anyone who chooses to play jazz for a living, particularly in cash-strapped Britain, where libraries and humanities courses are under threat, but the music itself is thriving, particularly among young players. When it comes to signs of life, I could give lots of examples, but the one I chose was this, and it came to me last week, on a evening when I heard Melissa Aldana, the Chilean saxophonist, at the Wigmore Hall after spending the day writing a sleeve note for the next album by the Welsh saxophonist Rachel Musson, both wonderful improvisers.

Sixty-odd years ago, when I was devouring the Melody Maker and Down Beat in order to learn about this music, the names of only two female jazz saxophonists ever cropped up. One was the British tenorist Kathy Stobart, the other the American altoist Vi Redd, both useful players. After that, in the ’70s, there was Barbara Thompson. Now, though, I could name you 30 or 40 world-class female jazz saxophonists without pausing for breath. And the same is true for other instruments.

Anyway, it was nice to get the piece of paper, and I’m grateful to the people who organise the awards, which are undoubtedly a good thing when they recognise people like Yazz, Donovan, Knats and the rest. Lobbying for jazz in Parliament can’t be the easiest of gigs, but I’m glad someone is doing it.

Oct 13

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The Island story, pt 3

Every year or so there’s a little reunion of people who worked at Island Records in its early and earlyish days, held in a pub near the offices in St Peter’s Square, Hammersmith, to which the company moved in 1973. The most recent of these family affairs was a week ago, and it coincided with the publication of the third volume of Neil Storey’s mammoth Island Book of Records, an illustrated oral history of just about everything that went on to make the label what it was and became. Mammoth in the depth of research that goes into documenting every release on the label and its associates, albums and singles, no matter how seemingly insignificant, and mammoth also in its sheer physical proportions.

Each volume is 12 inches by 12 inches, hardbound with sturdy covers and good paper. This one has 480 pages, and you would not want to carry it up too many flights of stairs. It covers only two years, 1971-72, when the company was headquartered in Basing Street, Notting Hill, but what years they were: Traffic’s John Barleycorn, King Crimson’s Islands, Fairport Convention’s John Babbacombe Lee, Free Live!, the first solo albums from Sandy Denny, Richard Thompson and Jim Capaldi, Cat Stevens’s Teaser and the Firecat and Catch Bull at Four, Nick Drake’s Bryter Later and Pink Moon, the Harder They Come soundtrack, and the debut of Roxy Music. Also a torrent of albums from the sort of bands that ZigZag readers loved: Spooky Tooth, Mott the Hoople, Free, Quintessence, Uriah Heep, the Incredible String Band, Vinegar Joe, Juicy Lucy and Bronco. Not to mention Claire Hamill, the Sutherland Brothers and Amazing Blondel. And Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

Storey’s interviewees range from musicians, backing singers and executives to promotion people and sales representatives, designers and photographers. Everyone has interesting stories to tell, be they founder Chris Blackwell, A&R chief Muff Winwood, the producers Joe Boyd and Paul Samwell-Smith, the art director Ann Sullivan (a rare woman at this stage of the story), the photographer Brian Cooke, the publisher Lionel Conway or the engineers in the label’s studios, including Phill Brown, Tony Platt and Richard Digby Smith. There are frequents shafts of illumination, like the great engineer/producer John Wood on John Martyn: “John always wanted to be something he wasn’t.” Or the late Mike Kellie of Spooky Tooth, summing up Island’s early-’70s vibe by describing the Basing Street offices, with their famous non-hierarchical round tables, as “a home away from home.”

These years also saw the birth of the HELP label, a cut-price line for compilations, live albums and experimental projects. It took its name from ELP, whose live recording of Pictures from an Exhibition was its first release, followed by Ashley Hutchings’ Morris On, King Crimson’s Earthbound, John Surman’s Westering Home (the forerunner of his ECM albums), Stomu Yamash’ta’s Come to the Edge, and others.

The one that interests me most is Tibetan Bells, a project by Henry Wolff, Nancy Hennings and Drew Gladstone, an unlikely project which ended up selling quite well. Tony Platt’s description of solving the problems involved in recording bells and bowls is both enlightening and entertaining. And David Betteridge, who took over as the company’s managing director in 1971 when Blackwell felt like spending less time in the UK, gives us a sharp little reminder of the modus operandi at even the most seemingly enlightened and progressive of record labels: “The sleeve was a damned indulgence with that special inner bag… but don’t forget that at the end of the day the costs of that were recouped. We weren’t that stupid. The artist paid out of the royalty for that sort of indulgence.”

There’s a delightful description of the 1972 visit of Johnny Nash and Bob Marley to a school in Peckham, South London, where they give the pupils an impromptu concert — and where Bob played football with the boys. And it’s Marley whose arrival gives the book its postscript: an account of Blackwell’s first meeting with the Wailers, of his decision to advance them the money (£12,000, as I recall) to make an album which he would then market as of they were a rock band, and of how he felt when he heard the first results of his gamble, at Harry J’s studio in Kingston, where a new future would begin.

* The Island Book of Records Vol 3: 1971-72 is published by Manchester University Press, price £85. The curious object sitting on the book is a ceramic by Bryan Ferry, who presented it to me with his tongue in his cheek and a little label (now lost) saying ‘Roxy Music Rock Critic of the Year Award 1972’. The piece of paper under the book is the original typescript of the feature I wrote for the Melody Maker that year on visiting Jamaica to listen, with Blackwell, to the first recordings from the Catch a Fire sessions. Normally I chucked the carbon copies of my typescripts away; this one I kept.

Oct 11

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Birdsong in Dalston

After spending some of the morning reading a piece on biodiversity by Simon Barnes in the Observer, I felt properly primed for the second of Evan Parker’s four matinees at Cafe Oto. Simon, an old colleague at The Times, was writing brilliantly about species diversity. His special subject is birds; he can tell the song of a willow warbler from that of a chiffchaff, just as I can (I hope) tell the sound of Fats Navarro from that of Clifford Brown. Whereas the dawn chorus around my suburban home vanished several years ago, in rural Suffolk he is able to log the sounds of 21 different bird species before breakfast.

This afternoon’s performance in Dalston was billed as Evan Parker / John Coxon / Ashley Wales: “With Birds”. Together, Coxon and Wales are known as Spring Heel Jack, manipulating electronics and turntables in order to provide unorthodox and stimulating settings for free improvisers of the first generation (their album John Tchicai with Strings, released on their own Treader label in 2005, is a classic). They have collaborated with Evan on many occasions, and today’s concert was a live iteration of another Treader album, Evan Parker with Birds, released in 2004.

Today Parker had brought his soprano saxophone and was flanked by Coxon at one table, stage right, and Wales at another, stage left. Wales seemed to trigger most of the birdsong during the one-hour set, but he and Coxon both contributed to the electronic sound bed that supported and encouraged Evan’s improvisations.

To begin with, Evan seemed to be responding directly to the calls of various birds. But when, with about 20 minutes gone, Coxon began striking a small handbell and a xylophone with a light mallet, Evan reacted by turning on the afterburners and delivering quite the most astonishing extended solo I can remember hearing from him: one of those improvisations of his in which each phrase seems to overlap the one before it (and, thanks to his use of circular breathing, there are no breaks between them).

It was astonishingly powerful, and I got the feeling that it transfixed everyone else in the crowded room, too. And then over the remainder of the set he did it twice more, not quite with the same degree of intensity but varying his attack and trajectory as first Coxon set up a repeated figure on a little kalimba (thumb piano) and then, in the final section, used kalimba, handbell and xylophone over a drone from Wales that sounded like an organ powered by waves. Eventually Evan fell silent and the xylophone and waves slowly faded into a silence that was anything but empty.

* The third of Evan Parker’s series of Sunday matinees at Cafe Oto is on November 8, featuring Henry Dagg. The fourth is on December 13, featuring Pat Thomas and Thurston Moore. Treader’s albums are available as digital downloads: https://treader-recordings.bandcamp.com/

Oct 5

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Another Lifetime

Fifty-odd years later, the original version of Tony Williams’ Lifetime remains the most exciting band I ever saw. At Ungano’s in New York in the autumn of 1970, the three-piece Lifetime, with Larry Young on Hammond organ and John McLaughlin on guitar, produced a howling noise that seemed to take music into the next dimension.

It was jazz, it was rock, it was somehow psychedelic, it was all of those things and none of them, with the burners turned right up. In that time and place, made by a trio of innovators, it was the sort of music that made you reach for the word ‘beyond’. It also made everyone else’s attempts at some kind of jazz-rock fusion sound like Muzak.

Their double-album, Emergency!, had created a bit of a stir, but its appeal was seriously undermined by very dubious sound quality, as if they’d used poor-quality equipment and had left the final mix to the studio cat, and then pressed the result on twice-recycled vinyl. Listening to it was a bit of an ordeal, which is not how it should have been at all.

The day after I saw them, I interviewed Tony in his manager’s office. He was less than communicative, something I reflected in the piece I wrote for the Melody Maker, suggesting that it might have been at least in part the fault of my stupid questions. He was reading the newspaper as I walked in and said hello, and he barely looked up from it for the duration of our talk.

It wasn’t a lack of sympathy on my part. I’d been an admirer since he became the drummer in the Miles Davis Quintet seven years earlier, aged 17. I’d devoured the albums he’d made for Blue Note, both under his own name and with people such as Jackie McLean, Eric Dolphy and Andrew Hill.

Maybe it was me, maybe it was the day, maybe (as I took the liberty of suggesting in my piece) he was still learning how to handle fame. Whatever, I left in disappointment but with just about enough to turn into something publishable.

When I asked him about the murky sound quality of Emergency!, mentioning that someone close enough to know had told me it came out exactly the way he wanted, he gave a somewhat puzzling response: ‘Oh no, that’s not true. Wait a minute. Did someone tell you that? Well, write down that it’s true. I got tired of clear things — everyone was recording with the same sound, and I didn’t have time to experiment before going in there, and that was the best way to get a different sound. Just distort it and make it fuzzy.’

But now, finally, 56 years later, someone has sorted it out. For its release on the Reference series of reissues from Werner Uehlinger’s Thingamajig label, Emergency! has been subjected to a process of sonic restoration and mastering by the Swiss engineer Michael Brändli which reveals, for the first time, the music that was always there. Clearing away the fog while leaving some of the distortion and fuzz has turned it into what I heard at Ungano’s, and what Tony must have had in his head, if that’s not too presumptuous a claim.

If you ever shared my reservations, listen to the way McLaughlin’s epic guitar flights, Young’s completely original approach to the organ and Tony’s dramatic contribution to the three-way conversation (which sounds as if he might have been listening in a very creative way to Keith Moon) now emerge with light shining on every component part. It’s still not polished — this was never going to be polished music — but it’s much easier to appreciate.

During our conversation, Tony also mentioned that Jack Bruce was joining the group. In London two years earlier, after Cream had broken up, Bruce recorded a quartet album with McLaughlin on guitar, released in 1970 as Things We Like. Now he seemed to have found a perfect berth, and during Lifetime’s UK tour that November they stripped the paint from the walls of the Marquee in front of an audience containing many well-known musicians, who were suitably gobsmacked.

Jack was now doing the singing, as well as playing bass. Tony had sung with the three-piece line-up, and he wanted to keep a vocal element in the band. He told me that he’d sung doo-wop as a kid in Boston, and made the rather surprising claim that his own vocal efforts were inspired by Arthur Prysock, Nat King Cole and Billy Eckstine. But then Lifetime was a surprising band on every level. I wish we’d got on better that day, but nothing has ever dimmed the memory of the night at Ungano’s, which now has its perfect souvenir.

* Emergency! is reissued on the Thingamajig label, containing the uncredited photograph used above.

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.

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