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Sep 25

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Danny Thompson 1939-2025

The first time I saw Danny Thompson, he was playing with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated at the Dungeon Club in Nottingham. This would have been the spring of 1965. I must have liked his playing a lot because I got him to autograph a paperback copy of Nat Hentoff’s The Jazz Life that I happened to be carrying that night.

A couple of years later I saw him with the Pentangle, a band that to my ears never equalled the sum of its parts. It was his long-standing partnership with John Martyn that brought out his best, whether racing alongside the effects-driven guitar on “I’d Rather Be the Devil” or adding a darkly poetic arco line to “Spencer the Rover”.

Danny, whose death at the age of 86 was announced this week, was a member of a generation of great double bassists who emerged in and around the British jazz scene in the ’60s. If you wanted to line them up in some kind of taxonomy of interests and instincts across a spectrum of the music with which they were associated, starting with folk and proceeding to contemporary classical, it would probably go something like this: Danny, Ron Matthewson, Dave Green, Jeff Clyne, Harry Miller, Dave Holland, Chris Laurence, Barry Guy. Obviously that’s not everyone.

Danny was the Charlie Haden of British bassists, his playing warm and deep-toned, as rooted in folk modes as Haden was in bluegrass music, but just as capable of dealing with the most advanced and abstract forms.

Maybe the best way to celebrate his life is to listen to Whatever, the album he recorded for Joe Boyd’s Hannibal label in 1987. It finds him with a trio completed by two relatively unsung heroes of the scene, the wonderful Tony Roberts on assorted reeds, flutes and whistles and the terrific guitarist Bernie Holland.

I remember giving it an enthusiastic review in The Times, commending its highly evolved fusion of folk materials and jazz techniques. It’s a little bit like a British version of Jimmy Giuffre’s Train and the River trio, unafraid of the bucolic and the open-hearted.

Most of the pieces are credited as joint compositions but some are arrangements of traditional pieces, such as “Swedish Dance”, which opens with a bass solo rich in disciplined emotion before moving into an ensemble workout on a light-footed tune whose complex rhythms are made to sound as charming as a children’s song. The stately melody of “Lovely Joan” is delivered by Roberts on a set of Northumbrian pipes — mellower than their Scottish or Irish equivalents — before he switches to soprano saxophone for an intricate conversation with Holland’s nimble acoustic picking and Thompson’s firmly grounded bass. Of the originals, “Minor Escapade” adds elements of the classic John Coltrane Quartet to this trio’s distinctive approach.

Not having played it for some years, I’d forgotten what a truly exhilarating album it is. Now it’ll be at the top of the pile for some time to come, adding the sparkle and freshness of its understated virtuosity to the room. RIP, Danny.

* The photo of Danny Thompson is from the cover of Whatever and was taken by Nick White.

Sep 9

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Every beat of my heart

This is the bass-drum head from the kit I used as a member of an R&B band in 1964-65. Last week, two days after I’d taken it to the recycling centre as part of a general clearout of superfluous possessions, a mid-evening collapse on a platform at St Pancras station saw me in an ambulance, where a pair of paramedics gave me an ECG that showed I was suffering from cardiac arrhythmia.

What kind of a drummer, even an ex-drummer, suffers from arrhythmia? To injury was added insult.

I was admitted, via A&E, to St Thomas’s Hospital, directly across the river from the Houses of Parliament. For the first four days I was in a ward on the seventh floor, in a bed by a window giving me a view across the Thames that would cost you £5,000 a night were it a hotel room. At some time during those first four days under the care of the National Health Service the monitor showed that my heart stopped for four seconds — I thought only Aretha Franklin could do that to me — and then restarted itself.

Long story short, there was another episode that led to a rush into the Intensive Care Unit, and from there a day later to an operating theatre where a cardiac pacemaker was installed. My problem had been caused by bradychardia: the unnatural slowing of the heartbeat. The pacemaker will ensure that it won’t fall below 70 beats per minute. In a couple of months, a second procedure will lower the safe limit to 60bpm.

That sounds like a nice, steady, medium-pace lope, which probably suits me now. And thinking about it set me to imagining the possibility that one day, when you have a pacemaker fitted, it might come with a variety of settings, based on the characteristic approaches to tempo of great drummers. Naturally, I thought of jazz drummers.

Which button would I want to press? Elvin Jones would be too turbulent, Art Blakey too disruptive, Tony Williams too hyperactive, Tyshawn Sorey too unpredictable. Sunny Murray? Not sure I’d want my heart to run on free rhythm. If I were younger, I’d opt for Billy Higgins, not least because, along with that amazing sense of lift, I’d probably get, as an extra, the lovely smile he always wore. But I’m not young. So the graceful swing of either Kenny Clarke or Jimmy Cobb would do for me.

Anyway, the point of this profoundly self-indulgent story is that between one Sunday and the next I spent part of the time wondering what our elected representatives were up to in the big building on the other side of the river and the rest of it marvelling at the astonishing amount of kindness and consideration shown towards me by the skilled, wise and compassionate NHS staff whose job was to save the life of someone hitherto completely unknown to any of them.

I didn’t get the name of the young female maternity nurse who was getting off the same train and immediately came to my aid, or those of two more fellow passengers, a pair of young women doctors, who stayed with me until the ambulance arrived, or those of the two paramedics who took over, made the initial diagnosis, and decided that St Thomas’s would be the best place for me, or that of the doctor who triaged me in A&E and sent me up to the seventh floor.

But thereafter I did start writing down the first names of as many of those who helped me as I could catch: nurses, doctors, cleaners, cardiologists, electrocardiologists, radiographers and others. Those names, unsorted by function or rank but in more or less chronological order, give a sort of a portrait of the health service that is a riposte to those both working hard to destroy it and to divide us by undermining the stability of our post-colonial, multicultural society. Here they are:

Abdul, Melody, Beth, Eva, Cielo, Jonathan, Alma, Lily, Simran, Isaac, Angelo, Favour, Aba, Aboudin, Lina, Mehari, Precious, Nabila, Chris, Parth, Tracey, Izabela, Konstantinos, Serena, Gloria, Anoup, Shawza, Rawlston, Diego, two Clares, Richard, Sabeen, Emma, Terry, Elorine, Nikki.

I know the NHS is under strain and imperfect, and I’m aware that it was my good luck to find myself at St Thomas’s. But while I was waiting to be sent home on Sunday, the doctor in charge of intensive care at the hospital walked past on his rounds. I told him that while it had been in most respects the worst week of my life, it had also been among the richest. I’d been given an unexpected opportunity to experience and be grateful for human relationships in public service — comradeship among workers, empathy for strangers — at their best. Something I’ll never forget.