A farewell to Mike Westbrook

Summarising the long life and very eventful career of Mike Westbrook in a maximum of five minutes was not the easiest assignment I’ve ever been given. But that was the necessary limit placed on the tribute I was invited to deliver during the great composer and bandleader’s funeral in Exeter last week. The crematorium chapel was packed, and the music included the singing by the congregation of “Jerusalem” to the accompaniment of Karen Street’s accordion and of another William Blake lyric, “I See Thy Form”, by Phil Minton with Matthew Bourne at the piano. Here’s what I had to say.

For many years – in fact from the 1920s through the 1950s – the principal job of the British jazz musician was to learn the language of the great American originals and absorb it thoroughly enough to be able to produce a creditable facsimile.

But in the 1960s, something different happened. A group of young British-based musicians suddenly appeared with a new set of aims. They admired the American masters just as deeply as their predecessors had, but they were looking for something more. They were after a language of their own, an approach that would enable them to create a kind of jazz that wasn’t simply in thrall to someone else’s tradition.

From the moment Mike Westbrook arrived in London in 1963 and formed a new band, it became obvious that there was an unusual freshness and originality about his music. Mike’s personal heroes included Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus, but he managed to do what all great jazz musicians do, which is to move beyond his idols in order to find his own voice.

Like his heroes, he had the priceless gift of creating settings that brought the best out of his carefully chosen soloists, from John Surman and Mike Osborne in those early bands through countless other distinguished players.

The scale of Mike’s ambition as a composer became clear after he signed his first recording contract in 1967 and began writing extended works. They included the epic anti-war piece Marching Song and then Metropolis, written with the aid of an Arts Council bursary that enabled him to stop working as an art teacher and become a full-time musician.

Those longer pieces led to others – like Earthrise, a theatre piece produced in 1970 in collaboration with John Fox and the Welfare State. He wrote Citadel/Room 315 in 1974, at the time he met Kate, who became his wife and collaborator on pieces that made use of her voice, her lyric writing and their shared interest in cabaret, musical theatre, and poetry. That led in the 1980s to the vast multi-hued canvases of The Cortège and London Bridge Is Falling Down, with texts from Rimbaud, Lorca, Goethe, Sassoon and others, and to the suite called On Duke’s Birthday, a marvellous homage to Ellington.

At the other end of the scale came the Trio, with Kate and Chris Biscoe, and the Brass Band, a combo-sized unit that appeared at street festivals around continental Europe – where it has to be said he was often more profoundly appreciated than in his home country.

He was astonishingly prolific. There was a jazz cabaret piece called Mama Chicago, and several operas, including one based on Michael Ondaatje’s Comin’ Through Slaughter, and his big-band settings of Rossini, performed first in Italy and then at a BBC Prom concert in 1992. And much, much more.

In later years, he formed the Uncommon Orchestra and the smaller Band of Bands, featuring musicians from Devon, including one or two he’d played with in his earliest days. Towards the end of his life also gave spellbinding solo piano concerts in which he could wander gently through pieces from all the idioms he loved, exploring their affinities.

Mike’s legacy is one of great richness and diversity. But perhaps the most enduring of all his pieces will be his settings of William Blake’s poems. The Westbrook Blake began life in 1971 when the poet Adrian Mitchell invited him to provide the music for a Blake-themed show called Tyger.

The pieces then took on a life of their own, becoming a classic of contemporary English music, delivered in all sorts of places right up until last Christmas, when there was a very moving final performance with Mike at Blackheath Halls. Something in Blake spoke to Mike, and then spoke through him.

I wouldn’t want to slight any other musician, from any era, when I say that Mike’s place as the pre-eminent composer and bandleader of British jazz is hard to dispute. As is his role in enabling jazz made outside America to establish its right to an independent existence.

Most important of all, everything he did was based on a recognition that when a jazz group is working properly, it becomes a model for a decent society: a vehicle for individual expression in full and unselfish collaboration with others. 

How lucky we were to have him.