VICTOR FELDMAN and BILL LE SAGE
- international bebop

Among the finest British jazz pianists of this era was Victor Feldman. His prodigious talent meant that he was all too briefly a fixture on the London jazz scene before he moved permanently to the United States in the mid-1950s. Feldman was, after George Shearing, Britain's greatest jazz export to date, and his was a precocious talent. He had begun as a child-star drummer, even guesting with the Glenn Miller Orchestra at the age of ten, but his ears were swiftly opened by the new sounds of bebop. By his teens he was also playing the vibraphone and piano, both with alarming proficiency and the kind of natural understanding of the idiom that was to characterise the work of his friend and colleague, the similarly youthful Tubby Hayes.

Feldman's piano playing has probably been obscured by his reputation as a vibraphonist, but it can be heard on several recordings with the Ronnie Scott nine-piece band prior to his departure to America to join the Woody Herman band in 1955. More readily available are the recordings he made for the enterprising Tony Hall's Tempo imprint a year later, when he returned for a busman's holiday in London (available on several Jasmine CDs). A quartet session with trumpeter Dizzy Reece illustrates the gap between Feldman's abilities and those of his former colleagues, and showcases his skills as both accompanist and soloist. His subsequent recordings with Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley lie somewhat outside the remit of this piece but are thoroughly recommended, especially the classic Adderley At The Lighthouse session on Riverside Records, an album that marked the debut of one of Feldman's most enduring compositions, Azules Serape.

Following the departure of Victor Feldman, Bill Le Sage (who had worked with John Dankworth as pianist and vibraphonist) was perhaps the most idiomatically faithful of all British jazz pianists. In the early 1950s he established a working relationship with the drummer Tony Kinsey, and this lasted intermittently until Le Sage's death in 2001. The quartet sessions that the group made for the Esquire label, although long since deleted, are worth tracking down. Two slightly later session made for Decca (Jazz At The Flamingo and Time Gentleman Please) have recently been reissued, and these feature Le Sage's dynamic piano and vibes soloing, and he all but steals the limelight from saxophonists Joe Harriott, Bob Efford and Ronnie Ross.

Given his independent musical brilliance, it is slightly unfair to try to align Le Sage's piano playing with an American equivalent, but his dedication to the idiom of bebop, and the depth of his understanding of the harmonic language of Bud Powell, brings him close to Barry Harris. Le Sage's Bebop Preservation Society quintet, formed in 1970 just as fusion and free jazz had some audiences running for the hills, came as a breath of fresh air and illustrated his abiding affection for the music he had heard as a musician on his Geraldo's Navy runs in the late 1940s. He also worked with bop giants like Sonny Stitt, Red Rodney and Dizzy Gillespie, but his overall musicality enabled him to draw from a far wider musical pool. He appeared in a bewildering number of line-ups of all styles (from The Kenny Baker Dozen to the Charlie Watts Big Band to Chris Barber and Barbara Thompson's Jubiaba) and could cross any number of preconceived dividing lines and offer much more than bop based pyrotechnics (it is Le Sage on piano on the club dance floor favourite, The Hipster by Harold McNair). With the baritone saxophonist Ronnie Ross he co-led a cool Mulliganesque quartet, and his Directions In Jazz Unit, formed in 1963, took a sincere look at the concept of chamber jazz, uniting a jazz sextet with the Freddie Alexander 'Cello Ensemble. Two thoroughly successful and typically musicianly albums recorded for the Philips label in the 1960s (Directions In Jazz and The Road To Ellingtonia) have since become rare collectors' items.

Le Sage left a healthier recorded legacy than many of his contemporaries and towards the end of his life he made several fine CDs; the Bebop 2000 quintet album featuring Gilad Atzmon and Steve Waterman revisited his first love; the Genetically Modified Ensemble album recorded at the Ealing Jazz Festival featured his own compositions for a medium sized band including Mark Nightingale and Andy Panayi, and two CDs for the Mainstem label in 2000 showcased Le Sage's vibes in a more reflective mood alongside guitarist Phil Lee and bassist Alec Dankworth.

Like Eddie Thompson, Alan Clare was a brilliant jazz soloist who mixed solo residencies with more challenging and commercial settings such as being Spike Milligan's regular musical collaborator. The recent reissue Jazz Around The Clock presents his less eccentric side.

EDDIE THOMPSON and DILL JONES
- transatlantic eclectics

Eddie Thompson was one of the few London modernists to successfully steer a profitable course through the middle ground that lay between artistic congruency and overt commercialism. Thompson, like George Shearing, had been blind since childhood, and similarly he shared an ability to put across sophisticated musical concepts in a manner so effortless and fluid that they seemed palatable to a wider audience. Thus Thompson could find himself booked as a variety act or a jazz performer and not have to bend either way to fit the bill. A sadly unavailable trio album, Piano Moods, made in 1959 and released on the Ember label, was an early classic containing an effective cross section of Thompson's musical world, from the sparkling Red Garland-like dancing figures he sprinkled above fast themes, to a more sombre and stoic lyricism that presaged the brooding introspection Bill Evans would come to make his own, as on Thompson's own composition Three For Three Four. At this time Thompson's repertoire contained what must surely qualify as one of the most unusual appropriations of English musical culture into a jazz settings, a jaunty re-arrangement of Flanagan and Allen's Underneath the Arches, a performance which on paper might sound improbable but is actually delightful. Thompson went one better on the now very rare 1958 Vox album London By Night, when he recorded a programme of songs dedicated to the English capital, including such unlikely fare as Passport to Pimlico and London Pride.

London was indeed proud of Thompson's talents, and one of his career highlights was sharing the opening night billing at Ronnie Scott's club in October 1959. For a short time he was the house pianist at the club before realising the ambition that George Shearing had held over a decade earlier when he, too, moved to America. Unlike other émigrés such as Dizzy Reece, Thompson quickly made a practical home for himself, playing a lengthy residency at the famed Hickory House venue in New York City, but by the early 1970s he was back in the United Kingdom. A solo LP recorded live at Ronnie Scott's during this period is long over due for reissue. Indeed Thompson's career is in need of reappraisal, as, up until his death in 1986, he was one of the country's best loved and most assured jazzmen.

Thompson was by no means the only British jazz pianist after George Shearing to try his luck in the United States. The similarly eclectic Dill Jones made a permanent move to New York in 1961, following a decade as one of London's most adaptable jazzmen. Jones' wide ranging abilities and enthusiasm are indicative of how the 'mainstream' of the music had a far more practical implication in Britain during this era. Before leaving Britain, Jones had kept pace with all the local bop-based talents - he had played in Tony Kinsey's Trio, played with Joe Harriott, and had also been a key member of the Tommy Whittle quintet - but he had also accompanied Louis Armstrong. In 1961, at the height of the trad boom, Jones cocked a snook at convention and led a band of 'modernists', including clarinettist Vic Ash and trombonist Keith Christie, and billed itself as the Dixieland All-Stars, which horrified audiences and critics alike when it played an all trad programme at London's Flamingo Club. Was this provocation, an extreme case of hitching a ride on a passing bandwagon, or merely an indication of Jones' dislike of pigeon holes? When the band made an LP for Columbia, Jones The Jazz (now as rare hen's teeth), few original copies were sold to an audience then deeply divided by the trad versus modern debacle. Jones made few other recordings as a leader while in Britain. Perhaps his finest was the 1959 EP recorded by the enterprising Denis Preston at Lansdowne studios, Dill Jones Plus Four. Original copies are rarities, but anyone lucky enough to own this record will hear not only Jones' urbane piano style (at the time somewhere between Teddy Wilson, John Lewis and Tommy Flanagan) exercised on themes by Duke Jordan and Sonny Rollins, but also the lyrical eloquence of tenor saxophonist Duncan Lamont.

Upon moving to America, Jones did what he did best, once more befuddling the preconceptions of his critics back home. Having joined the noisy ranks of the Eddie Condon associated circle in New York, he then worked with Jimmy McPartland, Gene Krupa, Bob Wilber and also with the Dukes of Dixieland. He then settled comfortably into one of the best mainstream bands of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the JPJ quartet, co-headed by saxophonist Budd Johnson and drummer Oliver Jackson; this group suffered neglect only because the topsy-turvy world of jazz in that era was not patient enough to hear music that was not political, experimental or plugged in. In 1972, Jones recorded a glorious album for the American Chiaroscuro label, Davenport Blues, a tribute to Bix Beiderbecke which affirmed once more the pianist's total lack of regard for stylistic straight-jackets and which is among his finest recordings.

HARRY SOUTH, DEREK SMITH and RONNIE BALL
- hip furrows

Eclectics such as Dill Jones could move chameleon-like across the entire spectrum of the music but there were other British jazz pianists who preferred to plough far more narrow, far more hip furrows, among them Harry South, Derek Smith and Ronnie Ball.

Harry South made a better living writing music for television (the theme to The Sweeney for example) and from his collaborations with Georgie Fame than he ever did playing the piano in tenorist Dick Morrissey's quartet. Never the most virtuosic of performers, South nevertheless made the most of his understated style, and with Dick Morrissey and Tubby Hayes his spare accompaniment and terse solos were a less-is-more bonus. His harmonic acuity too was second to none, a skill that underpinned his success as a composer, arranger and sometime leader of a marvellous big band that brimmed with the best jazz talent of the day. A good place to get the measure of his piano playing however is the session recorded for the Tempo label by the Tubby Hayes quartet in July 1955, included on the CD The Swinging Giant Volume One.

Derek Smith (who also left England for America) was for a time the most archetypal 'hip' pianist on the British jazz scene. His high profile jazz career had begun with Dankworth's big band, but blossomed further in the co-operative band The New Jazz Quartet, formed in 1955 with drummer Allan Ganley, bassist Sammy Stokes and baritonist Harry Klein (later replaced by trumpeter Dizzy Reece). This group was together long enough to record, and the four titles taped by the Tempo label at a Royal Festival Hall concert in February 1956 (Modern Jazz Scene 1956) are perfect examples of Smith's early brilliance and his ability to synthesise the very latest styles from American pianists. There are echoes of Horace Silver in Smiths' assertive left hand comping throughout, and the rolling but stubborn approach he takes is also reminiscent of West Coaster Russ Freeman and the underrated Stan Getz sideman John Williams.

Like Silver in his early days, Smith was able to fit behind all manner of horn players, and his work in this role can be found on many sessions produced by the late Denis Preston for the Nixa arm of Pye records. There were sessions with Kenny Baker, Keith Christie, Bruce Turner, Jimmy Skidmore and Vic Ash among others, samples of all of which have thankfully recently reappeared on Too Hot, the three CD anthology of Preston's work recently issued. Since moving to America, Smith's style has broadened from hard bopper to all-rounder, working both on TV and film soundtracks, and accompanying all manner of vocalists from Frank Sinatra to Pavarotti, and with jazzmen as diverse as Benny Goodman and Arnett Cobb.

If players such as Derek Smith and Harry South represented the hard bop logic of the New York based school of jazz, the rather exclusive club of pianist Lennie Tristano had its British representative in Ronnie Ball. Ball had actually studied with Tristano while working on the Transatlantic cruise liners in the late 1940s, and he had become fascinated with the individual approach to jazz development favoured by the blind pianist and his close affiliates. Back home in London he worked as part of the house trio at the Studio 51 club, where he accompanied virtually all of the leading British modern jazzmen (snapshots from this era are the two tracks of tenorist Tommy Whittle accompanied by the Ronnie Ball trio heard on Bop-in' Britain, where the pianist sounds more boppish than the idiosyncratic Tristano). Ball decided to leave the United Kingdom for New York in 1952, where the possibility to work within the thin-slice of the jazz wedge that was the Tristano school was a practical reality. He did indeed work with ex-Tristano-ite altoist Lee Konitz (with whom he recorded the At Storyville album in 1954) and with other Tristano associates, the tenor saxophonists Warne Marsh and Ted Brown (as can be heard on the recently reissued 1956 session Jazz Of Two Cities). Ironically, Ball's American career found him widening his jazz spectrum considerably and working with musicians as far removed from the cool school pretensions as can be envisaged, including saxophonist Flip Philips, trumpeter Roy Eldridge and drummer Buddy Rich.

TERRY SHANNON
- authenticity

At a time when few British jazzmen had even a feint whiff of authenticity about them, Terry Shannon stood out, despite being within two thousand miles from New York's Birdland. Like his predecessors, Shannon was a self-taught talent, relying more on what could be gleaned from records than on any academic training. This is all the more surprising when one considers how harmonically erudite his playing was.

Shannon entered the music business with some reluctance, abandoning a good day job to join the quartet of clarinettist Vic Ash and to work on record with musicians such as trumpeter Dizzy Reece and saxophonist Ronnie Scott. One of Shannon's earliest recordings was the 10" Tempo album Dizzy Blows Bird on which he accompanied Dizzy Reece through a programme of numbers associated with Charlie Parker (A New Star). The two takes of Parker's blues Bluebird contain superlative early Shannon; he already displays the virtues that would lead many of Britain's modernists to cite him as their favourite pianist, the grooving sense of time, the assertive but never boisterous accompaniment, and solo lines which snake through the chord changes with a knowing sophistication. Shannon named his favourite pianists as Tommy Flanagan, Horace Silver, Bud Powell and Sonny Clark, and it is possible to hear elements of each of those performers in his work at this time, and also, in the telling economy of his statements and comping, that of John Lewis.

In 1957 Shannon joined the Jazz Couriers led by Ronnie Scott and Tubby Hayes, and it is hard to imagine a better context in which to place his gifts. Like Hayes (who tolerated Shannon's poor sight reading skills because he admired his playing so much), Shannon was a perfect synthesiser of the latest jazz trends from America, and yet he never sounded empty or faceless. His work throughout the four Jazz Couriers albums (available on several reissues) is that of a master pianist, and one can cite his tactful comping on After Tea from The Couriers of Jazz album as an excellent example of his skill as musical prompt, or his solo on The Serpent (now on the CD Some Of My Best Friends Are Blues) as an example of his ability to develop the thread of a solo, or his brief improvisation on My Funny Valentine (again from the The Couriers of Jazz CD) as an example of his reharmonisation of a hackneyed theme.

Hayes was quick to praise Shannon's contribution to the Couriers music, and when the band split in 1959 Shannon would stay on and spend a further five years working with Tubby's various groups. This work is spread across several albums, including Tubby's Groove (included on The Eighth Wonder), Palladium Jazz Date, Tubbs, Tubbs' Tours and archive issues such as Tribute to Tubbs, Live In London Volume 1 and Volume 2 and Night and Day. Throughout this impressive body of work Shannon emerges as an amazingly consistent performer, unfazed by Hayes' virtuosity, and even, by dint of a canny brain and a subtle technique, able to undercut the nominal star. Blue Hayes from the 1959 Tubby's Groove set is a masterpiece for Shannon, joining the performance on Blues For Tony which he recorded with Jamaican saxophonist Wilton "Bogey" Gaynair the same year (the album Blue Bogey) as evidence of Shannon's genuine ability to play the blues in a convincing and sincere way.

Frustratingly, Shannon's career began to falter in the late 1960s, through a combination of the usual jazz vices and bitterness (he was especially cynical about the lack of cohesive rhythm sections on the local scene), and by the end of the decade he was almost invisible on the musical radar. His career since then has been a similarly inconsistent mix of potential comebacks, dissipation and abstraction, and despite the efforts of his one time producer at Tempo, Tony Hall, to get Terry to record again, he has become all but musically silent, an ignominious shame for a musician who was once central to one of the finest jazz groups this country has produced.

BRIAN DEE, JOHN BURCH and ALAN BRANSCOMBE
- the last hipsters

By the early 1960s, the largely hard bop derived house style which revolved around Ronnie Scott's clique (which included Terry Shannon) was so well established that it was hard to envisage anything ever challenging it, let alone causing any of its practitioners sleepless nights. This complacency, whilst showing the initial stirrings of British jazzmen taking some sort of pride in their own efforts, was nevertheless dangerous. The wave of British jazz pianists that had grown up after Terry Shannon and Harry South heard new possibilities in music made by the likes of Bill Evans, and recognised that the brand of musical machismo which sometimes passed for confidence was actually something of an Achilles' heel. But before they could really make their case there was a brief and remarkable Indian Summer of British jazz piano players, cut from the very same straight ahead cloth as men like Wynton Kelly, Red Garland and Erroll Garner. And there was also the remarkable blossoming of one resolute maverick who had been around long enough to deserve the praise that was headed his way.

Brian Dee arrived on the London jazz scene at the tail end of the 1950s and quickly impressed everyone with his adaptation of Wynton Kelly's approach (including Kelly himself on a tour opposite the Miles Davis Quintet which Dee made in 1960). This early work can be heard on The Five Of Us, an album recorded for Tempo by the Jazz Five, co-led by saxophonists Vic Ash and Harry Klein, and one of the groups that had sprung up in the wake of the Jazz Couriers. As the years went by, Dee's playing matured, as is evidenced on several recent CDs: Centurion, recorded with his quartet featuring saxophonist Alex Garnett, The Catalyst, a trio session with the redoubtable Dave Green and Clark Tracey, and a stunning recital of Richard Rodgers' songs with the saxophonist Duncan Lamont, Happy Talk. He has also become one of the most respected accompanists on the British jazz scene, working as effectively with vocalists as with instrumentalists.

John Burch favoured a far more blues-based approach even in his early work with saxophonist Don Rendell (on the recently reissued Roarin' session), something that was an indication of the rapidly blurring dividing lines between previously irreconcilable musical camps. Indeed, Burch's own octet included musicians whose subsequent career paths would take them to rhythm and blues, the avant garde and even international rock stardom, such as Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce, Graham Bond and Dick Heckstall-Smith.

Alan Branscombe's multi-instrumental skills did more probably to obscure his world class skill as a pianist than enhance it. Prodigiously gifted on all the saxophones, vibes and percussion, Branscombe had an uncanny knack of being able to get inside whatever was going on in jazz, and was able to function within almost any playing context, recording with New Orleans clarinettist Albert Nicholas, playing hard bop with Tubby Hayes and jazz-rock with Ian Hamer, and relishing new challenges in the swirling soundscapes of Kenny Wheeler's big band. Simply, Branscombe was one of our finest jazz musicians, although that vaunted status, as is so often the case in this country, is not to be supported by a large recorded legacy as a leader. Branscombe in fact made only three LPs under his own name in what was a career packed full of playing. As good a place as any to look for his piano playing, both electric and acoustic, is the Ian Hamer sextet CD Acropolis.

ROY BUDD, TONY LEE and DUDLEY MOORE
- jokers in the pack

Two pianists who were to prosper - literally - in the classic piano trio line-up during the 1960s were Roy Budd and Tony Lee. The prodigious Roy Budd had the virtuoso technique of Oscar Peterson coupled with a tunesmith's gift, and by the end of the decade he had turned just as successfully to film score composition. In this guise his credits include the Michael Caine thriller Get Carter for which he penned the groove-based theme which has become a much sampled club classic. Ironically, although several anthologies of his work on film scores have been issued, there are currently no available albums documenting his sensational jazz trio work.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Tony Lee became synonymous with the Bull Head at Barnes, one of London's most celebrated jazz venues where his trio held court with all manner of visiting guests. At a time when straight ahead jazz was losing its credibility with a certain type of jazz aficionado, Lee represented a faithful link with a more pure jazz outlook and his work with his own trio (and as an accompanist) was a glorious celebration of the core value of swing. Two early albums made with drummer Phil Seamen (Phil Seamen…Now! and Meets Eddie Gomez) have become sought after, while a more recent example of Lee's timeless brilliance was the CD he recorded in 2000, Close To You, which transpired to be his last album. Tony Lee died in 2004.

The true joker in this pack of British jazz pianists was Dudley Moore. Although his musical career was eclipsed by his undisputed comic and acting talents, Moore was among the finest jazz artists Britain had produced. Beginning his career at the end of the 1950s with an unhappy stay in the big band of Vic Lewis - not exactly the ideal home for a soloist inspired by Erroll Garner - Moore quickly turned to the trio format, utilising first Hugo Boyd then Pete McGurk on bass (and later Pete Morgan), and drummer Chris Karan. As Moore's other careers blossomed, this trio had the peculiar multi-tasking duties of appearing at the satirical Establishment club in London, featuring on Moore's television comedy appearances and on his film soundtracks. Yet away from the limelight the band had developed cohesively into a world class jazz piano trio, as can be heard on the two albums recorded in the mid-1960s by Decca, Genuine Dud and The Other Side Of Dudley Moore. The latter, first released in 1966, is a true classic and illustrates the breadth and depth of the musical mind that lay behind the comic persona. My Blue Heaven and Baubles, Bangles and Beads are out-and-out groovers, smack in the middle of the great piano trio tradition, but Moore's own compositions take in a far wider trawl for inspiration and influence. Lysie Does It would not sit too awkwardly on an Andrew Hill album; Poova Nova is bossa nova lounge music as only a performer from the 1960s could envisage it, whilst Sooz Blues takes its cue from the unexpected resource of John Coltrane's Equinox. The ballad Sad One For George is among Moore's greatest compositions, touching upon the melancholy of Bill Evans, and it is Evans who the trio evoke explicitly in its rearrangement of the old Dixieland warhorse Indiana, surely one of the most brilliant transformations of a standard tune imaginable. Throughout, Moore's compulsive musical personality leaps off the album; indeed one gets the impression that the pianist himself absolutely adored making music to be enjoyed (a trait he shared with his idol Erroll Garner) and that playing jazz, at a time when all kinds of agendas were beginning to attach themselves to its performance, was above all an enjoyable and fun thing to do.

It is possible to lament Moore's mainstream media success as it did unfortunately side-track what was a brilliant jazz career, but, like Fats Waller before him, Moore was a born communicator, a naturally comic personality and an irrepressible showman, facets which more or less made a move away from the somewhat po-faced modern jazz scene inevitable. Throughout his career he took time to record albums with his trio, almost as if jazz could be some sort of leisure activity squeezed in between a celebrity lifestyle, but as is so often the case, it is Moore's earlier jazz work that demands repeated attention.

STAN TRACEY
- "Christmas every night"

The 1960s also saw the long awaited rise to prominence of Stan Tracey. Although Tracey had been a professional musician since 1943, it had taken him time to find his way inside the inner circle of the British modernists, something borne out of commercial necessity. His early career featured spells with such unlikely acts as the cod-gypsy Melfi Trio, for whom Stan obliging returned to his first instrument, the accordion (an instrument he would play on record with Kenny Baker in the mid-1950s) and by the late 1950s, despite having made valuable playing connections and recordings with Ronnie Scott, Jimmy Deuchar and Victor Feldman, Tracey was still having to earn a commercial crust with the Ted Heath band, wherein his mischievous sense of humour occasionally threatened to derail the temperate mood of blandness.

At a time when British jazz pianists were generally trying for the smooth fluidity of men like Tommy Flanagan, Wynton Kelly and Oscar Peterson, Tracey represented a distinctly knotty alternative, as can be heard on his first album as a leader, Showcase, made in 1958 with Heath band colleagues bassist Johnny Hawksworth and drummer Ronnie Verrell. The results are by no means mature Tracey, for there are still more than trace vestiges of his dance band apprenticeship, but the overall concept is a far different one from merely following a fashionable star and one can readily recognise the Stan Tracey of today in this early effort. Tracey had by then in his own words "boiled it down" to just two major influences, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, and the effect these influences had upon him was to make his style stark, rhythmically obtuse but assertive, harmonically dense and without any real recourse to empty technical displays. The iconic album Little Klunk is the perfect early example of Tracey's skills as they stood at the dawn of the 1960s, and features only his own compositions, a trend that the pianist was to follow with unexpected dividends within a few years.

Such an intractable and stubborn stylist might not have seemed the ideal choice for the position of house accompanist, but in 1961 Tracey fell into just such a role at Ronnie Scott's club and over the next seven years there followed an intense period of musical creativity for the pianist, alternating work and recordings with his own quartet and accompanying a bewildering array of visiting American soloists, an experience he once described as being "like Christmas every night." The reaction to Tracey was variable. Some, like Sonny Rollins, Roland Kirk, Jimmy Witherspoon and Zoot Sims were delighted to find a genuine musical personality at the keyboard and not some fawning non-entity; others were not. Saxophonists Lucky Thompson and Don Byas were openly hostile, and Stan Getz had the ego-fuelled nerve to criticise Tracey publicly over the microphone at the club one night; "bollocks," was Tracey's response.

Tracey had already found something far more useful to do with his hands than wipe the backsides of the visiting artists at Scott's, but when a sincere musical dialogue commenced he was ready to throw himself in with total commitment. "I don't like accompanying twinkling stars," he said later, and the same lack of unnecessary hype and fashion conscious pandering marked his own choice for regular musical partner when he began to work with tenor saxophonist Bobby Wellins, another genuine improviser with an unshowy gift. The Tracey-Wellins partnership was central to one of the greatest triumphs in British jazz, the 1965 recording Under Milk Wood, the story of which has been documented time and again elsewhere. The follow up album recorded in 1967, With Love From Jazz, has finally been released on CD after years of being an expensive collectors item on vinyl. If it lacks the legendary status of its predecessor, it certainly lacks nothing else. Tracey and Wellins are on peak form, revealing yet another facet of their hand-in-glove pairing on a loosely connected suite of songs about love.

A period in the jazz wilderness followed in the 1970s, as did some not entirely convincing collaborations with musicians from the free jazz scene, but by the 1980s Tracey was back doing what he does best. Indeed, Tracey is currently going through yet another purple patch and the renewed interest in his work heralded by a recent BBC4 documentary on his life and work and by the Jazz Britannia series (although somewhat cynically received by Stan himself) looks as if it will have positive ripples. There are plans to reissue several of his classic albums from the late 1960s and mid-1970s, which include the big band sessions Alice In Jazzland and The Seven Ages of Man, the trio album Perspectives, a collaboration with saxophonist Peter King, Free 'an One, and the much loved album Captain Adventure, featuring another long-term Tracey sidekick, the tenorist Art Themen. There can be little doubt that the renaissance of one of this country's finest jazz talents is both deserved and very welcome.

GORDON BECK and MICHAEL GARRICK
- the impact of Bill Evans

The work of Bill Evans was not overtly dramatic, but his recordings in the late 1950s' Miles Davis sessions as well as those with his own trio severely altered the musical course of several London-based pianists, Gordon Beck and Michael Garrick principle among them. It is interesting that both of these performers branched outwards from an Evans' influence into something more personal.

Gordon Beck's jazz career began with the prestigious opportunity of joining the Tubby Hayes' quintet in 1962 (recorded on two live albums, Late Spot At Scott's and Down In The Village), a major accolade for a virtually unknown pianist. The Hayes group, with its positive echoes of the bands of Cannonball Adderley and Horace Silver, was not really the place for a musician like Beck, and after a tenure with the Tony Kinsey Quintet (recorded on How To Succeed In Business) Beck went out on his own in a trio setting, which directly reflected his Evans fascination. This first edition of the band also accompanied vocalists such as Annie Ross and Joy Marshall and various horn players, but it was on its own that it came into musical fruition. As the decade wore on, Beck's approach flourished beyond playing standard show tunes in the Evans manner, and he became a noteworthy composer. His sidemen too became ever more adventurous, and he enrolled the idiosyncratic drummer Tony Oxley.

Two of the finest British jazz albums of the 1960s were recorded by this trio. Experiments With Pops was a bold and successful attempt to subjugate then current popular material by the likes of The Beach Boys, The Who and The Beatles, and incorporated the talents of the young "Johnny" McLaughlin on guitar (it also mitigated Beck's earlier and disastrous attempt to perform a jazz version of the music from the film Dr. Doolittle). Gyroscope concentrated upon Beck's regular trio with bassist Jeff Clyne and Oxley, and upon Beck's own compositions. As the 1970s dawned Beck found himself frequently working in Europe, often with the quartet of American altoist Phil Woods and with European jazzmen such as violinist Didier Lockwood. This situation has endured to this day, with the pianist sadly now rarely performing in the country of his birth.

Michael Garrick's musical journey was one of the first in British jazz to take an almost exclusively jingoistic route. His first quartet in the late 1950s had begun to incorporate adaptations of English folk songs into its repertoire, often little more than a twee pastiche of the Modern Jazz Quartet's approach, but work with the poets John Smith and Danny Abse using English texts to jazz accompaniment furthered Garrick's desire to get to something quintessentially English. These literary efforts went in tandem with liturgical interests and Garrick's Jazz Praises, performed by his sextet and a choral group at St. Paul's Cathedral in 1968, is among the very few explicitly religious works ever performed by a British jazz group.

Even if these personal interests might have seemed to be at odds with virtually everything else on the British jazz scene there was little risk of alienation for Garrick, as his thoughtful piano style, which could veer from ultimate restraint to spiralling brilliance, had found a welcome home in the quintet headed by saxophonist Don Rendell and Ian Carr, a band also on a resolutely individual path. Garrick's playing and composing quickly became central to this group, with themes such as Black Marigolds and Dusk Fire coming to define their music. Fortunately the entire Rendell-Carr back catalogue has been revived on CD as have several of Garrick's own sessions, which mix a veritable cast of Brit-jazz heavyweights such as Art Themen, Tony Coe, Henry Lowther, Norma Winstone, Dave Green, Carr, Rendell and Joe Harriott. Black Marigolds in particular has achieved almost mythic status, but Troppo and The Heart Is A Lotus are also well worthy of reappraisal, each indicative of Garrick's skills as a composer, arranger, bandleader and pianist. The interest generated by the recent Jazz Britannia television documentary series has also served Garrick well, and the affiliated concert at The Barbican gave a unique chance for his big band (now something of a musical preoccupation for him) to be heard by a wider audience.

MICK PYNE
- original

One of the most impressive of the generation of British jazz pianists who emerged in the early 1960s was Mick Pyne. Pyne came from a musical family (his brother Chris was a fine trombonist) and had an eclectic musical apprenticeship. He had fallen in love with revivalist jazz as a child, an enthusiasm which never left him, and had mastered the complex art of stride piano, but his musical tastes stretched far and wide. His first gigs in London could not have been more different; he held a Tatum-esque solo pianist residency at one club whilst also appearing with the Tony Kinsey Quintet, one of the countries best regarded modern jazz units. However, Pyne felt he was not yet ready and returned to Yorkshire for an intense period of musical study. When he returned to London he brought with him a piano style that could be as earthy and direct as Hampton Hawes and as delicate and lyrical as Bill Evans, but finding a place for himself was proving difficult. In 1966 he was working with Alexis Korner's Blues Inc., then a refuge to several other jazzmen such as his brother Chris, altoist Ray Warleigh and bassist Danny Thompson, but a chance gig with Tubby Hayes suddenly brought him into the limelight.

By the end of 1966, Pyne was Hayes' regular pianist and the recording he made as part of the Hayes quartet in early 1967 is one of the most assured of all British jazzmen's debuts. Mexican Green is among Tubby Hayes' finest achievements and Pyne's playing is one of the contributing factors to its success. His introduction to the ballad Dedication To Joy is a thing of pure beauty and his snaking solo on Tubby's Blues In Orbit echoes the way Herbie Hancock was then playing with Miles Davis quintet. His improvisation on the title track, which balances free playing and tight structure, is among the records highlights, building over a tight beat from drummer Tony Levin, it eventually sprawls all over the basic tonality and then escapes as if in pursuit of Stan Tracey. (Live recordings of the Hayes quartet featuring Pyne can be found on the CDs Live 1969, For Members Only and Jazz Tete A Tete).

Pyne infrequently led his own bands, usually a trio comprising his Hayes band colleagues bassist Ron Mathewson and drummer Spike Wells (a live recording of this group at Ronnie Scott's was briefly issued in Japan and cries out for release in the Occident) but also a quartet featuring Ray Warleigh and an intriguing octet which brought together a truly all-star line up including John Surman and Kenny Wheeler. With these line-ups, Pyne concentrated upon his own compositions which could be dark and foreboding in a manner that reflected his love of modern classical music, or songful and joyous, and which were always reflective of his immense understanding of structure and harmonic tension and release.

Pyne also spent a great deal of time working with Humphrey Lyttelton in contexts which made the most of his eclectic talents (Humph also persuaded Pyne to take up the cornet again, an instrument he had played in childhood and which he would eventually use on a double-tracked duet recording with his own piano). With Lyttelton, he also revisited his love of stride piano. His early death in the mid-1990s was a great loss.

HOWARD RILEY, MIKE TAYLOR, KEITH TIPPETT and JOHN TAYLOR
- into the seventies

The course of British jazz piano it the end of the 1960s is best exemplified by the differing approaches of Howard Riley, Keith Tippett and John Taylor. Howard Riley found himself in the same position as his friend (and former employer), the saxophonist Evan Parker; having realised there was no point trying to play the dominant American jazz influences at their own game, the music he was performing had less and less connection with any tradition in jazz, either from Britain or America. Subsequently he composed large-scale works for the London Jazz Composers' Orchestra and chamber pieces, but his 1968 trio recording Angle is a good place to hear where the young Riley thought he might take that classic line-up. A 1983 solo recording Beyond Category was a surprise return to playing standard themes by Monk and Ellington, albeit in Riley's own distinct manner.

The short-lived Mike Taylor could have gone a similar route to Riley, but mental instabilty wrecked his promising career and he tragically took his own life in 1969. The two recordings his group made for Denis Preston (Trio and Pendulum) are fascinating but have the frustrating air of a musical direction that was never to be realised.

Keith Tippett too quickly moved outside any notions of a strict jazz genre, extending his energetic virtuoso piano playing to ever larger, ever more inclusive projects such as Centipede, the fifty strong orchestra which he formed in 1970, and that took in jazz, rock and classical musicians to perform Tippett's own work Septober Energy. His interest in free music gave rise to the improvisers' group Ovary Lodge, and also to a collaboration with fellow pianist Stan Tracey (T'N'T) which was hailed as a success at the time but which now looks among the most unrewarding, insincere and dated of Tracey's recorded ventures. Tippett remains beyond category, although there is little doubt that his has definitely been the work of a jazz musician looking farther afield and not that of grant-chasing charlatan.

John Taylor's career might be the epitome of a quintessential English jazz musician of his generation. He had the usual dance band apprenticeship, then the sudden joy of working with like minded souls such as Alan Skidmore, Kenny Wheeler and Norma Winstone, and finally an international reputation based securely on a European footing. His 1971 album Pause, And Think Again, recorded with his own band featuring Kenny Wheeler, Chris Pyne and Stan Sulzmann, is a classic British jazz recording. Taylor's piano style is that of a virtuoso, not just on a technical level but in its ability to find the right time, space and logic in any context within which it appears. Whether burning the paint off the walls with the celebrated Alan Skidmore quintet of 1969 (as on the album Once Upon A Time) or with Ronnie Scott's quintet, or creating moods of quiet lyricism and solemnity with Wheeler and Winstone in the trio Azimuth, Taylor delivers the perfect performance. Indeed his is a creative talent now rounded to a degree all but unimaginable sixty years ago, when British jazzmen struggled to get to grips with the new idiom of bebop.

© SIMON SPILLETTSeptember 2005