HANK SHAW and LEON CALVERT
- Club Eleven stalwarts

Kenny Baker may well have been the most prominent British Jazz trumpeter during the late 1940s, but he was certainly not the most forward thinking. Baker rather sensibly realised that the new music of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker was not his natural environment and left the unravelling of bebop's complexities to a more dedicated set of performers. Centred around the ill fated Club Eleven venture (which tried vainly to maintain an unadulterated bebop club in the austere circumstances of post-war London) were a pool of young players eager to emulate the new wave of modern jazz emerging from the United States. The principal brass players within this movement were the trumpeters Hank Shaw and Leon Calvert, both of whom took a very different route out of the new idiom.

Hank Shaw balanced his love of Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Navarro to arrive at a mode of expression that can best be described as having a crackling fluidity. As with all the British modernists, his style took a while to reach maturity, largely due to the forced circumstance of having to work with second-hand sources. Early examples of Shaw can be under the leadership of Ronnie Scott on several Esquire recordings. After the mid-1950s Shaw's visibility on the jazz scene fluctuated, but by the late 1960s he was playing with the Tubby Hayes Big Band, and in 1970 he became an appropriate founding member of Bill Le Sage's Bebop Preservation Society, a band that made a very welcome relief from the fusion-based approaches of the day. Shaw recorded three albums with this group (The Bebop Preservation Society, The Bebop Preservation Society with Red Rodney and Pied Piper of Hamlin Suite, all sorely in need of reissue), and each recording reveals a secure idiomatic style that had grown in breadth and depth of expression. The 1975 Spotlite album made with guest Red Rodney - a former trumpet partner of Charlie Parker - finds Shaw doing anything but letting the esteemed American steal the show. Sadly, ill health forced Shaw to stop performing publicly in the 1990s.

Leon Calvert was the first 'cool' trumpeter in the UK, drawing his inspiration from the early work of Miles Davis on Charlie Parker's Dial and Savoy recordings, and this made a less intimidating introduction to bebop than Dizzy Gillespie's helter-skelter pyrotechnics. Such reserve, more readily identifiable with British performers, inevitably drew Calvert and John Dankworth together, and after a decade or so of work with, among others, Vic Lewis and Tony Crombie, the trumpeter spent the most prominent part of his jazz career with Dankworth's early 1960s' big band. Calvert's contributions to the two suites which Dankworth penned at this time, What The Dickens and The Zodiac Variations, are deeply couched in the style of Miles Davis' recordings with arranger Gil Evans, and, like Davis, he was among the first jazz trumpeters to realise the potential of the flugelhorn.

Ken Wray was an incredibly powerful player with a sound harmonic knowledge, but his soloing could veer dangerously close to crudity when at its most excited. He also made prominent use of the valve trombone - an instrument popular in jazz circles in the 1950s after its patronage by Bob Brookmeyer - and as such was featured in the quartet of Ronnie Ross, which recreated the piano-less line-up of Gerry Mulligan and Brookmeyer. Wray's solo work is scattered over several albums, but an especially rewarding example can be found on Harry South's composition The Scandinavian from the 1964 Tubby Hayes big band album Tubbs Tours.

JIMMY DEUCHAR
- a true market leader

Undisputedly the greatest British modern jazz trumpeter was Jimmy Deuchar, who also began his career with John Dankworth. Deuchar was one of the most sophisticated jazz talents on the London scene of his time. His theoretical grounding - which was more or less self acquired as were those of Ronnie Scott and the other members of the Club Eleven circle - manifested itself in an improvising style that could negotiate the most tricky harmonies with aplomb, and which lent itself also to an erudite composing and arranging concept that superficially resembled Tadd Dameron's. Deuchar's trumpet playing hero was Fats Navarro, the tragically short-lived genius who had created one of the most lyrical of the bebop styles at the close of the 1940s and whose playing was the prime influence upon Clifford Brown. Like Navarro, Deuchar had a broad and fat tone that rarely ventured into the extremities of the instrument's upper register, and he made a virtue of the fact that his range was comparatively small. As Les Condon, one former colleague of Deuchar's has said, "the stuff Jimmy could get going in just over one octave was amazing."

Deuchar's early recorded work can be sampled on the two Jasmine CDs Bop-in' Britain volume 1 and Bop-in' Britain volume 2 which contain several early 1950s' dates under the leadership of Ronnie Scott and John Dankworth. Deuchar's purple patch came in the middle of that decade, preceeding his move to Germany. From 1955 to 1958 he recorded five sessions for the Tempo arm of Decca records under the supervision of Tony Hall, and these rank as some of the most organised and musically rewarding British modern jazz of the era. The Jimmy Deuchar Ensemble session, which began the cycle, Showcase, contains four distinctive Deuchar compositions, and he is joined by the youthful Tubby Hayes and the pianist Victor Feldman, who was soon to leave Britain to join the Woody Herman band in America. Like the majority of Deuchar's sets for Tempo, the personnel centres on alto saxophonist Derek Humble and the trombonist Ken Wray, both of whom also joined the Edelhagen band in Germany. The Deuchar Plays Deuchar session (on the CD Opus De Funk), recorded the following spring, finds the embryonic Stan Tracey in the piano chair and has the novel idea of naming the four compositions which Deuchar wrote for the date after various beers. The contrast between the front line players is marked: Humble's ethereal Konitz-like alto makes an unlikely bedfellow with Ken Wray's Bill Harris-like outbursts. A further Deuchar date with Wray and Humble from 1958, Pal Jimmy, is book ended by two sessions featuring Tubby Hayes. The first, from March 1957 (on Opus De Funk), has Deuchar in splendid form. He eats up the complex changes of Miles Davis' Milestones and the standard Lullaby In Rhythm, and he plays two fine solos, both blues, Horace Silver's Opus De Funk and Swingin' In Studio Two, a re-titling of a Sonny Stitt number, Loose Walk. Deuchar's glowing tone even manages to save a near disastrous reading of Gershwin's ballad How Long Has This Been Going On?, on which his harmonic accuracy is totally at odds with the rhythm section. The final Tempo session by Deuchar (contained on the Pal Jimmy CD) recorded in March 1958, featured four covers from the score of the movie Pal Joey, including the arrangement Deuchar contributed to the Jazz Couriers' book of Rodgers and Hart's My Funny Valentine. There is further superlative ballad playing on Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered and the session has the welcome novelty of tenorist Tubby Hayes playing baritone saxophone with all his characteristic energy and drive.

Deuchar and Hayes made a formidable front line, one able to mix the frenetic approach found elsewhere in British modern jazz at the time with a more thorough going degree of idiomatic accuracy, and it was no surprise when Deuchar accepted the trumpet chair in Hayes' new quintet in early 1962. The recordings the group made, scattered across several albums (including the official Fontana releases Late Spot At Scott's and Down in The Village and the privately recorded live sets on Tribute To Tubbs, Night and Day and both volumes of Live In London) are some of the finest British hard bop ever committed to disc. With all the recent attention upon Hayes' own contributions, it is all too easy to overlook Deuchar's complementary work, but these records abound in fine moments from the trumpeter's hard hitting work on the title track of Down In The Village, his Harmon mute lead on Angel Eyes on Late Spot At Scott's, his glowing lyricism on All Of You from Tribute To Tubbs and his mellophonium (an instrument similar to the french horn which he took up after encountering its use in the Stan Kenton band) on the skating 6/4 blues Simple Waltz on Night and Day. Deuchar's composing figured prominently also in the Hayes quintet's book; First Eleven, a torturously complex theme which reveals that Deuchar had been listening to Giant Steps-era Coltrane, is one of the high spots of Down In The Village, while the graceful If You Knew, which opens Live In London volume 2, is a theme so inevitable that it seems to have been around for years. Deuchar also featured within the ranks of Tubby Hayes' infrequent big band (itself an outgrowth of the Downbeat Big Band which Deuchar had led before moving to Cologne), and his soloing and arranging can be heard on the Tubbs Tours album from 1964.

During the early 1960s Deuchar briefly co-led a quintet with the trombonist Keith Christie, a player whose apprenticeship spanned the entire range of jazz in Britain and who was a much underrated performer, but by the middle of the decade Deuchar had returned to Germany, and the remainder of his career was spent at a much lower profile than he deserved. He returned to Britain in the 1970s, moved back to his native Scotland and then briefly to the Far East. A 'comeback' album, The Scots Connection, was recorded for the HEP label in 1979, recently reissued, and he toured with the mammoth Charlie Watts orchestra in the mid-1980s. His final recordings, made with the Jack Sharpe big band and which resuscitated the library of the old Tubby Hayes' band (including Deuchar's own scores), reveal a musical concept still intact, but ill health plagued him and he died in 1993.

DIZZY REECE
- "Intensity" and then some

If tales of West Indian jazzmen being sidelined are mythical, then tales of their inspirational and passionate performing are the stuff of legend. No-one player perhaps better embodies this spirit than does trumpeter Alphonso Son "Dizzy" Reece. Reece was actually something of a rarity in the West Indian jazz community as he had actually been amongst those who had arrived in England aboard the famed M.V. Windrush in 1948, the first ship from the West Indies which contained what the press of the day dubbed "500 Pairs of Willing Hands". If the local jazz community did not welcome Reece initially, it had less to do with his colour or the notion of British jazz being a closed shop than the trumpeter's erratic playing. A stay on the continent ironed out a lot of Reece's problems where he was able to work with players like saxophonist Don Byas and drummer Kenny Clarke, neither of whom welcomed anyone onto the bandstand.

The recordings Reece made in the mid-1950s under the aegis of Tony Hall (Dizzy's most ardent promulgator) for the Tempo label reveal that his style took both leaps forward and back, a situation not helped by Reece's reluctance to play unless he wanted to, unless the conditions were just right, or unless he could do as he wished! This single-minded attitude would have made him stand out virtually anywhere in the jazz world of the 1950s, let alone in the sometimes compromising circumstances of London's West End scene.

If his outlook was singular, his playing was even more so. At a time when most other British jazz trumpeters were hung up on either Clifford Brown or Miles Davis, Reece sounded like neither. In his notes for Dizzy's first album, A New Star, Tony Hall compared him to Art Farmer, a compliment that is accurate only in the resolute identity of the two men's beautiful tone. Reece played with a melancholy style full of unusual leaps and turns, and a subtlety alleviated by a very un-British like intensity. As a composer, too, he was resolutely himself.

Of the local players, Reece formed happy and useful alliances with drummer Phil Seamen, vibraphonist Victor Feldman, and with the tenor saxophonist Tubby Hayes - with whom Reece recorded the soundtrack to the British thriller Nowhere to Go (on the CD Progress Report). But in a scene where most of the locals were still grappling with the mechanics of bebop, few knew how to handle a player such as Reece who was already genuinely beyond its confine, especially as defined by American role models. On paper, at least, Joe Harriott and Dizzy Reece were made for each other, and it might have been a perfect musical partnership were it not for both men's intractable belief that their own direction was the only one. They had apparently attempted their own brand of free form in the mid-1950s, but an attempt to get them together on record was, in Tony Hall's recollection, a total disaster: the session ended in a raging argument between the two front line men, and Harriott's last minute replacement was the less temperamental Sammy Walker, another West Indian saxophonist.

Nevertheless Hall never lost faith in Reece's ability, a view shared by several American jazz men who heard the trumpeter play, such as Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins, and in 1958 Hall engineered Reece's signing to the home of many of hard bop's finest talents, the prestigious Blue Note label, an endorsement that even Victor Feldman - Britain's most successful jazz export of the time - had not received. Reece's first Blue Note date, Blues In Trinity, was recorded in an atmosphere of subterfuge due to the still fragile relationship between the Musicians' Union and the American Federation of Musicians. (For years it was stated that the album was cut in Paris but in reality it was made at Decca's West Hampstead studio in London.) It is a record of sky-rocketing hard bop energy, pitting Reece and Tubby Hayes against the trumpeter Donald Byrd and drummer Art Taylor, two of the leading lights in 1950s' American jazz. Reece outshines everyone (save perhaps Hayes, who is in mercurial form) and the whole set vindicates Tony Hall's decision to support the trumpeter.

In 1959, Reece moved to New York but his move did not herald the success and recognition that everyone hoped for and actually began the abstraction of his career. Two more Blue Note dates followed - neither was as impressive as Blues In Trinity - but Reece's profile on a jazz scene which could then boast trumpeters like Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan at their peak was not prominent. In the 1960s, Reece would return to Europe and worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Hank Mobley and others and recorded only sporadically in the 1970s. By the 1990s little was heard from him and Reece remains an example of a great early promise that, however fine the quality of his later playing, manifested itself ultimately in anti climax. It is also perhaps a lesson to all those who think that Joe Harriott would have benefited from a move to the United States.

DICKIE HAWDON, LES CONDON and IAN HAMER
- neglected talents

Jimmy Deuchar had a great influence upon his fellow London-based trumpeters, amongst them Dickie Hawdon, Les Condon and Ian Hamer, all of whom had worked at various times with Deuchar in bands led by Tubby Hayes. Of the three, Dickie Hawdon had by far the most interesting career development. Starting as a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist in The Yorkshire Jazz Band in the late 1940s, he moved to London and surprised everyone by 'turning modern' (in the days when the trad versus modern argument was strictly partisan) and joining the sextet led by Don Rendell (and which can be heard on Meet Don Rendell). By 1956 Hawdon was working with Tubby Hayes, and the recordings he made with both the octet and quintet Hayes led during 1956 reveal a player still trying to exorcise some of the jauntiness of his trad apprenticeship (see Modern Jazz Scene 1956 and The Swinging Giant volume 1 and volume 2). Hawdon subsequently worked with the big band of John Dankworth, featuring on both trumpet and the mellophone (another curious relative of the french horn), and as one of the band's principal soloists he received plenty of record exposure. His next move, however, stunned fans and fellow player alike; Hawdon moved 'back' to trad circles, joining the Terry Lightfoot band in 1961. Such a decision, coming as it did during the height of the trad boom, might have seemed suicidal for the modernists' purist ideals or a leap on the commercial bandwagon, but was in fact indicative of Hawdon's healthily and catholic enthusiasm for many jazz styles, an enthusiasm he would take into his role as director of the pioneering jazz course at Leeds College of Music.

Les Condon and Ian Hamer had more or less parallel careers during the 1950s and 1960s. Both were closely associated with Tubby Hayes and both were rarely heard as soloists in their own right. By the late 1950s Les Condon had the makings of a style very much informed by that of the American trumpeter Lee Morgan, although his early playing was often erratic (and can be heard with Tony Crombie on Modern Jazz At The Royal Festival Hall). His recorded work with both Tubby Hayes and Tony Kinsey reflects this, especially on the recently reissued Kinsey album recorded in 1963, How To Succeed In Business.... Ian Hamer's style was similarly informed but broadened to encompass the freedoms of Woody Shaw, Freddie Hubbard and his close colleague Kenny Wheeler. As with most of his brass playing contemporaries on the London jazz scene, Hamer's soloing was scattered throughout dozens of albums by various leaders, including Harry South, Tubby Hayes and Vic Lewis, but a recent CD issue (Acropolis) features the group he had led intermittently throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including saxophonist Tubby Hayes, Alan Skidmore and Dick Morrissey, and the album illustrates perfectly the underrated talents of the trumpeter.

KENNY WHEELER
- blossoming on the international stage

Rising quietly through the bebop ranks throughout this era was Kenny Wheeler. Nowadays a jazz star of international fame, Wheeler struggled with finding his own concept during his early years as a performer. Having arrived in the United Kingdom from Canada in 1952, he spent most of the 1950s in big bands, but a combination of crippling nerves and uncertainty about how best to find his own voice meant that he was loathe to push himself forward. Nevertheless Wheeler's personal style emerged and began to attract attention. His trumpet and flugelhorn solos on several albums made with John Dankworth during the early 1960s are clearly the work of a mind that went beyond mere mimicry of bebop mannerisms. Wide intervals and a melancholy tone already characterised his playing, and although it bore some superficial resemblance to Art Farmer and Booker Little, his style was distinctly personal. Such individuality ensured that Kenny, fortunately, never fitted exclusively into any one school of playing, and by the late 1960s he was moving effortlessly between the free jazz experiments of drummers Tony Oxley and John Stevens, the mainstream of clarinettist Sandy Brown, and the post-bop of Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott. Wheeler was also an extremely busy session musician, a retreat into which virtually all of the players discussed here moved, and only in the early 1970s did he begin to lead his own bands on record.

The debut album by his own big band, Song For Someone, recorded in 1973, is a remarkable work, not only for the breadth of Kenny's choice of sidemen - which range from trombonist Keith Christie to saxophonist Evan Parker - but also for his stunning compositions and arrangements, and for some staggering playing from the leader. Wheeler's career since has been conducted on an international level, and the series of recordings he made for the ECM label are some of the most personal music to have come from a player of his generation. He remains, at the age of seventy-five, a peerless brass master, and, although Canadian by birth, is very much a British national treasure.

HARRY BECKETT
- the eloquence of "Flare Up"

After Joe Harriott, the most prominent West Indian jazz musician on the British circuit in the late 1960s was the Barbadian trumpeter Harry Beckett, a man possessing a truly unique talent at a time when most other trumpeters were totally consumed by Miles Davis' influence. True, Beckett could play a ballad with the heart breaking exquisite tenderness of Davis, or more pointedly Art Farmer, but he was also more than capable of functioning in totally free contexts. There are few things more joyous in British jazz from the early 1970s than Beckett's debut album for Phillips, Flare Up, which finds him alongside the Young Turks of British jazz during those years, saxophonists Mike Osborne, Alan Skidmore and John Surman. The album mixes rock grooves, collective improvisation and touching balladry. Beckett's free playing conveys his light-hearted nature and his abstractions never hint at the dark demons so often displayed in European free music of the time. His skittishness is at times reminiscent of Don Cherry but much more so of Kenny Wheeler, another transatlantic migrant, with whom Beckett really shares a similarity.

Both Beckett and Wheeler took interminable time coming to the forefront of the music, both serving lengthy apprenticeships and eschewing any limelight (Wheeler with Dankworth and Beckett in the lower profile world of night club bands). Beckett's work with bassist Graham Collier in the late-1960s turned many listeners on their ear, forcing the question: how on earth does a talent this unique sit mostly unnoticed for over a decade?

Like Wheeler, Beckett was also a man for all sessions, able to embrace big band section work, standards gigs, the knotty world of Stan Tracey, and pure improvisation with the likes of drummer John Stevens, all without ever sounding in danger of surrendering his identity. Indeed, such was his prominence as the finest black jazzman in Britain in the 1970s and early-1980s that he became something of an elder statesman for Courtney Pine's generation. Beckett himself recognised Pine's burgeoning talent and the two men recorded a pair of fine quintet CDs for the West Wind label in the late-1980s. Pine returned the favour by including Beckett in the Jazz Warriors trumpet section, where he displayed his genuine talent in a raw new setting, as inspirational and encouraging as ever to those around him. He remains one of Britain's best jazz improvisers, a status supported by the high regard in which many American brass players hold him.

IAN CARR
- English individualism chasing a star

A near contemporary of Wheeler's is Ian Carr. Carr had a similar bebop apprenticeship, and by the time of his arrival in London from Tyneside in the early 1960s, he was fully versed in the mechanics of modern jazz trumpet playing. The pairing of Carr with the veteran saxophonist Don Rendell in 1962 proved to be a turning point in each player's career. Carr and Rendell fronted a quintet featuring pianist Michael Garrick, bassist Dave Green and drummer Trevor Tomkins for nearly five years, producing a string of classic albums including Dusk Fire, Live and Change Is, each one reflecting the changes taking place in jazz during the era. Miles Davis' modal experiments and elements of eastern music were explored, but the band's output reflected increasingly their own self-penned repertoire, and accordingly became revered as one of the first truly English jazz groups, seemingly working at one remove from all else around them. Carr's playing on these classic recordings, both on flugelhorn and trumpet, undoubtedly contains the stamp of Miles Davis, and it was Davis who influenced Carr's next venture, the fusion group Nucleus, formed after musical differences pulled the Rendell-Carr quintet apart. Nucleus and Carr recorded prolifically and remained big headliners throughout the 1970s; but, after the resolute individuality of the Rendell-Carr band, the venture reeked of following a star and Carr's career ever since has seemed anti-climactic.

KEEPERS OF THE FLAME
- Derek Watkins and Dick Pearce

The work of the two principle studies in this piece, Kenny Baker and Jimmy Deuchar, has left its mark on British trumpeters to this day. Baker's disciple might well be Derek Watkins, a player of equal versatility, and who is among Kenny Wheeler's personal favourites. Watkins' career began in the mid-1960s and, like Baker twenty years before him, he quickly became a highly sought after session musician. He is a peerless lead player, reliable in any context, and a more than capable improviser whose style reflects a love of Clifford Brown and Freddie Hubbard as well as Kenny Wheeler; his flugelhorn playing has a truly gorgeous tone. Watkins' career has seen him tackling heavyweight jazz gigs with the likes of Benny Goodman and the Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band (where the youthful Englishman headed a trumpet section including international veterans such as Art Farmer, Benny Bailey and Idrees Suliemann) to playing on numerous commercial sessions by everyone from The Beatles to the Spice Girls. Like the majority of British jazzmen, however, Watkins has recorded infrequently as a leader in his own right, with a sole recording in a quartet context from 1995 remaining in the catalogues (Over The Rainbow, Zephyr). He continues to be the lead trumpet of choice in Britain, recalling Dizzy Gillespie's glowing endorsement that Watkins "is the best lead trumpet in the world," whilst recent jazz gigs have included a tour with Kenny Wheeler's big band.

A player with an equally formidable reputation who has suffered a similar fate of neglect by record labels is Dick Pearce. More than any other British jazz trumpeter, Pearce probably deserves the mantle of heir to Jimmy Deuchar, offering a style that contains a fractured lyricism reminiscent of his forebear. Pearce began his career as a military band musician and subsequently emerged in the 1970s from one of the earliest editions of that ongoing jazz dynasty, the National Youth Jazz Orchestra (NYJO). Surrounded by would-be plugged-in Miles Davis clones, and by those musicians who had reached attention through the very different apprenticeship of free music, Pearce was notable for being the kind of straight ahead player who might well have appeared on the London jazz scene twenty years earlier. He has a sophisticated command of harmonic improvising, although, as with his self-confessed (and disparate) trumpet heroes - Chet Baker, Art Farmer and Don Cherry - his playing comes across as anything but contrived. Pearce had a lengthy association with Ronnie Scott which lasted from the 1970s until Scott's health forced him to abandon performing in the mid-1990s, and some of his best recorded work can be found on the CD Never Pat A Burning Dog (Jazz House, 1990), where his solos contrast admirably with Scott's more forthright contributions, and contain a heat and urgency never far beneath the cool surface.

A quartet CD for FMR records in 1994 remains Pearce's only noticeable solo recording effort and, as with virtually all the players mentioned here, his reputation would be ill-founded if one were to base it solely on the quantity of his recorded output. However, Pearce's beautifully integrated mix of hard bop and abstraction influenced a whole generation of British trumpeters including those who followed in his footsteps with NYJO, such as Gerard Presencer and Guy Barker, both of whom have made careers representative of the kind of failsafe adaptability that has long been the way for British trumpeters.

© SIMON SPILLETTJune 2005