Part 3- Tubby Hayes The Complete Fontana Recordings Box Set Notes by Simon Spillett

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Here is part three of Simon Spillett’s sleeve notes for the now out-of-print 'Tubby Hayes: The Complete Fontana Albums 1961-69' 

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© -Simon Spillett, copyright protected; all rights reserved; used with the author’s permission.

TUBBY HAYES 

THE COMPLETE FONTANA RECORDINGS 1961-1969 

'They say you can’t sell British jazz in Britain - not the modern stuff. That’s not quite true. With someone like Tubby, who now has an international reputation, sales are healthy enough. He is, in fact, the modern star name among European jazzmen.'

Jack Baverstock, Crescendo, June 1963

A little difficult to grasp: Tubbs in N.Y. and Return Visit

Titled – how else? - Tubbs in N.Y. Fontana released a single LP's worth of material from Hayes' Big Apple début in April 1962, just ahead of its subject's second US visit. Once more they'd tasked Benny Green with the job of writing a note to summarise an event that many thought inconceivable. Again, as he'd previously been with Tubbs, Green was among the incredulous. 'Five years ago 'Tubbs in N.Y.' would have seemed like the wildest wishful thinking,' he noted in his sleeve commentary. 'Even after hearing the six tracks I find it all a little difficult to grasp.'

Away from the partisan necessities of penning the album's sleeve notes, in his dual role of both advocate and critic, Green was also asked to review the album for The Observer. To his credit, he struck a uniform note; 'all in all, an album of high musical content and some historic significance. It is bound to do a great deal to earn Tubby the American reputation he certainly deserves.'

In some ways, the album proved he'd already earned it, its six-theme playlist setting down definitive examples of his saxophone work, playing so mature and authentically 'American' sounding that those coming to it not knowing its provenance might not guess it came from a young Londoner. The album's reviewers certainly thought so, Melody Maker's Bob Dawbarn stating 'if anyone has any lingering doubts about Hayes's claims as a world-class musician, this should dispel them at once.'

For local fans, long used to seeing Hayes pushing against the restrictive envelope of parochial limitations, yes, the album did confirm his ability to sit at the top table. Retrospectively, it's also easy to see why Tubbs in N.Y. quickly came to be not just a best-seller in a physical sense but also in an artistic one; it has much of what Hayes was legendary for – the up-tempo but no-sweat-broken Opus Ocean; the facility within devilish chord sequences heard in Airegin; the equal balance between well-chosen Great American songbook sources and the hippest of jazzman-penned material, poles marked by George Gershwin's Soon and Clark Terry's ultra-groovy A Pint Of Bitter; even his signature unaccompanied introduction, as heard on You For Me, an album opening that almost instantly seared its way into the inner-ear of a generation of British modern jazz fans. It's small wonder too that, taken with the later Fontana sets 100% Proof and Mexican Green, Tubbs in N.Y. is frequently cited among his most representative work on-record.

And what of Fontana's reciprocal windfall – the promise of recording an American soloist in return? Well, that had gone swimmingly too. Hayes had visited the Half Note in exchange for Zoot Sims, who undertook a month-long residency at Ronnie Scott's club – the first ever US hornman to do so. While in London Sims had recorded two albums with his English accompanists ('Zoot Sizzles On Tape' ran Melody Maker's headline), creating music that proved that the man-for-man deal need not result in any inequality whatsoever.

But wasn't this all just a political exercise? What were both sides really thinking? And what were they truly making of it all on the other side of the pond, now that the man who'd enjoyed perhaps the greatest tourists welcome any foreign jazzman had ever been afforded in visiting New York, had gone back home and there was no direct need for old-world, to-your-face, politeness? Was Britain's Great Jazz Ambassador really that well regarded?

A month before Fontana issued Tubbs in N.Y., Epic Records released its own US-version of his previous London-taped album Tubbs – retitled Introducing Tubbs. Reviewed in DownBeat, the LP received a somewhat qualified appraisal, at times almost echoing the name of the journal in which it was published. 'This is not the best Hayes can do,' thought Ira Gitler, 'but it's still better than good.' Gitler's rating? Three and a half stars, the jazz writer's equivalent of 'must try harder.'

Perhaps this was merely a bit of understandable Stateside haughtiness, maybe brought on by the unfamiliarity of the names with whom Hayes was performing? DownBeat were bound to like an album recorded on their home ground – and moreover with a home team – a lot, lot better, surely? When Tubby The Tenor appeared on the Epic label in the summer of 1962 – a track for track facsimile of Tubbs in N.Y. - it prompted one of the worst reviews of Hayes anywhere, at any time in his career, the magazine's John S. Wilson damning its 'minutes of aimless diddle-daddle' 'long-winded' improvisations and 'fluency [that] proves more of a bore than a boon.' 

Wilson awarded the album a paltry two-stars, a rating that even the normally 'couldn't-give-a-damn-about-the-critics' Hayes found unduly harsh. It's not known whether the saxophonist was aware that Wilson had delivered very similar verdicts on albums by two of his own heroes, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, and was well-known for a tendency to turn the function of a record review from product assessment to character assassination. Hayes was in good company. Nevertheless, in return, he called the review 'lousy.'

But what about American musicians themselves, they'd like his latest record, right? There was every suggestion that they might. Indeed, the news that filtered back to London about Hayes' second American visit in June 1962 made the star-signed endorsements he'd received the previous autumn look positively undercooked. Dexter Gordon, Gerry Mulligan and Philly Joe Jones came to sit in at the Half Note; there was talk of potential collaborations with a dazzling array of young jazz talent ranging from guitarist Grant Green through to the Slide Hampton Octet; there had even been the extension of a job offer from none other than veteran big band leader Woody Herman. As ever, Melody Maker added grist to the rumour mill. 'Benny Golson has invited me up to his place,' Hayes told the paper, 'and Stan Getz wants me to play duets.'

Golson already knew and loved Hayes' work, after unexpectedly encountering the saxophonist's recording of Cherokee on the radio (this may have been on the night of November 22nd 1961 when famed broadcaster Willis Conover played Tubbs completely on his legendary Voice of America programme). Getz may not have been quite as enthusiastic. In fact, Hayes may have even thought twice about the American's invite if he'd been in possession of a crystal ball. When played one of the Englishman's Tubbs in N.Y. tracks during a Blindfold Test in DownBeat in 1964, Getz observed 'there's too much of the same dynamic level...it just goes on and on, with tenor all the way through'. Oddly enough, in the features' Afterthought, in which tester Leonard Feather afforded those he buttonholed an opportunity to atone for their judgements, the only track Getz didn't mention again was that by Hayes.

The biggest coup of Hayes' return visit to New York in June 1962 wasn't his Half Note gig, or his blink-and-you'll miss it appearance at the First International Washington Jazz Festival (ahead of Duke Ellington, no less), it was the taping of another album, this one even heavier on sales-potential than its predecessor. Again, whatever planning there was appeared to be at best minimal and, at worst, last minute. 

Despite being overseen by arranger and bandleader Quincy Jones – a favourite of Hayes, who would later employ the Englishman on several UK-made film soundtracks – come the eve of the session, Hayes was none-the-wiser as to who'd be taking part. 

Jones was acting in his new capacity as A&R man for Smash, yet another American label with whom Fontana had struck a European licensing deal, and, as such, had even flown to London ahead of Hayes' New York trip to try and firm up the details.

Some of his ideas now seem almost too good to be true. 'He suggested getting Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Curtis Fuller on trombone and Bill Evans on piano,' Hayes told Disc magazine. There were also suggestions of a live recording, a tentet session with Oliver Nelson arranging and even, with Hayes leased out to another label, a head-to-head with Dexter Gordon.

In the end, Hayes' second and final New York recording had more the air of a hastily-assembled blowing session than a carefully planned-out exercise, Jones roping in blind reed maverick Roland Kirk (handily signed to Smash's parent label Mercury), ex-Dizzy Gillespie sax star James Moody, pianist Walter Bishop Jr. - the only musician booked with whom Hayes had already performed – and the bass and drums team of the early 1960s edition of the Cannonball Adderley Quintet, Sam Jones and Louis Hayes. 

Even if one doesn't know the circumstances behind the recording, something of its ad-lib nature can be heard in the music, Hayes himself turning this 'unknown quantity' quality into a dramatic opening to his own sleeve notes for the resulting album. In the back of a cab heading towards New York's famed A&R Studios – co-run by the legendary Phil Ramone, who'd record everyone from Burt Bacharach to Andre Previn within its walls - he had his doubts. 'I was about to record with Great American jazzmen who knew nothing about the date until the day before and whom, apart from the piano player, I had never met; great jazz musicians who I have a deep respect for, called together to record with me by Quincy Jones whom I have admired for years'.

Pressure on? And then some, the general air of expectation added to by the producer himself arriving late ('very different from British record dates', Hayes told Disc). Worse still, one of the assembled cast – James Moody, moonlighting as 'Jimmy Gloomy', the label to whom he was signed unable to grant him swift-enough release -  hadn't even realised Hayes was a jazz musician. 'I've heard your name,' the American lisped stonily as the Englishman unpacked his saxophone, 'and I thought you were a rock and roll singer.'

If this comment was intended as some sort of artistic face-slap, Hayes took it very well, channelling everything into a five-tune session that makes up for what it lacks in organisation (virtually everything sounds like a head-arrangement) in sheer curiosity and variety. There are three tenor show downs (Stitt's Tune), a novel pairing of vibes and two flutes (Lady 'E') and generous helpings of Kirk's instrumental caprices – a whistle and a siren here, a snort of nose flute there, sudden bursts of two-horns at once riffing, even a ballad solo played on a reedless tenor. ([He] seemed to be getting ready so many instruments that I had my doubts is he would be ready before the session was due to finish', said Hayes afterwards.')

The whole album, around forty minutes of music, had been set down in six hours, the session ending abruptly as Kirk and the rhythm section had to depart for their evening gigs.

That Hayes had remained unperturbed by all this was a tribute to his sheer professionalism, all the more remarkable away from his usual habitat. And it was this – the keeping of his cool amid the brightest and best – that UK record reviewers picked up on when the resulting LP, titled Return Visit, was issued in June 1963. 'First-class jazz of which Tubby can be justifiably proud,' beamed Melody Maker; 'an achievement for Hayes [because] for the first-time we have the chance to evaluate his talent against those of some American top-liners,' opined Steve Voce of Jazz Journal, who thought the impromptu jam-session air made the record 'a nice change from some of the skull-crushing experiments one is obliged to sit through these days.'

The thumbs-up of British writers was almost a given – this was, after all, our top man doing top stuff in top company – but this time around even American jazz scribes found themselves altogether more convinced by Hayes' talents. 

Issued by Smash as Tubby's Back In Town, the album received a four and a-half star rating in DownBeat, Harvey Pekar praising Hayes as 'a musician capable of giving many well-regarded U.S. tenor players a run for their money.' Jazz magazine's reviewer likewise got straight to heart of the matter, thinking the recording proof that 'Tubby plays great regardless of race, creed or colour. I, for one, should not be drug [sic.] if he decided to move here permanently.'

Records like Return Visit only added further fuel to the long-simmering suggestion that Hayes should just do what everyone thought he ought to – emigrate to the USA and truly make a place for himself at the top table. But for all its surface success, some saw in the album more than a hint of how America might really welcome him once all the novelty had died down. Jack Cooke of Jazz Monthly – a journalist who personified the 'he giveth, he taketh away' duplicity of British music criticism of the era – thought Return Visit a 'partial failure' not just because of its last-minute, on-the-hoof genesis but due to the make-up of the band. Hayes was well-used to the 'throw them together' ethos that had governed much of the British jazz scene of the 1950s and early 1960s, and had proved to be entirely unsuited to it. If this was the kind of thing he could expect in America too, why bother going at all? Another especially perceptive observer, Val Wilmer, believed 'with more time for rehearsal the overall effect of the album could have been better', taking Hayes' declaration that 'I didn't know till the last minute who would be on it' at face value. It was almost as if you could hear the American side of the operation saying 'Oh, he's only a visiting English musician, we needn't make too much in the way of plans.'

Wilmer's interview with Hayes for Jazz News and Review in the summer of 1963 – just past the point at which he'd renewed his contract with Fontana – captured the saxophonist at the apex of his career achievements, the very moment when he faced what another newspaper headline had called 'the jackpot question'. Would he or wouldn't he leave the UK permanently for New York?  

Hayes still wasn't certain. Among the reasons for not upping sticks -  or rather among those he could put into the public arena – he cited his young family, his existing London-centric workload, and his own band. He also mentioned connections to the other kind of 'overseas', one rarely thought of as vital to a generation of English musicians who seemed transfixed by America – continental Europe.

'My name seems to be getting better known on the continent,' he told Wilmer, who noted him being 'in demand throughout Europe', something that might have smacked of PR-spin were it not for the plain-as-day proof. 

Hayes had first played abroad in the late 1950s, touring Germany in 1959, a nation to which he had returned two further times since, in 1961 and in the spring of 1963, the latter trip marking his first involvement in the state-sponsored international jazz workshops organised by radio station NDR. There had also been brief jaunts to Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland, and France, both for short club-runs and one-off festival appearances. By the middle of the 1960s, he was spending weeks at a time in Europe, often as a member of all-star, multi-national bands assembled for multi-capital tours. 

What had swung him these new opportunities within a fresh arena? According to one of Hayes' colleagues – and a fellow saxophone legend – Peter King, it could well have been his recording contract to Fontana. 'I seem to remember it being more open as far as British musicians going across and working in Europe and also European musicians coming and working in England sometimes,' King remembered in 2001. 'It may have been something to do with the record label's [who] may have had a little more power in those days. The people that Tubby recorded for – they probably had distribution all over Europe.'

And so they did. So much has been made of Hayes' coup of releasing albums in the United States that his pioneering example in other territories has often been overlooked. Throughout the 1960s, his Fontana catalogue was sliced and diced for the continental market – divided up for various issues released in Holland, Germany and Spain, often in unusual (and now highly collectable) formats such as 10” LPs and EP's.

Hayes was selling well in the Commonwealth too, Fontana exporting his albums to retailers in far flung Australia and New Zealand. Sometimes sales figure for these exports could come close to dwarfing those on the domestic market; a Fontana royalty statement covering the year 1964/65 reveals the label to have sold over a thousand Hayes' albums outside the UK in that year alone.

A spree in the charts; Sally

With the contract renewed in spring 1963, Jack Baverstock thought it high time that he tried opening up still another market for the saxophonist – that of the jazz 'single'. At the very moment when the Trad Boom was about to cede to that of Beat, this might not, at first glance, seem a bright idea. Not only that, Hayes was – how could you put it? - a player who didn't seem a natural bedfellow for the 45rpm format.

Never a man to do things by halves, by this point he had garnered a sometimes inhibitive reputation for playing solos of such extended length that they confirmed all the negative stereotypes which had always circulated about modern jazz: it was tedious; it was a music more for those who played it than those who came to listen; it had dispensed the idea of recognisable punter-friendly melody for batteries of overwritten chords and slalom-speed improvisation. In short, it was the sort of thing you couldn't hope to reduce down to a few minutes and serve to the wider public.

Baverstock thought otherwise. And he already had one solid modern jazz hit under his belt to prove the point. Back in 1961, it had been he who had decided to excise Take Five from Dave Brubeck's Time Out album, edit it, and issue it as a single, resulting in a record that was both a chart-hit and a shot in the arm for hopeful jazzers everywhere. Going solely on gut feeling, he'd scored a commercial bulls-eye. 'I just liked it,' Baverstock told Record Mirror, 'thought about putting it out as a single and up it came.'

The idea of pushing Tubby Hayes in the same direction was also supported by the recent popularity of Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd's Desafinado, proof positive that a tenor saxophone heavyweight needn't go all lightweight to get his music noticed.

Putting their heads together in early 1963, Hayes and Baverstock began thinking about material, settling on a number of pieces that the saxophonist thought 'pretty unusual', including I'm An Old Cowhand, a couple of songs from the recent show How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, an original bossa-nova by the saxophonist, Ricardo (named for his son Richard) and – most peculiar of all – the old Gracie Fields favourite Sally. Amazingly it was the latter than came out tops, its two-beat lope, Jazz Messengers feel almost succeeding in banishing the folk-memory of Fields air-raid siren delivery. 

The flipside, I Believe In You, conversely struck a cool, almost West Coastish vibe. 

'Tubby Hayes has given 'Sally' a new dress,' reported The Daily Mirror excitedly, 'he dolls her up 1963 modern jazz style [and] deserves a spree in the charts with this one.'

The idea didn't exactly catch light sales-wise, although it could well have done, given the fact that by this time Hayes and the recently formed quintet who played on the single now had their own ATV series – Tubby Hayes Plays - the second such programme fronted by the saxophonist in two years. 

Very quickly the predictions of his supporters ('will Tubby become a sort of modern Acker Bilk?' wondered one paper) were proved premature, Sally attracting more bewilderment than applause. 'It could be from a Stoke-on-Trent dance hall or the Ray Charles Band', Dusty Springfield famously said when played the single in a Melody Maker blindfold test, 'it doesn't stand an earthly'.

Its sheer novelty did have an upside though. Around the time Sally was slipping out of sight, Baverstock was busy signing another British jazz figure with a taste for the pop charts, John Dankworth, who, unlike Hayes had had plenty of experience in recording for major labels, including US giants Capitol, Verve and Roulette, from whence he transferred to Fontana. 

Baverstock instantly saw the commercial potential in securing Dankworth and immediately began recording material by him for the 45's market that summer ('Philips over in Holland made a tremendous fuss when I signed John,' he told one interviewer. 'They made much more fuss than over my signing Eden Kane, though he was a better sales prospect'). The bandleader, however, had come on board for a quite different reason, approaching Fontana in order to record the first in a series of ambitious concept albums he was beginning to formulate in his head. 'I went to Philips because Jack Baverstock was doing so well for Tubby Hayes,' he said in Melody Maker. 'He was recording British modern jazz when most people didn't want to know about it.' 

Interviewed at a recording session during the summer of 1963, Baverstock gave a valuable insight into his thinking at the time, telling Crescendo's Tony Brown that exchange deals were equally as important in the record business as they were at club level. 'A British company representing a British artist has bargaining counters,' Brown noted. 'American release [of UK artists] can be arranged in exchange for distribution of American discs in Britain', which is exactly what had happened in the case of Tubby Hayes' first US-taped album.

Brown also recorded how hard-learned pragmatism underpinned Baverstock's genuine enthusiasm for the local product. '[He] accepts the brutal facts of recording life and tries to make records that will sell. He didn’t invent the situation. He’s as much a victim of it artistically as the musician. But he’d dearly like to make a best-selling band record.'

'They say you can’t sell British jazz in Britain - not the modern stuff,' Baverstock observed. 'That’s not quite true. With someone like Tubby, who now has an international reputation, sales are healthy enough. Not fantastic - but healthy. He is, in fact, the modern star name among European jazzmen.'

Indeed he was. And by 1963, Hayes was cruising at the very ceiling of his success. He was a perennial poll-winner, topping various categories in the still-valuable annual Melody Maker Readers' Poll (tenor sax, flute, vibes, best small band, Musician of The Year) with such consistency that at times it all resembled a one-horse race.

His band -  a quintet formed in early 1962  – was resident at the still burgeoning Ronnie Scott club; he was in-demand as session player, accompanying everyone from Matt Monro to Nina and Frederick; he had appeared in several feature films (with more to come) and was making BBC radio and TV appearances virtually weekly. And he remained arguably the only British modern jazz musician who could claim to have a genuinely international career, his chubby frame, squeezed into neo-Italian bumfreezer tailoring, hopping on and off BEA and BOAC flights like a one man pre-Fab Four. Not even John and Cleo were doing this at this point. This was clearly Hayes' moment. Indeed, at the hand-over point between Harold Macmillan's 'Never Had It So Good' affirmations and Harold Wilson's promise of the 'White Heat' of technological advancement, he stood with a foot in both camps; a good as it got and as modern as tomorrow, ready to thrust ahead.

And, jazz purist though he was at heart, Hayes also had the one asset that was truly required to make all his disparate strands tie into a workable career; an undeniable charisma which could, with the merest flash of his friendly, face-filling, smile, melt an igloo. 

Combined with his combustible playing, he could even thaw those who might otherwise have thought his art too elitist or self-absorbed, as journalist Peter Clayton observed in the Sunday Telegraph in 1964; 'He goes at his music with such gusto, such confidence, that even those people who are unmoved by it or don't understand it can see he knows exactly what he's doing and where he is going.' 

This is the Hayes of folk-memory, a man who radiated both charm and determination, and who can be seen as well as heard on a surviving episode of the BBC's flagship television series Jazz 625, which has become the iconic on-screen representation of his talents, taped on the day after he turned thirty (coincidentally the day after Winston Churchill's funeral too, another key junction between old and new Britain).  Watch him and try not to smile back.

This, what might be termed peak-time Hayes, is captured in all its brilliance on his three Fontana albums issued between 1962 and late 1964: Down In The Village and Late Spot at Scott's – by his quintet both taped live at Ronnie Scott's Gerrard Street premises in spring 1962 – and Tubbs' Tours, his first solely big band album, made by the thirteen-man outfit he'd formed in early 1963.

Both bands were among his best. Both were also formed out of necessity. The quintet had come about for reasons at first more financial than musical. On the back of his 1961 US visit, Hayes had begun to up his own fees, much to the disgust of his existing quartet's sidemen. A palace revolution ensued and eventually, in January 1962, he disbanded the band, seeking more 'mature' musicians. The new quintet therefore had to start from scratch, the leader having to abandon his usual practice of forming a new band from the remnants of an old one in favour of casting his net wider for available talent. In came three veterans he already knew – trumpeter Jimmy Deuchar, drummer Allan Ganley and bassist Freddy Logan – and one promising rookie, pianist Gordon Beck, a player already beginning the look beyond the confines of Hard Bop. If the group's composition looked to be a shade too diverse to really work, it didn't trouble Hayes, who within a very short while had knocked the band into truly formidable shape. 

Listening back to the quintet now, with its emphasis of helter-skelter tempos, abruptly shifting rhythms and complex harmonic structures, it's hard not to compare it with the band on which it was unashamedly patterned, the instrumentally identical line-up headed by American pianist Horace Silver. By no means does the English unit come off second best, proving once and for all what a superb writer and arranger Hayes has now become, one every inch as artful as Silver.

And it was a desire to further this aspect of his talent that led to the formation of the Tubby Hayes Big Band around a year later. Hayes had already demonstrated his skill at larger-scale orchestration on two of his previous Fontana albums, Tubbs and Equation in Rhythm, made with what were in essence all-star bands comprising friends old and new. The new Tubby Hayes big band was much the same, bringing in horn players like Bobby Wellins, Keith Christie and Ronnie Ross to up the solo stakes. And, like the quintet, its occasional performance wobbles were a reminder that not every musician could keep pace with the leader's demands, both on and off the stand. Peter King, one of the band's saxophonists, recalls Hayes urging him to 'go on, have another double' in the intervals of their gigs, sometimes to disastrous effect, while trumpeter Ian Hamer remembered that their sets could be as tough on the chops as they were on the liver. 'The trumpet section was great,' he said in an interview conducted in 2004, emphasising the jazz-heavy talents of its members. 'Music just poured out of Jimmy [Deuchar] but he wasn't a tremendous trumpet player technically. Les Condon, he was the same way; a good jazz player not [having] the range to be a lead part. Normally in a big band you give and easy [lead] chart away and have a rest but with that band you couldn't give a bar away!'

The quintet's music – Hayes stripped to his essence, as it were – was even more of an endurance test, as Allan Ganley observed. 'Sometimes I used to dread those fast numbers, I really did. We'd play the theme, whatever it was, and then Tubby would go off and play a million choruses, then Jimmy, maybe half a million choruses...then Tubby wanted a drum solo and by that time your hands were just about seizing up. It was character-building stuff!'

Ganley thought that the band sounded best at the venue he considered its 'spiritual home', the old Ronnie Scott' Club in Soho's Gerrard Street, at which they were resident for three nights a week from early 1962 to summer 1964.

'There was a tremendous atmosphere down there,' he remembered. 'We used to get good crowds, it was packed. The band was really popular and people used to come from all over to hear us.'

'When you listen back to those albums,' he once said, 'I mean Horace Silver is a hard act to follow but I think we came pretty close.'

Truly a musician of whom we can feel proud: 

Down in The Village/Late Spot at Scott's and Tubbs' Tours

'Those albums' – Down in The Village and Late Spot at Scott's - are two sides of a dazzlingly polished coin, Hayes' brilliance touching all bases to electrifying effect. Indeed, if asked to find a single recorded example defining who Tubby Hayes was and why he mattered so much to British jazz clubgoers during the 1950s and '60s, you'd be hard put find anything more fittingly explicative than these two sets, which even now, some fifty-five plus years since they were taped sound as fresh as paint.

Recording them proved a headache though, as Fontana's Terry Brown recounted in his sleeve notes to Late Spot at Scott's. He wrote of 'the suffering of the technicians, hunched over their equipment in a tiny back room (surely designed for midgets), in a temperature of 90º F,' yet thought their discomfort 'justified, judging by the results of these two albums'.

Everything that we now think of as the Hayes legend is here on these recordings, all the more vivid for being caught live: the rumbustious, virile and palpably energised tenor soloing, each note shot like bullet from a machine-gun; the contrastingly mellow, percussive and songful vibraphone work; the ability to make his own characterful, personal and colourfully titled compositions (Half A Sawbuck,The Sausage Scraper, Down In The Village) sit with no discernible disparity in quality or dialect whatsoever alongside American themes by the likes of Horace Silver and George Gershwin; his uncanny knack for melding a line-up of individual voices, both experienced (Allan Ganley) and new star (Gordon Beck), into a musical unit at once redolent of his own image; the near-superhuman ease with which he could master a new musical challenge (his sole recorded soprano saxophone solo on In The Night).

Those present on these nights felt as if Hayes were determined to put everything he had into his performance. Jazz writer Brian Davis recalled one of the evenings also having its comic moments. Fontana had booked a photographer to take some shots of the band in action – 'one of those old-fashioned photographers with tripod and a black sheet over his head' – something which prompted Hayes and his players into 'taking the unholy mickey, striking exaggerated Edwardian poses and generally falling about.' These relaxed, high-spirits, Davis believed, had carried over into the music taped that night.

But there was something else that makes these sessions; Hayes' charm and personality, the twinkle-in-the-eye transatlantic-toned voice that introduces each performance, whose self-confidence is so deserved and natural that he can even sell us the line  'apart from being the greatest jazz musician in the world, I'm also the biggest liar in the world' and make it seem less like a gag than an apology for his own genius.

In his sleeve notes for Down In The Village, Ronnie Scott left no-one in any doubt about how special he believed Hayes to be. 'Tubby would be fantastic even had he been born and bred in America, with all the opportunities that country can offer to the jazz musician. The fact that he is British and has been restricted to learning his art mainly from records and the occasional visit of an American artiste, makes his achievements almost unbelievable.'

He was, Scott concluded, 'truly a musician of whom we can feel proud.' 

Success sat well with Tubby Hayes and somehow or other even when discussing what it had brought him – an international reputation, the right for better fees, a major record label contract – rarely if ever did he come across as smug. 

Interviewed by Melody Maker in 1964, he admitted 'this last year...has been my most successful so far, without doubt. I've got my bank manager's word for that', a there-you-go admission that rather counters all the hype that's latterly been passed around about his career being immediately derailed post-Beatles. Mid-period Hayes was very much a man in charge, not yet wrestling with new musical obstacles, still at the top of his professional tree, and, crucially, still young enough to consider himself a natural presence at the cutting edge. He remained not just the leading saxophonist in British jazz but, to many, the leading figure of the movement itself.

Hayes the great musical figurehead is never better captured than on Tubbs' Tours, the big band album he assembled from two days' worth of sessions in 1964 (discographers and record company date-sheets disagree as to whether the album was taped in spring or summer). 

The premise behind The Tubby Hayes Orchestra – to give the band its formal title, as per the LP – was simple: extend and amplify the leaders' example, a basic enough equation which ensured music that was bound to be a cut above that of any other local big band.

It was an outfit that prided itself on being, in the words of one of its members Peter King 'the best at that time.'

'It always felt like a co-operative effort,' King remembers, 'and I think Tubby felt that way about the band too. It was a genuine all-star band [and] we knew it was a unique organisation.'

The band's only LP reveals this in spades, providing Hayes' writing-rich team of sidemen the opportunity to contribute towards a programme intended as a musical travelogue. Although a great A&R idea ('we couldn't get every country in because there are quite a few places, you know,' Hayes commented on the albums sleeve), there was a hint of artifice to the concept, several of the items chosen for the recording having already been in the band’s regular gig pad for over a year. Additionally, the 'tour' idea was nothing new, Quincy Jones having taped a similarly-themed album three years earlier. 

Listened to today, there is also the nagging question of period-taste, tracks like Pedro's Walk and Raga at times sounding like a musical equivalent of the Vesta range of 'Package Tour' ready-meals that were then just beginning to find their way onto dining tables in homes throughout the UK; suggestive of another culture but not really all that accurate a representation. Indeed, this 'musical tour of the world', as Hayes had it, was a journey in which every step was trodden by thirteen pairs of very English feet.

There were some notable exceptions though, Peter King's African-flavoured Sasa-Hivi, full of dramatic 9/8 rhythms and flaring brass, the best of the bunch. 

King had been asked to write something African-sounding for the album. 'It was around the time when the great sort of “Freedom Now” was being expounded everywhere,' he remembered in 2001, 'and I wanted to say the word now in [an] African [language]'. King's multi-lingual brother suggested using Swahili, translating 'Right Now' into Sasa-Hivi. 'It sounded just a great title and that's how it came about.'

There is something highly appropriate in the album's most committed performance coming on a piece dedicated to the defeat and destruction of old Imperialist thinking. Striking out for a new, unshackled independence, standing up for their rights, maintaining self-pride – these were all things Hayes had long campaigned for in musical terms.

As ever with a Hayes album, Tubbs' Tours scored on the sheer élan of its delivery. In some ways the travelogue idea didn't really matter, not in musical terms anyway, given that the leader, canny programmer that he was, had planned to include several numbers already popular with the band's fans on live gigs – Pedro's Walk, In The Night, The Killers of W.1 (a multi-layered Jimmy Deuchar arrangement written, according to Allan Ganley, by torchlight in the back of a car in which the Hayes quintet were speeding towards Scotland). In doing so Hayes had also firmly laid out the groundwork for healthy sales.

Added to this, the promise of hearing his musical energy magnified twelve-fold was also ineluctably exciting, the leader even upping the ante by unpacking all his instrumental doubles and adding a new sound, the deep, satisfying thump of two tympani drums to one track, the John Barry-ish Russian Roulette. Hayes at his most instrumentally diverse? Certainly. Hayes at his best? Well, that depended on which critics you read, or more correctly, which you chose to believe.

Middle-period Fontana Hayes – roughly from the release of Down In The Village in November 1962 through to early 1965, when the final reviews for Tubbs' Tours were published – happens to coincide with what might be termed Middle-period Impulse! John Coltrane, the man who had alternatively inspired and perplexed the international jazz scene since the late-1950s, and about whom Tubby Hayes never seemed to be able to quite make up his mind.

That Hayes admired Coltrane has long been known ('my favourite of all the modern tenormen,' he'd said as early as 1961). However, by 1963, he had cooled somewhat to the American's music. 'I've bought most of his albums but I never seem to play them now,' he told Val Wilmer, admitting to being bewildered by the continued use of modal frameworks.  It was easy to see why he no longer felt any sense of kindred-thinking. The Coltrane of Giant Steps was a harmony obsessed speed king, whose technical command made him seem like an opposite number. The Coltrane of  My Favourite Things and beyond, more about emotional denouement than technical craftsmanship, was a performer Hayes couldn't quite come to terms with, at least initially. Hearing how he did so makes for fascinating listening, as we shall hear.

Nevertheless, there were still parallels between the two, as well as some eerie, albeit purely coincidental, similarities in their recent career paths. Coltrane had signed to Impulse! Records in the spring of 1961, the same time as Hayes had inked in his signature on his Fontana contract; both had begun their new contracts with large-scale projects (Africa/Brass, Tubbs); both had made supercharged live albums at venues considered their home turf (Live at The Village Vanguard/Late Spot At Scott's) and both, around 1964, started to look very definitely outside the box for ways in which to extend their methods of musical expression, Hayes disbanding his band, Coltrane augmenting his. 

The American saxophonist had also spoken of Impulse's desire to create 'a diverse sort of catalogue', the very same thinking that shaped Tubby Hayes' output with Fontana.

The key similarity though lay in how the jazz press received their recorded work. Coltrane's mid-period at Impulse!, between, say, the albums Coltrane and Crescent, contained recordings that both delighted and distressed jazz journalists, the mix of critique varying from Pavlovian predictability to outright hostility and disappointment. Hayes's album reviews of the time were much the same, ranging from the partisan, which often read more like record label blurb than objective assessments, to the downright dismissive. Some writers thought Hayes was going too far, others not far enough.

Late Spot at Scott's, for example, was both praised as 'probably the best Tubbs has made' (Jazz News and Review) and a damned as merely another showcase for the leaders 'technical effusions' (Jazz Journal). 

Down In The Village – one of Hayes' most varied-sounding small group albums due to its near-constantly shifting instrumentation – received an even more mixed reception. Jazz Journal's Mark Gardner believed the album to be 'representative of current modern jazz development in Britain'; Jazz Monthly's Michael James thought less kindly, finding its opening track, Hayes' tear-arse account of Johnny One Note, still more proof that, as a saxophonist, Hayes was strictly a one-trick pony. 'Restless ebullience...is about the sole emotional ingredient,' he sneered. 

Tubbs' Tours, if anything a far more traditional endeavour, one that conceivably might play right into the hands of a jazz press still very much in love with the big band format  - itself a one of the oddest quirks of taste within UK jazz journalism of the era -  got the most varied reception of them all.

Crescendo's Victor Graham ('whatever you do, don't miss this one') and Melody Maker's Bob Dawbarn ('throw those anti-British prejudices out the window') both loved it unreservedly, as did Gramophone's Alun Morgan. Jazz Beat even named the record its Album Of the Month in January 1965, stating 'Woody Herman's latest Herd has made no finer LP than this.'

However, others like Jazz Journal's Pete Turner remained unconvinced, thinking the bands material 'not very impressive.'

It was left to Jazz Monthly's Jack Cooke – who, as we've seen, never really warmed to Hayes – to deliver a critique that, if the saxophonist ever read it, might have struck a raw nerve. Cooke thought his playing 'static' as if 'he seems to have found nothing to challenge him lately.'

The album, he concluded, was full of 'a lot of surface brilliance, but underneath one is left with the uneasy feeling of having been exposed to nothing more than someone running on-the-spot.'

To be continued in Part 4.