Part 5- Tubby Hayes The Complete Fontana Recordings Box Set Notes by Simon Spillett

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Here is the concluding Part 5  of Simon Spillett’s sleeve notes for the now out-of-print 'Tubby Hayes: The Complete Fontana Albums 1961-69' 

More about Simon can be found via his website including contact information and of course you're always welcome to leave your thoughts in the “comments” field of this blog.

© -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

Something a bit more commercial: The Orchestra

That Hayes was willing to renegotiate some old prejudices was as apparent in his appearance as it was in his music. Gone were the tight-cut, thin-lapelled suits of yore, replaced by pin-stripped double-breasted. Out went the razor-sharp-parted, box haircut, overtaken by a shaggy mop and a droopy moustache. If new fashions didn't really suit him sartorially, musically they were much more useful. Indeed, his quartet – by the end of 1968 featuring yet another young find, twenty-two year old drummer Spike Wells – was now happily mixing tradition and innovation, playing original compositions that flirted with the avant-garde (The Inner Splurge, Rumpus) and even the occasional pop song (the band would feature Dusty Springfield and Tony Bennett-associated material on its clubs sets).

'I make a point to listen to everything that goes on in my particular field,' he told one journalist in 1969, 'always have done.'

And he was keen for record-buyers to hear how he was processing this 'everything'. To this end, and on top of what he admitted was to all intents and purposes a post-conviction career refit, designed to dispel all the negative press he'd attracted since the previous summer, he was again in touch with Fontana. His idea? A two-pronged assault on the album market, with both a new quartet LP and an orchestral recording aimed at the commercial easy-listening market. To Hayes, both seemed like potential winners. He'd already relaunched his big band that spring – another thirteen-piece outfit but one which placed a firmer emphasis on musical diversity than its predecessor – and, as he told Melody Maker, 'there is no reason why we can't develop a softer, more commercial side, if you like.'

The band were already playing Lennon and McCartney and Petula Clark covers on gigs anyway. What harm would it do to make an entire album of such pieces? With an ear consistently cocked towards the pop market, Jack Baverstock certainly liked the idea, giving Hayes the green light to record several sessions featuring his big band (extended to include a string section) over the summer of 1969. 

Work for this project took up a great deal of the saxophonist's time over May, June and July of the year, his diary blocking out a series of days 'writing' with either band member Les Condon or a new accomplice, young arranger Dick Walter. Some of these get-togethers were as much about choosing repertoire as they were writing scores. Walter was initially surprised to find Hayes' already aware of the work of Burt Bacharach, Jim Webb and other young pop composers, thinking him 'very open to any suggestions'.

Actually, Hayes was bang on-trend. American big band icons like Buddy Rich and Woody Herman were already proving they could find both a new audience and continued mileage for their signature format by playing contemporary material. There was also no shortage of pop-covers included on recent Blue Note albums. 'I had the idea to do something a bit more commercial than the average jazz album,' Hayes told Max Jones of Melody Maker. 'To show that it was possible to play something we hope is saleable without losing our artistry'. In other words: 'I'm not being left behind, not this time'.

While doing the legwork necessary to get his orchestral project underway, Hayes was simultaneously attempting to complete a new quartet album, undertaking a series of sessions at Philips Studios in May and June of 1969. While the yield of these dates was hugely impressive musically – and would have, had it been issued at the time as planned, given Hayes his last great, small band album, one arguably even finer than its predecessor Mexican Green – the artistic flow had been somewhat compromised by a shift in personnel, Louis Stewart ceding to erstwhile quartet member Mick Pyne in the midst of the recordings. Quite why these sessions remained unissued (until they were rediscovered and released in 2019 – some fifty years later – as Grits, Beans and Greens: The Lost Fontana Sessions 1969) is unclear.  After hearing them for the first time in half a century, Spike Wells found them 'arrestingly good' yet remained uncertain why they'd ever been left on the shelf. It may have been Hayes himself who put the block on them. Or it may have been that on the back of falling sales - from October to December 1969 Fontana sold only 28 copies of Mexican Green - Baverstock was looking for something that was going to sell and sell well.

There was also the nagging doubt that Fontana might not be quite the label on which to head towards the cutting edge. It's mid-1960s jazz releases were, by and large, not all that adventurous: albums by popular organist Alan Haven, a single 'with strings' date by Ronnie Scott, an LP of Jimmy Witherspoon with Dick Morrissey's quartet, the début record by the Brian Green Jazz Band, a one-off album by Ronnie Ross. There were the odd exceptions, the unclassifiable pianist Colin Bates' Brew LP for one, but not until the signing of bandleader Graham Collier in 1969 did the label look to release anything consistently progressive.

Hayes' final Fontana album was dubbed The Orchestra (probably in reference to the fact that Ronnie's Scott's latest group had been marketed as 'The Band') and it's aims were simple, set out plainly on the rear of the album's sleeve by the saxophonist's then girlfriend, Sylvia Goldberg. 'This is not basically a jazz album,' she wrote, '[instead Hayes] has taken a number of the better popular tunes and...orchestrated them in such a way that even the most violent anti-pop listener will be aware there is a great deal of talent abroad on the pop scene.'

It was remarkably honest marketing, however a quick glance down the albums playlist would have told you just as much; themes associated with The Beatles, The Fifth Dimension, Sergio Mendes, Nancy Sinatra and Herb Alpert had replaced Hayes' quirkily titled, highly demanding original material.

Playing the album now – five decades after it was taped – this seems nowhere near as controversial a departure as it must have appeared at the time it was issued. In fact, its über-Sixties vibe – somewhere between 'swinging' London bachelor-pad make-out music and the soundtrack to an Austin Powers movie – now seems more charm-laden than ever, and fits right in with the entire retro, 'chill-out' culture that emerged from the mid-1990s on.

Indeed, those who enjoy contemporary records by Stan Getz, Wes Montgomery or Astrud Gilberto will find it no less appealing. And even aficionados of late-1960s British jazz might now see it as chiming with other UK-made releases of the era – Ray Warleigh's First Album, Harold McNair's Flute and Nut, Harry South's Say No More.

At the time, however, The Orchestra didn't so much delight Hayes' followers as divide them. Jazz magazines largely avoided it (only Melody Maker gave it fulsome praise), record buyers ignored it and even those who took part in its creation felt mixed feelings as to its merits. One, the drummer Spike Wells, later maintained that 'it was one of the best things I'd ever heard Tubby do. He plays superbly.' Another, trumpeter Ian Hamer, bridled at the entire process, blaming Jack Baverstock for forcing Hayes into the pop arena. 'What I regret about that is that we never actually recorded our own music...we're all playing pop tunes of the time.'

Whether they sincerely thought it might catch-on with a wider public or not, Baverstock and Hayes soon had to concede defeat. Released in April 1970, The Orchestra simply didn't hit the spot. Its initial sales were promising enough, but, yet again, the timing of its release couldn't have been worse. At the very point it was hitting the shops Hayes was gravely ill in hospital, remaining bed-ridden for fifteen weeks as he bravely battled a potentially life-threatening internal infection. When he finally emerged during the summer of 1970, worryingly slim, long-haired and with a haunted look replacing the vibrancy that had once shone within him, the time to capitalise on whatever saleability the pop-angle might have afforded him had gone.

Besides, he now had other, more serious, concerns; steadying his health, regaining his instrumental form; finding his feet again. His most recent LP – 'it wasn't done with the jazz market in mind' – taped less than a year ago seemed almost as if it belonged to a different age. Things were moving on.

Time and tide certainly weren't waiting for Hayes, nor he for them. As the early Seventies geared up – in some cases quite literally -  he tried his best to reflect the times through which he was living, confessing to Melody Maker that 'I get excitement from some of the new things, also a lot of boredom'. Post-Bitches Brew Miles Davis, for example, wasn't among his favourites. Weak of heart though he may have been at this juncture, he remained strong in his convictions. The contemporary US jazzmen he liked best – Joe Henderson, Woody Shaw, Joe Farrell, Freddie Hubbard – were musicians very much like himself, skilled changes-players who thought jazz progress might come best from finding new ways in which to utilise structure rather than abandon it. You could add flavours to what you did well already but to completely forego what you'd already learned before, for a performer like Hayes, was a total no-no. 'I think you've got to assimilate a lot of these contemporary ideas,' he said in one of his final press interviews, 'not only avant-garde jazz but the current rock sounds...all of today's music.'

If he ever did record again, he maintained that the results would be his reflection of the latest musical fashions, not a wholesale absorption of them. 'I feel if you incorporate what you want of the present-day sounds,' he said idealistically, 'you can still have your orchestrations and your solo playing as you want them.' Ironically, this was a statement he could have made at any point in his twenty-three year professional career.

The final musical days of Tubby Hayes, alas, never found their way onto commercially-issued records. Quite how his contract with Fontana came to expire is not clear. Jack Baverstock had left the company in 1970 - not that much of a hammer-blow considering that most of the labels dealings with Hayes were done by his producer Terry Brown - but with Brown now busy elsewhere, building up the label's folk and pop catalogue, things appeared to have reached a natural end. 

Philips' were still taping some British jazz during the early 1970s – Alan Skidmore, Harry Beckett, John Dankworth – and even afforded Hayes the honour of being one their artists chosen for what amounted to a budget-line reissue programme, re-releasing 100% Proof in its 'This Is...' series in late 1972, the album fitted out with a recent photograph of Hayes – all bouffant hair, safari suit and flowered shirt – looking for all the world like an extra from a 'Confessions' film.

Creating what might be a nice little stream of income in what had been trying times both physically and fiscally, this was now Hayes' only available album release. His health problems, which by this point had necessitated life-saving open-heart surgery, undertaken in an era when such an endeavour was by no means routine, had been widely acknowledged in the music press. He was still in there slogging, but, as everyone could see, he was by no stretch of the imagination the man he'd been a few years earlier.

By and large, since his comeback to full-time performing in early 1972 the critics had been kind to Hayes, praising him for taking on new musical challenges where before they might have accused him of sold-out vanity, finding a positive within his reduced blowing power rather than damning him for being a spent force. However, where his records were concerned, it was the old story of leopards and spots.

Jazz Journal's review of the This Is Jazz album harked back to the lukewarm, 'very good but' days of the mid-1960s, while Jazz and Blues Monthly's Jack Cooke trotted out the pet-dismissals he'd employed a decade before, his judgment unaffected by Hayes' recent frailty. 'There is not much behind the initial attack and brightness of this music, and at the centre there is something approaching an artistic vacuum.'  

Only Richard Williams of Melody Maker welcomed 100% Proof's reappearance. 'It's an album which has maintained it validity,' he wrote,' and will, no doubt, sound as good in another five years' time.'

Barely a few months after these words were published, Hayes was dead, aged just thirty-eight, his ravaged body unable to be roused after further heart surgery. To the letter, each of his obituaries recorded what a grave loss this was, not just personally – Hayes was among the best-loved of all British modern jazzmen – but professionally, the saxophonists death coming so hot on the heels of those of Phil Seamen and Joe Harriott that it planted what was, in effect, a full-stop on the story of second-wave modernism within the UK. 

These tributes also made much of what was undoubtedly Hayes' single-most important accomplishment and the one aspect of his example that could truly be said to have left a lasting impact on subsequent jazz generations – that of his successfully breaking America, a coup that had finally, irrevocably, cast aside the old misconception that jazzmen from anywhere other than the US didn't really have what it took. Anyone looking for proof that this was no longer so need only turn to the recent line-ups fronted by Miles Davis, which had included not one but two British-born jazzmen, bassist Dave Holland and guitarist John McLaughlin.

Rather surprisingly, what the obituaries didn't say much about were Hayes' recordings, preferring instead to concentrate on what was already his folk-myth – the combustible Little Giant, turning on his energising brilliance on bandstands throughout the British Isles. The reasons for this oversight were more about a deficit of easily to-hand examples than anything more conspiratorial. The more in-tune jazz scribes – Coda's Mark Gardner, Cream magazine's Brian Blain, Jazz Journal's Steve Voce – made appropriate nods to the best of his Fontana discography - Mexican Green, 100% Proof, the two live albums from Ronnie Scott's – but only they dared raise the awkward truth that, when all was said and done, Hayes had left virtually nothing that could be gone and bought off a record store shelf right there and then. 'It is hoped that Philips/Fontana will make available again some of this great musicians' work', wrote Gardner, knowing full well how unlikely this would be.

Fittingly, DownBeat had also recorded Hayes' death, with its obituary understandably playing up the Englishman's recordings with Clark Terry and Roland Kirk, albums on which, they maintained, he'd truly 'showed his mettle'. The magazine even mentioned an album never ever released in the States, Mexican Green, the record's importance having clearly reached further than Hayes might have realised.

Almost within your grasp: The Fontana Legacy

Quite what Hayes would have made of all this fuss about his transatlantic equality – proven long ago and by the early 1970s not quite the big deal it once had been – remains debatable. One also can't help wondering what he'd have thought too of the comments of one American jazzman visiting London – the trombonist Frank Rosolino – barely a few weeks after his death. 'He wanted to know where he could get a copy of 'Mexican Green', reported Melody Maker's Christopher Bird (Brian Blain). 'What a loss. Tubby was such a great player.'

The answer was nowhere, of course, unless he fancied a root around in the deletions or second hand bins. Indeed, by the early 1970s, overstocks of Mexican Green were being remaindered by WHSmith for as little as £1.00. 

In some ways, this ignominious fate chimes right in with what we think of when we now consider the early 1970s in Great Britain – a time of strikes, three-day-weeks, power-cuts and the like – a dark age in which Glam Rock was supposedly laying waste to anything of musical value, while fashion and protest were turning a once smart and respectful nation into a hairy, anarchistic rabble. Yet, it's vital that we realise that the UK record industry back in those far off days was a very different entity to that it is today. And it's important to understand that what now might look like unashamed artistic censure – the deletion of a jazz legend's entire recorded output – was, in fact, nothing of the sort. When Philips stopped production of Hayes' last available album just after his death it wasn't a decision taken for posterity. It was most likely one taken out of practicality. Yes, the jazz reissue boom was already up-and-running (Philips long a key player in the game) but when a British modern jazzman died quite suddenly, at what appeared, at face value, to be beyond his prime, you could be forgiven for thinking there was little corporate sense in keeping his albums in catalogue.

And although everyone liked to bracket Hayes with players like John Coltrane, the fact remains that he wasn't a life-changing innovator, or a musician who left recordings that seemed to suggest something otherworldly and indecipherable. He'd never made claims on being a saint, or spoken of his music as anything other than a craft. The mystique of Coltrane's final years and the sense that his was a hastily curtailed journey, like that of a prophet recalled on high, only made it more inevitable that his every recorded scrap would be hunted down and released, barely before the fall-out from his death had begun to settle.

Tubby Hayes, on the other hand, was a pragmatist whose entire journey as a British jazzman had been tempered by compromises of one sort or another. Some things he had fought against successfully, but he couldn't win them all. And he certainly couldn't reach beyond the grave to insist his recorded work remain available. When Ian Carr compiled an exhaustive discography for his landmark book on British jazz – Music Outside (Latimer New Dimensions), published the year Hayes died -  he had thoughtfully listed all Hayes recordings from 1955 to 1969, knowing full well that 90% of them were currently unavailable. There could be no more stark indication of how little things had really changed recording-wise over the twenty-three years of Hayes' career.

Conversely, the performance side of the jazz scene Carr tried to encapsulate in his book was in a high state of flux.

New things were happening with alarming rapidity  – the jazz-rock of Nucleus, Mike Westbrook's sprawling large-scale suites, Keith Tippett's mixed-media extravaganzas, Michael Garrick's liturgical homages, the Euro-Free revolutions of Derek Bailey, Evan Parker and co. - and not just to the young garde. Former Hayes contemporaries like Stan Tracey were throwing their lot in with the free-improvising generation, determined to make the most out of opportunities that might not come again. The cruel truth was that Tubby Hayes was no longer around to benefit from any of this and therefore, to the thinking of some, once he'd been paid tribute in words, his music might just as well be put away somewhere, as a souvenir of far more innocent times. 

Did those who'd recorded Hayes think the same? There exists a letter from Phonogram, the parent company who had taken on the Fontana holdings the year before Hayes' death, written to the saxophonist's last girlfriend, Liz Grönlund, who'd contacted the company a few weeks after his passing to enquire whether they might consider issuing a memorial album, or, if not that, then a reissue of Mexican Green. The polite reply states that something might happen in 1974, 'when the time is right.'

Similar sentiments were expressed in a letter published in Jazz Journal in March 1975, nearly two years after Hayes' death. 'Surely there is something wrong with the record companies, when not one single album of his music has been issued. There must be a stack of material by him, as yet unissued, so why not an LP? Does nobody remember Tubby?'

It's important not to judge any one individual or company too harshly on this point. Things move on the record business just as they do in all other areas of life. Yet, the plain facts are that no memorial album ever materialised (Joe Harriott, who'd died the same year as Hayes, got one, issued by EMI no less) nor was there any official reissue of Mexican Green by its copyright holders. The final use of one of Hayes' Fontana recordings by Philips during the decade of his death occurred in 1975 when an edited version of 100% Proof was released on a multi-artist anthology LP titled Focus on Jazz. Not until 1981, when the enterprising Mole Jazz label licensed Mexican Green and Tubbs' Tours for release on its own pressings (sadly losing each album's iconic cover art) were UK record buyers able to walk into a record shop and buy a 'new' Tubby Hayes album.

What had been the net effects of the interim wilderness years? One had been the ever-increasing elevation in price of original-pressing Fontana's. During the early 1980s some were still around at what resembled bargain outlay – Palladium Jazz Date, The Orchestra – but as the decade wore on, and Hayes name began to gain currency again, largely on the back of the Mole reissues and the first rockfall of what would come to be an avalanche of live or bootleg recordings, his Fontana albums grew ever more collectible, some beginning to change hands for truly ridiculous sums.

To younger listeners – and some younger British jazzmen – Hayes was a new-found source of inspiration. Some heard him through a couple of ex-Fontana tracks included on club DJ Paul Murphy's Jazz Club compilation albums, which quickly turned A Pint of Bitter, lifted from Tubbs' in N.Y., into a dance floor anthem. Others came to him through chance airplay encounters, including up and coming saxophonist Theo Travis, who, after hearing a track from the reissued Mexican Green played on Humphrey Lyttelton's BBC radio show, simply knew he had to seek him out. The album blew him away, to the extent that, when asked twenty years later to nominate a record that had transformed him for Jazzwise magazine's feature Turning Point, he chose Mexican Green. 'This [music], though I was not part of it in terms of time, is a stone's throw away geographically,' Travis wrote. 'That feeling that it's near you, almost within your grasp, I think it fires you up a bit.'

Hayes was beginning to walk again, his presence as a UK jazz force driven home when the BBC rebroadcast his big band's appearance on Jazz 625 during the summer of 1984. Featuring music in part drawn from Tubbs' Tours the repeat reminded listeners of the sheer charismatic power of Hayes in full-flight. Seeing him was one thing; wasn't it about time someone got around to reissuing his best albums; those taped for Fontana?

As the 1990s began, false alarms came and went. In spring 1991, Jazz FM magazine announced -  erroneously as it turned out - that Tubbs, Late Spot at Scott's, 100% Proof and Mexican Green were all to be re-released on CD, 'on their original label, Fontana'. There had been already a Fontana reissue of sorts – that of the 1961 New York recordings, which appeared very briefly in 1990 on the American CBS label (which held the rights to the Epic catalogue) before being swiftly withdrawn over a copyright wrangle.

Then, in 1998, came the CD release of Hayes' two Fontana live sets from Ronnie Scott's club – Down In The Village and Late Spot at Scott's, issued as part of writer/producer and Polygram A&R man Richard Cook's short-lived but valuable Redial enterprise. Effusive critical reaction to these releases – and remarkably healthy sales-figures – convinced Cook to dig for more, informing Jazz UK magazine that he'd found further material from both the Mexican Green and 100% Proof sessions, as well as 'enough unissued material to make an album'. Mouths watered and discographers fingers itched. What else might be waiting to be rediscovered?

Sadly, Redial's operation came to a halt, not through any lack of pro-activity on Cook's part (he'd already advertised and given a catalogue number to an official reissue of Tubbs in N.Y.) but simply because there were changes afoot at Polygram, the label becoming part of the Universal Music Group in 1999. If anyone suspects that such a handover is merely done at the signing of a single agreement, they need to realise that when major record companies take on new holdings it's not a just simple case of transferring people and paperwork. Tape archives often need to be relocated too, sometimes internationally, with everything from album masters to unidentified or forgotten session reels in need of unpacking, re-cataloguing and refiling. It's a huge operation.

Not that Universal were asleep on Tubby Hayes. In 2003, the Japanese arm of the company reissued all but one of Hayes's Fontana's – everything except his 1969 MOR-set The Orchestra – each housed in a neat, obi-stripped, mini-LP sleeve. Desirable as imports, but woefully expensive to buy, their popularity helped prompt Universal's London-based jazz division to investigate the possibility of a series of domestic releases. By this time, it was 2005, the year in which BBC-4 ran its acclaimed Jazz Britannia television series, in which Hayes, inevitably, played a central role. Key to the series' success (and helping to bring the Brit-Jazz sounds of yesteryear to a new audience), cult-DJ Gilles Peterson had already included some of Hayes' music on his Universal-released Impressed compilations. Now, together with series consultant and Hayes buff Tony Higgins and Universal's own Kevin Long, they took the step everyone had long hoped for. Finally, in October 2005, Universal announced the UK release  - at mid-price, no less - of five of Hayes' Fontana albums: Tubbs, Equation in Rhythm, Tubbs' Tours, 100% Proof and Mexican Green. 

Tubby Hayes was back in the racks.

The reception met by these albums was like that expected on greeting a long-lost friend. And, of all the many magazine and internet reviews, it was perhaps that of Jazz UK's Brian Blain – a former friend of Hayes and who was already well-familiar with each recording – which best summed up this windfall. 'No reason now for a younger generation of fans and musicians to miss out on the extraordinary talent of the saxophonist who probably did more than anyone else in the 1950s and '60s to raise the profile of British jazz.'

Suddenly afforded the opportunity to hear what was, to all intents and purposes, a virtual step-by-step audio walk-through of the most important stage of Hayes career, it might have seemed churlish to complain. However, there were questions. Internet forums (always a good place to gauge jazz fans' concerns) began to buzz with curiosity.

Hadn't there been any extra material to include with these releases, any alternative takes or new titles? Wasn't there talk of an unissued album – why wasn't that been released too? And how had these discs been assembled? Did they sound, in some instances, less pristine than some listeners' old original vinyl copies? Single albums? 

Didn't Hayes deserve a full 'complete Fontana recordings' box set?

His 100%: notes on the complete Fontana recordings

This set answers all those questions, and more, presenting exactly what Hayes' fans have long dreamed of: a complete account of his time as recording artist for Fontana; every track he taped for the label as a leader (sidemen appearances with John Dankworth and Mark Murphy have not been included, likewise those with other artists signed to parent label Philips, such as Harry South, The Polkadots and Susan Maughan) including newly discovered alternate takes of material from such classic albums as Tubbs' Tours, 100% Proof and Mexican Green, and four reels' worth of recordings from the summer of 1969, comprising over nearly two hours of Hayes that was never released at the time, which enable us to hear his working method while in the studio, something that's almost worth the price of admission alone. 

What's more, unlike previous Fontana/Hayes reissues, every note heard on this collection has been lovingly transferred and remastered from either the original masters or from unedited session tapes, a process undertaken by Gearbox Studios, a facility well-regarded for its skill at getting high-end reproduction from vintage analogue sources.

Among the many things this box does is to effectively bring Hayes back to life, each recording capturing, almost like a stroboscopic photograph, his rapidly unfolding brilliance. Taken as a body of work, the saxophonist's Fontana Recordings amount to one of the greatest documents of a UK-born jazz improviser ever assembled, a uniquely British yet world-class set of albums that can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the finest material in the international jazz canon. They are also of uniformly high quality, in every regard, from performance to production. Indeed, that Hayes exercised a quality control as exacting as his playing is well in evidence and is supported by the fact that there appears to have only ever been two Fontana sessions by him that were rejected outright – one with Gordon Beck's trio in 1965 and a later live recording from the very end of his time with the label in 1970, neither of which appear to survive on-tape.

Hayes lived and worked in a jazz environment in which it was standard practise to align his achievements with those of his heroes, and while it's tempting to fall into the same trap in looking as his Fontana output – which compares very favourably to any number of contemporaneously produced oeuvres, ranging from Sonny Rollins' RCA-Victor recordings and Dexter Gordon's Blue Notes to Miles Davis' early Sixties Columbia output - to dwell too much on how Hayes measures up to others is to miss the bigger picture. 

Patterned largely on existing American models – Horace Silverish hard bop quintets, Hermanesque big bands -  this is music that is nevertheless firmly British jazz, of a time and an era, yet somehow oddly timeless. In fact, so high are its performance standards that it remains as formidable a bench-mark to today's jazz performers as it did to Hayes' own contemporaries. Indeed, there are many present-day saxophonists – and not just in the UK – who are still to better the time-and-changes match-up Hayes displays on, say, The Late One, to pick just one of this sets many examples of him at his supersonic boppish best. 

And, for those who think the jazz wunderkind is a recent phenomenon, consider this: three-quarters of Hayes' Fontana output was recorded before he'd even turned thirty.

It's not all about youthful pyrotechnics though. Throughout, Hayes shows himself to be as sensitive a musician as any, highly attuned to texture and dynamics, and a highly lyrical purveyor of ballad material. He also proves to be very far from the narrow-minded, tunnel-visioned purist his staunches critics dismissed him as. To wit; upon hearing the Indian-flavoured Raga or folkish In The Night, who could deny that long before it became a genre all its own Hayes wasn't at least dabbling with what we now term World Music? For Tubby Hayes, music was no more about a single place than it was about a single mode of expression and his Fontana output reflects this; there are soulful blues, dashes of free-improvisation, nascent jazz-rock, even dance-floor burners. Whatever the musical requirement, Hayes proves time and again that he was one of those rare artistic figure who really could do it all, and do so with such palpable energy and commitment that these recordings somehow seem far younger than their fifty-plus years. Even the bits of his output for the label that do remain firmly within their 1960s bubble – the cute, soul-jazz redress of Sally, his stabs at the music of The Beatles and Nancy Sinatra - are all dispensed with such charisma that they can make a believer out of even the most sceptical of listeners.

However, the central action on these albums isn't so much about Hayes' willingness to move between styles or his shocking precocity, it's about his sheer, hard-grafting, craftsmanship. Each of his considerable musical skills – virtuoso saxophonist, jazz flute-pioneer, hard-hitting yet lyrical vibraphonist, writer of catchy, idiomatically perfect compositions, scorer of well-thought-out, characterful arrangements – reached its peak during the years he was signed to Fontana. A high-percentage of his recordings for the label attempted to serve up all of these talents at once – the last being 100% Proof, soon after which he junked the vibraphone in favour of the single, more portable double of flute. 

The albums that remain best representative of what he was doing out on-the-road in the UK's jazz clubs of the 1960s, however, are those that showcased his regular small groups, the working units with which he was inscribing his own legend. His two sets from Ronnie Scott's club remain electrifyingly atmospheric, almost garish in their in-your-face immediacy, while the album most often cited as his masterwork, Mexican Green, is quite simply a recording for the ages, a set that as well as being a triumph for Hayes the saxophonist and composer was also a high water mark for him as a bandleader.

And it is this further skill – that of finding highly apposite musical partners and forging them into bands both individual yet made in his image – that truly came to fruition during the Fontana years. One need only hear a few bars of the quintet of '62 or the quartet of '67 to know they are Hayes' outfits, their collaborative vibrancy feeding directly from the leaders example (Allan Ganley, drummer with Hayes from 1962 to 1964, once mused that he probably gave more in those couple of years with the saxophonist's quintet than he did in over fifty with John Dankworth's various line-ups).

Hayes certainly set the pace for these bands, yet he never stole space or credit from those he employed, providing welcome forums for old colleagues and newcomers alike. Ego-driven though he may have been, he was always quick to tell you that his most noteworthy achievements had not been made in a vacuum.

Again, the Fontana sets show this attitude at its most generous. Just look at the personnels of his two big band albums Tubbs' Tours and 100% Proof and you'll find a veritable A to Z of the conjoined worlds of British jazz and studio sessioning; everyone from Kenny Baker to Kenny Wheeler is in there somewhere. Nor, once he realised that new musicians could rise to his high demands, was he at all sniffy about younger talent; the list of those he could justifiably have said to have discovered who feature on this box includes Gordon Beck, Johnny Butts, Jeff Clyne, Terry Shannon, Tony Levin, Louis Stewart and Spike Wells. Hayes gave them all their head, and in the case of several of them, their first recorded exposure too. In this, his Fontana's albums once again resemble those of John Coltrane, whose Impulse! LP's also gave a clutch of new talents their first break.

The Fontana sessions also have something else, equally important to their success as a genuine body of work, rather than a series of independent projects: their own unmistakable sound. Largely recorded at Philips' Stanhope Place studios, and almost entirely engineered by in-house regular David Voyde, these are records that have a distinctly period feel to them. Yet, whereas some classic jazz of this era has twenty-first century ears longing for the crystal-clear reproduction of the digital domain, or wondering how a professional engineer could render music so passionate so dull, Hayes' albums strike the perfect balance of warmth and accurate representation. Not that there is a single, simple mix applied to all, despite how front and centre Hayes always seems to be. Mexican Green, for example, swims in what must surely be one of the richest reverbs ever applied to a jazz album. This though, to those who know and love the album, is as much a part of its appeal as the music itself, just as those who love the mix Rudy Van Gelder achieved on those classic Blue Notes. Indeed, Theo Travis even goes so far as to say that the sound of Mexican Green, in particular, has influenced his wishes for how his own albums are produced, itself a nice baton-passing moment between the British jazz generations.

And, if we're looking at surface-gloss only, how about those covers? While not having the 'house' style cachet of a Blue Note or an ECM album sleeve, they've nevertheless seared their way into the minds of Hayes fans the world over, from Tottenham to Tokyo.

Uncredited but unmistakable, the covers for Hayes' Fontana albums are almost enough to tell his story alone, each marking a particular step in his recorded journey.

There are the classic shots of him in tenor-in-mouth that leap out from Tubbs and Palladium Jazz Date, images that tip their hat to all those classic, shot-from-below photos of Coltrane taken around the same time. Then, as Hayes' career moves from the monochromatic environs of the London jazz scene and onto the brilliantly lit international stage the designs change again; Tubbs in N.Y. a jaunty riot of purple; Late Spot at Scott's (the cover of which Val Wilmer thought 'ghastly') a close-up portrait of matinee idol proportions; Tubbs' Tours, with its much-stickered suitcase, supporting the idea that Hayes was now a musician in demand across the globe.

As his music became ever more multi-coloured and less clear cut, there came Mexican Green, the busy marketplace imagery of which – once described by writer Jack Massarik as 'hippy-dippy' – appeared to hint at a desire to sample every conceivable flavour of jazz then on offer. 

Finally, there was The Orchestra's black, austere sleeve, suggesting Hayes' recorded career was about to fade to darkness, it's tiny profile photos of him reproduced in various coloured washes seeming to say that no matter how he was disguised, be it with new sounds or in a new light, beneath it all lay the same, familiar Tubby.

The idea of there being a connective thread which might run through an artist's work, regardless of what can appear to be quite distinct changes, is especially applicable to Tubby Hayes' Fontana recordings. Like Coltrane's of the same vintage, they are united by the common connections of intensity and restless curiosity – no sooner had Hayes' recorded a definitive big band album then he was after something similarly defining within the looser framework of a quartet; once he'd taped an album with American guest stars he wanted to record with his own, London-based group, and so on. 

In this regard, Hayes' discography is almost unique within its generation of British jazz. Only Stan Tracey's Denis Preston-produced Columbia/Lansdowne output (covering 1965 to 1972) comes close in its variety, although certain of these albums, over which Tracey later expressed regret, are now known not to have been his ideas exclusively. 

Hayes was also far more prolific than most other British modern jazzmen of his day, releasing eleven albums during a period in which many of his colleagues released only a handful. Look, for instance, at the discographies of Ronnie Scott (two albums) during this period, or Dick Morrissey (four albums), Don Rendell (six albums) and Ronnie Ross (just one). It's also a tribute to how singular and characteristic each of Hayes' Fontana's were that nowhere within the canon of British jazz of the 1960s does there exist anything that can justifiably be called a pale imitation. These were indeed records that said it all, and said it so well that other local jazzmen were, almost by default, railroaded into finding other options when presented with recording opportunities. All too often derided as overly derivative by his critics ('they never really seemed to set their sights higher than trying to be as good as the current American idol', Chris Barber once observed of Britain's second wave of modernists) Hayes had actually done the scene in which he operated a huge service; nobody could better him so they had to find ways to better themselves, yet another of the timeless bits of Coltrane-ish musical wisdom his example can continue to furnish future generations on jazz performers. 

The Fontana albums, as well as telling Hayes's story, also recount the wider ambitions of Britain's bop generation far more fully than any other recordings. Where better is there to hear how these hungry, very often self-taught, young men mastered the rules of a game they'd learned largely by rote and turned it into something unmistakably their own? Throughout these records you can hear echoes of their American heroes, all the while filtered through a very different musical environment to that in the pressure cookers of New York or Chicago. Some played the game more fluently than others (Jimmy Deuchar, Terry Shannon), some created rather rough and ready facsimiles of the real thing (Keith Christie), others took its core message and bent it to their own ends (Kenny Wheeler, Gordon Beck). All were valued components of Hayes' recorded vision and each, to a man, gave of his best when a Hayes date came about. 'Everyone pulled out all the stops when we played', says Peter King of his recordings with Hayes, while bassist Jeff Clyne remembered 'you had to give your 100% to match his 100%. No question about it.'

Hayes was, in sum, an inspiration, as an instrumentalist and a leader and a recording artist.

If, at the close of his days, Hayes had looked back over his Fontana years, would he have been satisfied with what they encompassed? He'd certainly achieved all that he'd set out to do when he and Pete King first approached Jack Baverstock back in 1961, and more. There'd been albums with his regular bands, with specially assembled units, with American jazz stars; records that moved stylistically from Hard Bop to Free Form to Easy Listening; albums which showcased both his writing and playing, both live and in the studio, even a single. It was, in total, a body of work that fully fulfilled Baverstock's original wider remit when he was appointed to Fontana back in the 1950s; create a diverse LP catalogue, leave no stone unturned in pursuing new angles; move forward and always push for untapped markets. 

That Hayes was able to do all this on a major label at the time when popular music was turning the UK record industry upside down remains quite remarkable. And while, ultimately, he failed to sell in quantities that could in any way rival those shifted by Fontana's pop signings, it was a failure not in any way down to the quality of his music.

Rather, it was 'the times'. In 1961, when he released his first Fontana album, nobody but nobody – least of all Hayes himself – could have foreseen the tsunami-like onrush of Rhythm and Blues, Beat music and chart-pop that would shortly engulf British jazz. Back then, Hayes had had everything to play for – international recognition by far the most important goal –  and he achieved the lot, victories which, it can be argued, would never have come about had he and Jack Baverstock not hit it off on that fateful, initial meeting. Beyond that, Baverstock and Fontana deserve our hindsight-fuelled gratitude for sticking with Hayes at a time when the easiest thing would have been to let him drop. During his stint with Fontana, he'd changed not just musical direction but image and his personal life – drugs, affairs, divorce, arrests – made him a figure at times more renowned for his off-stage antics than celebrated for his art. There's many rock or pop stars who have found their record contract suddenly terminated in such circumstances. Hayes wasn't. There's also the sobering thought that had Fontana done this then it's highly likely that the record that is undoubtedly his best-known and best-loved, Mexican Green, one of the few truly indispensable British jazz albums of its era, might have never come to be recorded at all. Sometimes a producer's relationship with his artist really is more like an article of faith than a legal document.

The first of these recordings is now nearly sixty years old, the last exactly fifty. Recorded over eight years, they cover approximately a third of what was Tubby Hayes' professional career. And while 1961 to 1969 may have been a relatively short span in years, in terms of musical, technological and cultural distance traveled it resembled an epoch, its passage handily measurable within the two great achievements of the Sixties Space Race. The month after Hayes taped his first Fontana album, Yuri Gagarin made headlines as the first man to orbit the earth. Nine days after he taped his last session for the label Neil Armstrong took his history-making giant step on the moon. That's how long ago all this all took place; these once vivid accomplishments are now fading into the past, the generation that made them passing from the here and now into the been and gone. Likewise, Tubby Hayes and his musicians. Indeed, of the sixty-five or so players heard on these recordings, less than a dozen survive. The two men that produced them are also gone.

What remains, however, is the music they made. Over half a century after it was taped, and over forty years since Hayes' death, can it really tell us anything new about the man whose name it bears? Or is it simply  now just a museum piece, like a once living specimen pinned to a page in a dusty display case? The sheer vibrancy of Hayes' playing says not, his exuberance spilling off each disc as if he were still with us, the lessons of his example still as large as life.

Long familiar though this music may be, its reappearance reminds us of a story that is both firmly of its time and capable of resonating with us to today. That of a man determined to fight circumstance tooth and nail until he realised his vision – his own personal moon shot, if you like – his skyrocketing course set out for all to hear on these albums. By and large, these aren't new discoveries, nor are they recordings which can substantially alter Tubby Hayes' legend as it moves onward to the 2020's. They aren't part of a big reveal designed to topple or re-evaluate. They are simply the albums with which he made his name, carved his legend and left his mark. They are his choice of on-record representation; his gift to the wider jazz world; his defining legacy. And they are here, in one place for the first time ever, complete, restored, remastered; ready for anyone who wants to sit down and marvel at a musician at the very peak of his powers, a performer at his most charismatic, a creative fountain at full flow.” 

Simon Spillett

March 2019

Author 'The Long Shadow of The Little Giant: The Life, Work and Legacy of Tubby Hayes' (Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2015)

With thanks to Peter King, Alan Skidmore, Spike Wells, Ron Mathewson, the late sir John Dankworth, Jeff Clyne, Louis Stewart, Allan Ganley, Ian Hamer, Bobby Wellins, Bill Eyden, Stan Tracey and Tony Levin, Chris Bolton-Levin, Miles Levin, Alec Dankworth, Clark Tracey, Dave Bishop, Theo Travis, Carol Pyne, Richard Hayes, Tony Hall, Darrel Sheinman and all at Gearbox Studios, Les Tomkins, Mark Gilbert, Brian Case, Matthew Wright, Jon Newey and all Jazzwise, Mark Baxter and Lee Cogswell of Mono Media Films, Alyn Shipton, Janet Joyce and Val Hall of Equinox Publishing Ltd., C. Tom Davis, Bob Savage,  the late Liz Grönlund, Gavin Povey, Peter Rynston, Peter Dennett, Louis Barfe, Richard Henderson, Roger Farbey, Barbara Schwarz, Colin Harper, Brian Priestley, Richard Williams, Brian Blain, Mark Gardner, Steve Voce, the late Alun Morgan, the late Rick Hardy, Tony Prior, Michael Fishberg, Dave Trett, Phil Doggett, Adrian Tattersfield, Myra Ottley, Carole Merritt and the late Colin Hare.

Special thanks to Richard and Marianne Spillett.

Deepest gratitude to Tony Higgins and Kevin Long.