© Introduction. Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
The Manor House Jazz Club may be described as a small piece of dry land entirely surrounded by alcohol.
Jazz News, February 1958
Without any shadow of doubt this 12-piece humdinger is producing the most stimulating, swinging, satisfying and downright exciting big band jazz in Britain today.
Jazz News, June 1960
It wasn't my idea, but I more or less took it over. There was no money to be made...
Tubby Hayes, Crescendo, 1963
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“The work he’s done for British jazz history so far is incredible.”
The “he” in question is Jazz musician, band leader and author, Simon Spillett, who has been a guest writer on this page on many occasions in the past.
And for the reason noted in the opening quotation, along with many others including qualities of character and writerly attributes, it’s with great delight that we present more of his work on JazzProfiles.
This is a rather long piece and rather than divide it into a multi-part presentation with the attendant loss of continuity, we’ll keep it as one feature and maintain it in place for a while.
[Based in the UK, Simon uses English spelling.]
© Copyright ® Simon Spillett, copyright protected; all rights reserved; used with the author’s permission.
The club that Jack built; the birth of the Downbeat Club
“There had been a Downbeat Club in London before, a short-lived place located in the city's famous Archer Street, the narrow thoroughfare adjacent to Shaftesbury Avenue that has operated as a sort of open-air job centre for gigging musicians since the 1920s. That Downbeat Club had barely lasted a hot minute in 1951, just long enough to showcase a one-off big band headed by the near-mythical guru of British Bebop, Denis Rose. One of the band's number that March night was a fifteen year old tenor saxophonist by the name of Edward Brian Hayes – already better known to all by the nickname Tubby – who had latterly entered the jazz business full-time. Or rather he'd come into the dance band business, for, like virtually every other member of Rose's hastily pulled together unit that evening, which boasted names who would go onto greater success, including Vic Ash, as well as those that would sink into obscurity, like the West Indian trumpeter Wizard Simmons, the young Tubby Hayes was then earning his daily bread in a band with its eye firmly on public tastes, in this instance the new sextet led by Kenny Baker. Himself a refugee from the Ted Heath band – at that point the big name in British dance band circles – and as close to being a “star” as a British jazzman could get, Baker was another player juggling art and commerce. In fact, over the ensuing five or so years the trumpeters workload wasn't all that different from that of his young sideman. There would be short periods of intense jazz club activity balanced out by stretches working in more saleable formats, a sharp reminder that being a “modern” jazz musician in the UK during the early 1950s was by and large still a part-time occupation. It was hardly surprising. Left reeling from the financial aftershocks of the Second World War, and gritting its teeth through austerity, the country presented an odd sort of paradox; one the one hand, it looked ahead – the Festival of Britain, the Comet airliner, the four minute mile, the much-lauded “New Elizabethan Age” and so on. On the other, it seemed hidebound by the past, a country of perpetual black and white, eagerly watching the technicolour lights of America on the distant horizon, while its own Empire faded ingloriously into darkness.
For a professional “dance band musician” - a term that applied even to those whose music sought to escape the prison of the Palais - it was a frustrating time. Hell-bent on musical modernism, and as ostentatiously dressed as was possible in ration-straitened London, they tried desperately to shoe-horn in as much Bebop as they dare into bands that frequently still sounded like something from the pre-Atomic era. The music press were left unimpressed, regularly calling into question the sudden influx of what Melody Maker had called “rainbow-tied, over-dressed, super-padded, loud-talking and queerly tonsured youths.” In summary, to the British musical establishment, the early 1950s were more about Joe Loss than Joe Harriott, its popular culture more Blue Lamp than Blue Note.
Jazz work, what there was of it, was hard to come by and even harder to hold onto, and so, for those committed to the cause, the only possible solution was a DIY brand of promotion, as pioneered by the legendary Club XI during 1948-1950. Although the notion of musicians running their own gig nights had its roots in the old “rhythm clubs” from before the war, as well as in the less-wholesome bottle parties held during hostilities, it was a method that particularly suited the fly-by-night economics of modern jazz, and was to remain the most prevalent kind of “promotion” in British jazz, even well into the 1950s. The premise was simple; hire a room, book some players, put an ad in the back pages of the bible that was the Melody Maker and hope for an audience. If it didn't work out at this venue, then all the musicians need do was try it again somewhere else. Ergo, modern jazz clubs popped up all over London, here tonight, gone tomorrow morning. And it wasn't just around Soho or the West End. Modernism began cropping up in all sorts of unlikely places – from suburban drill halls to scout huts, pub back rooms to disused basements. The only real universal rule was that those involved – principally musicians, but also including the necessary smattering of camp-followers – was that they escape the mind-numbing mediocrity of their daily duties in dance bands.
The other Downbeat Club started in exactly this way, although as is so often the case in the distant days of early British modernism, nobody is sure exactly when this occurred. Occupying an upper room of the large Manor House pub on the corner of Green Lanes and Seven Sister Road in – ahem – Manor House, the club’s “official” launch took place in October 1954, an event receiving only a modest mention in the half page Club Calendar of Melody Maker's October 23rd issue. However, there had certainly been sessions of the modern variety at the pub for eighteen or so months prior to this, organised by the then amateur saxophonist - and soon-to-be-cab driver - Jack Sharpe.
Benny Green remembered that his first encounter with the twenty-two year old Sharpe had happened “in the autumn of 1952 [when] I played in a sixteen piece group of Jack's.”
“I don't recall that the Manor House band ever rehearsed ,” Green continued. “The job was the rehearsal – and there were hardly any jobs. Jack subsidised the running of the band out of his own pocket.” This was by no means an unusual situation in which to find a “promoter,” although being a musician too, Sharpe's dedication went beyond the merely financial. In between forming dream bands and losing money, he frequented as many of London's jazz clubs as he could, and at one – the Studio 51 in Great Newport Street – sometime in 1951 he encountered “a cherubic fifteen-year-old youth playing with an enthusiasm and authority beyond his years.” The cherub was none other than Tubby Hayes - angelic in looks if not behaviour - and the friendship the two men formed that night would last for the remainder of Hayes life. Within eighteen months of that first meeting, Hayes and a group sometimes including Sharpe had helped launch a club at a pub in Brixton Hill, close to where Hayes lived, but like so many stabs at presenting modern jazz around the capital, it didn't – couldn't – last. Undeterred, Sharpe decided to try again up at Manor House, operating what he now dubbed the Downbeat Club.
With an opening bill promising headliners Tubby Hayes and Harry Klein, aided by a supporting cast including trumpeter Les Condon, bassist Ashley Kozak and Sharpe himself, the clubs policy was made crystal clear from the outset; modernism served up by some of the youngest and most exciting of the local talents, something which contrasted strongly with the tastes of the other promoters who continued to use the Manor House premises on other nights. Indeed, the same week as Sharpe commenced his club nights, the pub also played host to Bob Dawbarn and his Jazzband, a unit then ploughing the popular furrow of revivalism.
(Despite operating at the opposite end of the jazz spectrum when performing, Dawbarn's “day job” as a journalist would soon bring him into contact with musicians such as Tubby Hayes, whose work he frequently championed in the pages of Melody Maker).
Over the following few weeks, the Downbeat featured a familiar list of British bop luminaries – Hayes and Klein both made return appearances, Jimmy Deuchar played a guest spot and there were nights featuring names that might now not even register a faint glimmer of recognition, such as West Indian trumpeter Pete Pitterson and the anarchic drummer Leon Roy, in whose big band both Hayes and Sharpe featured – but in continuing to offer the sort of mix and match, ad-hoc blowing sessions heard in virtually every other jazz club in and around London, from the Flamingo on down, the Downbeat was offering little in the way of novelty.
Happily for Sharpe, his own recruitment to the new Tubby Hayes band in early 1955 also provided the key to securing a defining identity for the club. A capable rather than outstanding saxophonist (although his leader had described him in the press as “a great prospect”), Sharpe would be forever mystified by Hayes' choice of him. However, he repaid any allegiance his leader felt ten-fold, selling his cab in order to buy a baritone saxophone and turn fully professional. He also proved himself a dab hand at the organisational rigmarole necessary to keep a road band afloat. “[It] was an education I would not have missed for anything,” Sharpe remembered in the 1980s. “One of the happiest periods of my life.”
It had also been one of the most trying. Despite all the attendant fuss about “Britain's Youngest Bandleader” (Hayes was just 20 years of age) and writers such as Tony Hall loudly trumpeting the band as “the most exciting and musically interesting....sound I've heard since the [Ronnie] Scott band started three years ago,” the new Hayes unit found itself marooned in a sea full of dance halls, percentage-grabbing promoters and the low-brow expectations of the wider public. The truth was that, as good as the group was musically, it was never that good at passing itself off as a commercial outfit. Recourse to the few recordings the group made for the Tempo label during 1955-56 (collated on Acrobat ACSCD 6002 – Tubby Hayes; The Complete Tempo Recordings), reveals its true identity as as an excitable, rawly swinging jazz combo, or as one of its members, trumpeter Dickie Hawdon, succinctly put it, “a lovely shouting little band.”
The message hollered by Hayes and his confrères received some of its most enthusiastic reception in London's club land, with the leader in particular attracting the sort of following that nowadays would be called cult-like. Hayes has always been gifted with the ability to communicate, a skill that made him stand out among his contemporaries, and so it seemed logical, not to say inevitable, that he should have a hand in providing the Downbeat Club with its own semi-resident star attraction.
Melody Maker announced the news of the launch with the shouting headline “Hayes Opens His Own Jazz Club” on July 30th, complete with a typically dynamic image of the tenorist in action, eyes tightly shut, horn held flashily aloft. Although the “launch” was nothing more than an expedient appending of the Hayes name to Sharpe's existing promotion, for the local music press, the “Tubby Hayes club” provided hot news.
“A capacity crowd of more than three hundred people made the initial session an uproarious success,” reported NME the following week, with writer Mike Butcher's somewhat breathless account of the night also recording the presence of added starters Jimmy Deuchar and Dizzy Reece (“playing surprisingly tasty drums.”).
Over the remainder of 1955, Hayes made as many appearances at Manor House as his touring schedule would allow. Sometimes, he brought his entire octet, at other times he appeared with a smaller unit drawn from its ranks, and on the Monday nights when he wasn't available, a litany of fellow modernists filled the vacant space; Keith Christie, Ronnie Scott, Ken Wray, Derek Humble and Jimmy Deuchar, among them. Bookings such as these had set out the club's agenda. “The [Downbeat's] policy is – shall we say? - uncompromising,” wrote Benny Green in NME the following February. “It is the one [London] club where all the musicians get booked because of the way they play,” a mindset that prefigured the sort of play-as-you-please rationale behind the Ronnie Scott club in the years ahead.
Green expanded on this point – and the incongruity of finding such a progressive outpost outside of Soho – in Jazz News two years later. Although by this time Hayes and his octet were history, with the saxophonist now co-heading the Jazz Couriers alongside his simpatico partner Ronnie Scott, the clubs purpose was unaltered – modernism for modernism's sake, nothing more, nothing less. “The need for a jazz club of this kind is proved by the fact that it is now among the veterans of the London club scene,” Green explained, “claiming a life of approaching five years and a membership that passed the three thousand mark a few weeks back.”
However, even with this evident success, Green's article noted that some of the oddities peculiar to British jazz promotion were still present; if a visitor couldn't find his or her way through the “labyrinth of bars and drinking parlours that surround the music room” they may well find themselves being entertained by “two spinsters [who] play operetta selections on piano and violin in the downstairs bar parlour,” employed, Green suspected, by a jazz-wary landlord “fearing for the cultural standing of [the] establishment.”
Green's brief outline of the clubs rationale also revealed that the Downbeat's music-first attitude had enabled the infrequent presentation of “large or expensive groups which only the dance halls and concert halls are usually able to employ.” Alongside these words was a photograph of just such an outfit, billed rather prosaically as “an experimental band,” and featuring, among others, Stan Tracey, Tubby Hayes, Bert Courtley, Dizzy Reece and Ronnie Scott. “What other clubs in Britain can attract such a star-studded group and offer the facilities for this kind of creative work?” Green asked, in conclusion.
What club indeed? And it was in this atmosphere of “creative work” that the Downbeat Club (which by the time of Green's Jazz News piece had been re-marketed as the “New Downbeat Club”) achieved its greatest success. Although the band featured in the article hadn't been billed as such, it was in fact merely the latest incarnation of what was to become known informally to London modernists as The Downbeat Big Band.
The Downbeat Big Band: “twelve piece humdinger”
The units existence had begun casually in late 1956, when Melody Maker announced the first public performance at Manor House by what it termed “an experimental modern combo” comprising a mouthwatering line up of Jimmy Deuchar, Ronnie Simmonds, Ian Hamer, Dizzy Reece, Les Condon, Ken Wray, Derek Humble, Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Scott, Jack Sharpe, Stan Tracey, Lennie Bush and Phil Seamen. “It started off as Jimmy Deuchar's band, actually,” remembered Tubby Hayes in 1963. “He did most of the arrangements for it. We got a few gigs.” And it was those “few gigs” that provided London jazz fans with a rare opportunity to witness something virtually unique in British jazz circles; a genuine jazz-only big band.
To a man, all the musicians listed in the first incarnation of the Downbeat Big Band had trodden a similar, well-worn career path, that of graduating from a big name dance band (Scott from Ted Heath, Hayes from Ambrose, Vic Lewis and others, Deuchar from Jack Parnell, Seamen from Joe Loss and so on) into work with smaller jazz groups. Although this was also the trend in US jazz circles (think of the apprenticeships of players like Zoot Sims and Gerry Mulligan, for example), these London musicians had an altogether different motivation to their transatlantic idols; American bop began by kicking sand in the face of swing, but for British boppers the enemies were the quick-quick-slow, the Palais and the novelty number. True, there were a handful of local big bands who tried to hew close to a progressive musical policy – Vic Lewis's most notably - but as full-time organisations with date sheets including dances as well as concerts, there was only so far they could go in pursuing purism. The Downbeat Big Band on the other hand, brought together only infrequently, and primarily for its members own enjoyment, had no such need to disguise itself as a commercial concern. “There was no money to be made,” Tubby Hayes declared baldly when interviewed about the band years later.
Money or not, the band had musical riches aplenty. Its unofficial head, Jimmy Deuchar, was one of the finest British modernists of the day, a musician whose instinctive grasp of the direction of modern jazz went hand in hand with a genuine understanding of its mechanics, resulting in scores that delighted those convened to play them. This skill had already been documented by a series of recordings Deuchar had undertaken with various line-ups for the Tempo label in 1955-56 (usefully collated on Acrobat ADDCD 3105 Jimmy Deuchar; The Complete Tempo Recordings) revealing a talent for small band writing that was nothing less than Dameronian. Moreover, his arrangements for a Tempo-recorded 12-man unit led by Victor Feldman had also shown a natural grasp of how to get the biggest possible sound from a line-up that only just qualified for the “big band” label. In addition to this, Deuchar also worked well under pressure, as those musicians who knew him well would recount, often turning out his note perfect scores in the noisy, distraction-filled environments of band coaches, dressing rooms and saloon bars. Therefore, the Downbeat Big Band, staffed by colleagues filled with admiration for his writing, and often gathered together at a moments notice, made for an ideal format in which the trumpeter could extend his art.
The only real impasse was one that hindered every professional musician then operating on the UK's tiny modern jazz circuit; that of making a living. Having famously abandoned a lucrative engagement with the BBC Show Band in order to throw himself once again into the challenges of small band club-work (see Acrobat ADDCD 3092 Ronnie Scott: Soho Blues), by the spring of 1957 Deuchar was feeling the pinch, so much so that when German bandleader Kurt Edelhagen visited London on a head-hunting expedition for new talent, the offer of regular money and an opportunity to both compose and arrange full-time proved too alluring to be ignored. Edelhagen also enticed the trumpeters two closest confrères, trombonist Ken Wray and altoist Derek Humble, a move that not only cleared three of the front-runners from the parochial small band scene but effectively blew a hole in the heart of the Downbeat Big Band.
The year after Deuchar's departure for Cologne, Jack Sharpe, by now back to cabbying full-time, teamed with Mike Senn to open yet another Downbeat Club, in Soho's old Compton Street, a venue Sharpe recalled as “a very popular meeting place for musicians, selling barrels of Flowers Keg Bitter and untold quantities of Carlsberg Special.” American after-hours visitors would include Stan Getz and Billie Holiday (the latter’s presence nearly causing Kenny Graham to knock out a noisy punter who wouldn't cut the chat while Holiday sang). The only thing not on offer was the Downbeat Big Band itself, its existence cut short by both the emigration of its founder member and Tubby Hayes's increasing workload with the Jazz Couriers. “We didn't do anything with it for a couple of years,” Hayes recalled in 1963. “Then in '59 we started rehearsing again, and I assumed control.”
To the Downbeat's latest team of recruits – in effect the entire line-up of the Jazz Couriers plus sundry refugees from bands led by Ted Heath, Vic Ash and Tony Kinsey – there was only one man capable of fronting the operation; Hayes himself. Although he would later protest “it wasn't my idea,” it was easy to understand their faith in the saxophonist. By 1959, not only had Hayes demonstrated a streets-ahead ability as an instrumentalist, offering triple-threat talents on tenor, vibraphone and latterly flute, but he'd also proved himself an equally impressive composer and arranger, creating the majority of the “book” for the Jazz Couriers, in the process revealing a precocious knack for writing both original material and reconfiguring tried and tested standards. Above all, he possessed what what many observers were already noting as genuine musical charisma, a quality often in short supply on British bandstands. The fact was that, although still only in his mid-twenties, Hayes had become the fountain head for local modernism – a unique catalyst whose likeable mien had broken down much of the enervated ennui that had clung to British modern jazz like one of the capitals dismal Fifties smogs. Who better to sell the unsaleable notion of a truly purist big band?
“Jackie Sharpe and I ran it between us,” Hayes told journalist Les Tomkins in an interview in Crescendo magazine four years later. “We shared the cost of whatever arrangements had to be paid for.” They also shared the heavy responsibility of trying to find further work for a band whose “for kicks only” style sat awkwardly among the more polite budget-Basie aspirations of other local big bands. North of the Soho border, up at Manor House the unit's reappearance had attracted the party-faithful in droves, but when it undertook a series of engagements at the Marquee club in Oxford Street in late 1959, it bombed.
“Attendances....when we were there were very disappointing,” Hayes told Disc early the following year, “considering who was in the band and how it sounded. But we were not so worried, because it was always intended primarily as a 'kicks' band.”
With characteristic optimism, Hayes preferred to play-up the positive aspects of the group; it had provided a showcase for his own big band writing, a skill that was still some way off from being documented on a commercially released album, and had given a useful forum for some of the newer stars then beginning to storm the “closed shop” of local modernism. Indeed, by the spring of 1960, those who enjoyed semi-permanent associations with the band included saxophonists Stan Robinson and Bobby Wellins (Hayes's then flat-mate) and multi-instrumental whiz-kid Alan Branscombe, among the brightest and best of the younger school. But it wasn't all new blood; there was even room for some of the older guards of local bop, including drummer Phil Seamen and trumpeter Hank Shaw.
However, despite this pool of talent, and a couple of helpful front page appearances via Melody Maker, the band found itself grinding rather than leaping back into action. Initially, it worked only one in four Mondays at the Downbeat (the other weeks were taken up by Tubby Hayes briefly revived octet) but soon enough business was picking up, helped enormously by Hayes's fast-burgeoning popularity; it had been a good year for the saxophonist - his style-defining album Tubby's Groove had been released in May and his installation as musical director for the new, much-hyped BBC series Tempo '60 meant that over the summer of 1960 he was seen regularly on television, a sure-fire way of winning new fans. For many London jazz enthusiasts, the Downbeat gigs were a must-go event, as Jazz News's Kevin Henriques discovered that June, making a visit to Manor House that resulted in a colourful article declaring “This band is a riot.”
“Stand back all you 'only-American-jazz is good-jazz' addicts while I rave – and I do mean RAVE – about Britain's greatest big band,” the journalist exclaimed. “Without any shadow of doubt, this 12-piece humdinger is producing the most stimulating, swinging, satisfying and downright exciting big band jazz in Britain today.”
The piece went on to list the arrangers and composers whose work the band had delivered with “a fervour which I thought had disappeared forever from British modern jazz”; Harry South, Jimmy Deuchar, Victor Feldman, Horace Silver, Benny Golson, Tadd Dameron and Dizzy Gillespie.
Canvassing opinion on the music from the audience, Henriques picked upon 27 year old fan Ric Clarke, who declared “the scores are more interesting than [Count] Basie's [band]. Why doesn't someone record it?”
Why indeed? For an answer, Henriques turned to Jack Sharpe, who offered a level-headed if somewhat sardonic explanation; “There is no other band in the country which plays with so much jazz feeling,” he began proudly, “[but] as far as records are concerned nobody seems interested and the people from the BBC have never got down to brass tacks and come to hear us.”
Intriguingly, Sharpe what chose not to reveal was that the band had already recorded, producing its own semi-official “demo” the previous autumn, a recording that may have well been intended as an audition piece for the BBC.
And so, for the time being, the Downbeat Big Band's existence continued in a frustrating vacuum – praised by the cognoscenti, ignored by the powers-that-be. Unsurprisingly, it couldn't last. Despite the raves of writers like Kevin Henriques, by the end of 1960 the band's popularity began to wane, a situation typical of the minuscule, up-then-down, world of British modern jazz. “Business was excellent at first,” Tubby Hayes recalled ruefully in 1963, “but it dropped off after a few months. People got bored, I suppose.”
Alongside public complacency were also other headaches; the bands personnel remained in a continual state of flux – for a time Ronnie Scott, Johnny Scott and Stan Robinson all played musical chairs as second tenor – and in September 1960, it had been dealt the heavy blow of Phil Seamen's departure, following his spectacularly public expulsion from the Tubby Hayes quartet. Were these nails not enough to seal the coffin, the Downbeat clubs ``proprietor” Jack Sharpe was feeling pressure of another kind. With the Trad Boom now at its height, the potential of richer pickings had caught the attention of the Manor House pubs management and so, in January 1961, Melody Maker announced the sad but inevitable volte-face; “After six years as one of London's strongholds of modern jazz, the Downbeat Club, Manor House, is switching to a trad policy from next Monday.” Ceding ground to the Chick Mayes Jazzmen, a despondent Sharpe told the paper “We were one of the earliest of the modern jazz clubs, but there just seems to be no interest in modern jazz in the North London area at the moment.”
Determined that the set-back be only temporary, Sharpe immediately sought out an alternative venue. In the meantime, on January 23rd, the Downbeat Big Band made a rare out-of-Manor House appearance at the Club Octave in Southall, yet another modern enclave struggling to ride out the Trad storm. There then followed a brief period in which the Downbeat Club briefly took up residence at the Plough in Ilford - an even more unlikely setting for modernism than N. 15 - and the Headstone Hotel in North Harrow, although for the time being Sharpe and partner Mike Senn played it safe by only booking small groups. In June, exhausted by punting their enthusiasm to less-than-convinced landlords, they retreated to their permanent home of Old Compton Street, in the heart of Soho.
With the big band temporarily mothballed, the Downbeat initially tried to promote the guest-soloist with resident trio format, aiming to provide some novelty by “present[ing] musicians who are not often heard as soloists around the clubs.” In principle, it was a logical idea, and over the first few weeks of summer 1961, the featured artists included players like French horn specialist Mo Miller, flutist Johnny Scott and bass-trumpeter Ray Premru. The real issue, however, lay in the fact that, as good as they were, players like Miller weren't “often heard as soloists round the clubs” for a reason – they didn't draw an audience. Rescuing the situation was easy, Sharpe thought. Why not book Tubby Hayes every so often, that would bring them in. But even then, there existed a problem. Hayes was now more in demand than ever, especially after the unprecedented reaction given by the press to his new Fontana album 'Tubbs.' He was also laying the plans for his forthcoming US début, as well as dividing time between his film, TV, festival and concert commitments. Among the casualties of all this feverish activity was the Downbeat Big Band. Now bereft of a home-base, the band made its last big public appearance in July 1961, sharing the bill with Hayes's own quartet at the final Beaulieu jazz festival, before fading swiftly out of sight.
However, it wasn't a total full-stop. The band had left a legacy; when Hayes formed his own big band proper in mid-1963 (in the interim there had been several studio-assembled outfits for broadcasting and recording) its “all-star,” hand-picked, method of appointment deliberately echoed that of its predecessor. And, given the still relatively confined nature of the local modern jazz scene, it was no surprise to find the majority of its members were ex-Downbeaters; Jimmy Deuchar, Les Condon, Ian Hamer, Keith Christie, Ken Wray, Alan Branscombe, Bobby Wellins and Terry Shannon, among them.
As well as this direct connection, the Downbeat Big Band's spirit had had a rather more general impact, in effect providing the model for the “kicks only” blow band that would inspire units as diverse as the Harry South and Mike Westbrook big bands in the years ahead. Even thirty years later, its essence informed the material and approach taken by Jack Sharpe's own semi-permanent big band, an aggregation that, exactly like the Downbeat and Hayes bands before it, took a clutch of young stars and gave them both the opportunity to play in a purely jazz big band setting and a highly partisan audience to entertain at a resident venue, in this case the Bull's Head at Barnes.
Given its portentous importance, and the fact that it had left its DNA in an entire strain of subsequent British jazz development – not mention its clear effect on the growth of Tubby Hayes's talent – surely the Downbeat band must have left something more tangible than faded press clippings and the odd photograph in its wake? Didn't there have to be a recording of it somewhere out there? For years, nobody thought so. Having disbanded just shy of the beginning of the tape-recorder-under-the-table activities of a certain London jazz fan, it seemed unlikely that anything “live” would ever be unearthed. However, a couple of truly remarkable rediscoveries have now put some musical flesh on the bare bones of those enthusiastic Jazz News reviews by the likes of Benny Green and Kevin Henriques.
The first – a tape passed covertly among Tubby Hayes's fans for something like thirty years – documents what appears to be to all intents and purposes an audition recording, possibly for submission to the BBC, recorded under studio-like conditions at Ronnie Scott's then-new Gerrard Street club in the autumn of 1959. Were this discovery not startling enough, a further tape of the bands sole broadcast appearance – with added starter Victor Feldman, no less– was recently unearthed in the effects of a British musician present (but not performing) at the original session. Thus, combined on this new Acrobat CD, we have, in effect a “complete” recordings of the Downbeat Big Band, something amounting to a major event for British jazz fans for several reasons. The first and most obvious of which is that this brace of sessions brings to life the work of a unit that has now fallen into very real danger of being entirely forgotten. The second is that they offer – in very fine sound quality, Amazon reviewers please note – what are prime examples of the talents of two of the UK's finest jazz figures, Tubby Hayes and Victor Feldman, both at the absolute peak of their respective careers. To put this in context, in Hayes's case, the years in which these recordings were taped, 1959-60, saw him breast ahead of all of his parochial counterparts to the point where the next step was true international stardom. In Feldman's case, the week after returning home from this trip to London (of which the Downbeat appearance was just one busman’s holiday distraction) he joined the quintet of altoist Cannonball Adderley, yet another endorsement of his musical authenticity.
There are other reasons to celebrate this release too, including oodles of Phil Seamen in his pomp; some rare and hitherto unknown scores by the likes of Harry South and Jimmy Deuchar; the chance to hear yet more of the criminally undervalued pianist Terry Shannon; and, more generally, the opportunity to glimpse back into the now dim and distant world of British modern jazz circa. 1960, a time when it really did seem as if local fans had “never had it so good.”
The Music: “...the boys really got into their stride.”
Taped at Ronnie's during the small hours of November 14th 1959, the six items comprising the Downbeat Big Band's recorded début are, in effect, a microcosmic manifesto of the bands approach, taking in original compositions (Harry South's Southern Horizons and Jimmy Deuchar's “E”), classic modern jazz compositions (Confirmation), standards (East of The Sun) and material by a contemporary US composer (Along Came Betty). They also deliver candid evidence of the band's strengths and weaknesses. The former – inventive soloists and creative arrangements – far outweigh the latter – audible lack of rehearsal time and the occasional recourse to the one-big-blast methodology noted by Kevin Henriques – as can be heard on the opening (presumably Jimmy Deuchar-penned) chart of Benny Golson's elegant Along Came Betty. Debuted by the Jazz Messengers on the classic 1958 Blue Note date that also yielded Moanin' and Blues March, Golson's theme contains a far subtler, more Dameron-like, attention to structure and harmony, making it an ideal solo vehicle for the 1959 Tubby Hayes, who fluently devours the unpredictable harmonic sequence before handing over to a trumpet soloist, most likely Eddie Blair, a musician rarely mentioned when discussing great British brassmen of the period.
Hayes' tone – a warm purr, perhaps best described as sounding midway between Rollins and Getz – carefully sculpted lines and his general air of hipster authority shine through even better on The Scene Is Clean, an intricate Tadd Dameron theme once recorded by the Max Roach/Clifford Brown Quintet. In fact, the dynamism of Hayes's solo diverts attention from the fact that the arrangement – a deft mix of Afro-Cuban figures and grooving swing – contains some of the most ragged ensemble work of the date. Besides Hayes, listen out for Phil Seamen's canny switches between Latin and bop and, in the closing bars, the terrific lead of Ted Heath's Bobby Pratt, a musician of towering ability who would take his own life in 1968.
East of The Sun – another Deuchar score – cools things down considerably and is redolent of the era in which progressive British jazz (in bands such as the Jazz Couriers, the Tony Kinsey Quintet and others) contained recognisable elements held over from its practitioners dance band apprenticeships. That the Downbeat band was something of a proving ground for its various members can be felt in Alan Branscombe's beautiful lead alto work. A multi-instrumentalist of the same frighteningly precocious skills as Tubby Hayes (he played all the saxes, vibes, piano and percussion, as well as composing and arranging), Branscombe had only just made his début on the British jazz scene, as a member of the Vic Ash Sextet of 1958-59, a band in which he was very much featured as a tenor rather than alto soloist. The Downbeat Big Band (like the periodically convened Tubby Hayes 8) gave him the opportunity to try his hand, with equal brilliance, at the key role of section leader, a position he would again occupy in Hayes's own 1963-4 big band.
Whereas Branscombe represented the new guard of British modernism, the trumpet soloist on East of The Sun, Hank Shaw, had the distinction of being one of the founding fathers of UK-bebop. Work with the Downbeat band came at a time when he was far less active in jazz circles than he had once been, although he and Tubby Hayes were already close associates, having worked together on promoter Bix Curtis's Jazz From London package shows in the mid-1950s (see Acrobat ACMCD 4368). Later still, they would reunite in Hayes's 1969 big band and, for a few hair-raising weeks during early 1972, both were members of Bill Le Sage's nostalgic Bebop Preservation Society, the perfect setting for Shaw's Gillespian talents.
Southern Horizons represents the work of composer/arranger/pianist Harry South, a musician whose association with Tubby Hayes dated back to the saxophonist’s (pre-professional) work on the South-West London jazz circuit of the late 1940s. Although South was never a member of the Downbeat band proper, his contributions formed a vital part of its pad, with the format affording him the opportunity to develop the skills he had discovered via a postal course in composition and arrangement taken while recovering from TB. With its Horace Silver-ish marriage of dramatic, minor keyed Latin flavours and Hard Bop, Southern Horizons is typical South, and was already a popular item in the quintet of altoist Joe Harriott, with whom the composer was working at this time of this recording. Indeed, so popular was the theme that after leaving Harriott (who used it as the title track for his initial US album on the Jazzland label), South took it first into the repertoire of the short-lived Ronnie Ross/Bert Courtley Jazztet and then into the playlist of his own sporadically active big band. Listening to the composition with 21st century hindsight, one can also hear the embryonic beginnings of South's gift for commercial composition, something that eventually led to his famous theme for the hit TV series The Sweeney in the 1970s. The Downbeat Big Band’s own flying squad of soloists once more includes Hayes and Shaw.
Blues At The Manor, a dedication to the Downbeat bands stamping ground, offers something of a rarity in British modern jazz of this era; an honest-to-goodness, slow, funky blues. The performances also negates all the criticisms often levelled at British jazzmen of a disregard for the niceties of dynamics. Among the many delights served up via this, another South composition, are a bitter-sweet alto solo from Alan Branscombe – think Art Pepper with a Scouse accent, if you like – a tightly-muted, Gillespie-inspired outing for Hank Shaw and, underpinning it all, the beautifully relaxed, hand-in-glove team of Jeff Clyne and Phil Seamen, making nonsense of all the critical opprobrium then directed at British rhythm sections.
The opposite end of the bands dynamic spectrum is captured in a version of Charlie Parker's Confirmation, the harmonic sequence of which had become the Ur-text of Bebop by the 1950s. Appropriately enough, the solo space is largely occupied by Tubby Hayes, a player who, as Benny Green once noted, found the harmonic requirements of bop “[came] as naturally to him as screwing up the ligature on his mouthpiece.” Such familiarity, however, never leads to complacency, or worse still, the cardinal sin of musicians playing material very familiar to them – the wrong tempo. Indeed, just listen to how the tempo sits just right for both those Gillespie-like trumpet ski-runs and Hayes's own inventions. Nor is there anything to suggest the vulgarity of excess many contemporary jazz critics then found in the saxophonist; in fact, far from being a welter of semi-quavers despatched machine gun fashion, Hayes's improvisation mixes lyricism and virtuosity in equal measure, a feat made all the more appreciable by the highly sympathetic accompaniment of the now-all-but-forgotten Terry Shannon.
The concluding score of the session, Jimmy Deuchar's original composition 'E' updates and enlarges the sextet chart the trumpeter has written for a Tempo recording in 1956 (and exported to the American Contemporary label under the delightfully apt title of Pub Crawling with Jimmy Deuchar.) Again, the mood is somewhat that of Birdland-meets-Streatham Locarno, although in between the scored passages there is yet another high-level contribution from Branscombe. As those who worked with him recalled, off-stage the Liverpudlian was anything but professional. Issues with alcohol and – as the 1960s wore on – hard drugs led to a truly dissipated lifestyle and, at one point, a lengthy spell recovering in hospital. Miraculously though, these personal tribulations appeared not to impact on Branscombe's unfailing musical ability. Indeed, stories abound about his brinkmanship, with clarinettist Vic Ash recalling in his autobiography, I Blew It My Way, how “in spite of his habit of rarely practising, he was always brilliant. He would sometimes not touch the saxophones or the vibes for months, then come out and play them to perfection.” Sadly, Branscombe's name rarely finds itself mentioned among the British jazz legends of the era, despite the fact that his work here is every bit as personal as that of the better known altoists of the time, such as Peter King, Joe Harriott and John Dankworth.
Drawn from the Downbeat Big Band's sole appearance on the BBC's fondly remembered radio programme Jazz Club, taped on September 1st 1960, the following seven items capture the band at its peak, displaying all the qualities that had made writers like Jazz News's Kevin Henriques sit up and rave.
During the same week as the broadcast, the band had also broken its unofficial Manor House curfew by appearing at an all-star British jazz concert at the Tavistock Rooms in Charing Cross Road, delighting “over 700 fans” according to Melody Maker, as part of a bill also including altoist Harold McNair and the bands of Ronnie Scott and Tubby Hayes. On Saturday September 3rd the same package made a rare out-of-town jaunt to Manchester to appear at the city's Free Trade Hall.
To review the Tavistock Rooms gig, Jazz News again dispatched its intrepid reporter Kevin Henriques, into what the journalist called “an exhausting room temperature which would have been more easily withstood by the athletes of ancient Rome.” This time around Henriques found the Downbeat band (“without four of its usual members”) less than impressive. “Perhaps it was the heavy, clammy atmosphere,” he wondered, “[but] the sparkle and impact associated with the band were missing. It was not until the final number, the rip-roaring 'Sister Sadie' that the boys really got into their stride.”
Both the Manchester and Charing Cross Road concerts had featured the band with an additional guest, Victor Feldman, the sensational multi-instrumental prodigy who had realized the ultimate British jazz pipe dream by emigrating to the USA in 1955. Feldman's success Stateside – first with Woody Herman's band, then as a key player in the Los Angeles studio scene – also provided a useful by-product for the colleagues he'd left behind in London. Technically, Feldman was still an English citizen and therefore was exempt from the usual strangulating, bureaucratic red tape that accompanied the arrival of any other international jazz guest. This meant that whenever he chose to return to London, he was free to play club and record dates. In the winter of 1956-57, he'd done just that, while on his Christmas sabbatical, and in August/September 1960, he returned to the UK on honeymoon with his new wife Marilyn, a visit that held the promise of the odd gig here and there.
Any notions of a peaceful, uneventful, time in which to contemplate wedded bliss were soon rendered scorched earth as Feldman found himself co-opted onto the bandstands of the Scott club and elsewhere as a star guest, attracting glowing press. To his credit Feldman didn't baulk at the situation, instead he quietly accepted these ad-hoc gigs in the same way that he had just – with equal modesty - accepted the offer to join the quintet of the altoist Cannonball Adderley.
For his appearance on the Downbeat Big Band's BBC broadcast, Feldman took on a dual role, playing vibes on two small band numbers (omitted here owning to time constraints, they may be released on a further Acrobat title), as well as taking his place in the rhythm section of the big band as a sub for the units then-regular drummer, Bobby Orr. This was a double windfall for fans, as, by his own admission, Feldman was spending less and less time behind the drum kit by this point, preferring to concentrate his efforts on his other instrumental doubles. (There may have also been a hangover from his “Kid Krupa” childhood, a time that, while it established him as a musician, had hamstrung many critical opinions of him prior to his departure for the US.)
The opening Ah-Bah-Chu (Jimmy Deuchar's phonetic allusion to How About You) reveals that Feldman had lost none of his natural ability, as he literally boots along a score which finds space for solos by Alan Branscombe, Keith Christie (then at the height of his J.J. Johnson-fixation) and Terry Shannon.
A re-run of East of The Sun takes the temperature down, this time sharing its solo space between Tubby Hayes and arranger Jimmy Deuchar, who after decamping back to London in early 1960 had simply taken up where he left off in forming a quintet with Ronnie Scott.
By 1960, Scott was naming his favourite tenorists as Sonny Rollins, Hank Mobley and Stan Getz, and although his own style retained elements of all three (as well as trace vestiges of even earlier inspirations such as Charlie Ventura), he had now come up with a voice recognisable his own, as can be heard on the broadcast version of Confirmation. Whereas Tubby Hayes had the mobility – witnessed on their shared Jazz Couriers recordings and elsewhere on this set – Scott was the player with the funkier edge, a useful quality that frequently prevented his improvisations from falling into the “running the changes” trap that sometimes snared his younger partner. The accompanying work of Terry Shannon (another ex-Courier who Scott praised as “one of the truly natural jazz musicians”) is another plus.
Like Someone In Love presents an exploded version of the quartet arrangement Tubby Hayes recorded in late 1959 for the album Tubby's Groove, an LP then causing something of a stir in the British jazz press. Alongside lyrical improvisations from Shannon, Alan Branscombe and Jimmy Deuchar (just hear him leap out after the key-change), the emphasis here is very much on Hayes's mastery of saxophone scoring, a skill at which he was largely self-taught. Not only does his rich choice of voicing make the four-man reed section appear much larger than it actually is – and note how he has Sharpe's baritone play more prominently a la Harry Carney on this chart – he also displays a canny knack of finding altered chord changes for the soloist to explore, especially apparent during Branscombe's alto chorus.
Victor Feldman's Une Momentum (recorded for Tempo in 1956 as One Momentum) occupies the other extreme – that of Tubby Hayes; rabble rousing hard bopper. Although Eddie Blair also grabs his share of the solo limelight here, there was no soloist in the Downbeat band - or indeed elsewhere in British modern jazz – better suited to this sort of tear-up than Hayes. The demon of an improvisation that he unleashes here could well serve as a definitive example of his up-tempo skills; first there is the smack-on time feel, itself something of a rarity in British jazz circles; then there is the ability to think clearly at speed – not only does Hayes create a virtual web of finely detailed ideas, he even has time to interpolate the work of another British jazz “export” Dizzy Reece, whose theme Bang he quotes in his opening bars. All this serves as a reminder that Hayes was the ultimate child of modernism, brought up on legends of Charlie Parker's uncanny ability to think out his improvisations bars and bars in advance. A performance like Une Momentum makes one wonder if Hayes wasn't capable of doing the same?
Although such feats of musical derring-do were hugely impressive (and remain so to this day), by the early 1960s, Hayes often found himself hauled over the coals for being a little too willing to flash off his superior technique. Writers like Jazz News's Danny Halperin were frequently taking him to task for blowing too much for too long, or for lacking the characteristics of “genuine” modern jazz. Whether they were merely sniping (Hayes's success inevitably led the peculiarly British habit of the press disassembling the legend it had once created) or had a valid point remains open to interpretation, but something of this argument - essentially that British modernists couldn't relax - is contained within the second performance of Southern Horizons. Compare, for example, Phil Seamen's interpretation of the generic Hard Bop/Latin groove to that of Feldman. Revered as the one British drummer who, as one writer later dared to put it, sounded authentically “black” Seamen's playing had an ease to it that made him the envy of his local colleagues. However, even he comes off second-best in this instance; four years of working almost exclusively with American rhythm sections had taught Feldman lessons that no amount of long-distance, off-record training could provide. In fact, towards the end of the piece you can hear the band begin to pull away from him almost entirely, clearly interpreting their guests hip, behind-the-beat pulse as mere dragging.
Sister Sadie, the “rip-roaring” finale Kevin Henriques had written of so appreciably following the Tavistock Rooms gig that same week, also closes the Jazz Club broadcast (ahead of which the shows mellifluous-toned compère Alan Dell reveals a glittering array of fellow British jazzmen present in the studio audience). Instantly, the listener is pitched back into a time when sanctified and soul-derived sounds were the very latest in hipness. As such, both the arrangement of Horace Silver's classic theme - introduced the previous year on the genre defining Blue Note album Blowin' The Blues Away - and the ensuing string of solos sometimes tread a rather self-conscious line between authenticity and affectation. (Reviewing a Hayes recording of another gospel-ish piece around this time writer Kitty Grime raised the rather awkward point of whether British jazz men had any sort of connection to the church tradition). Nevertheless, chasing fashion was part and parcel of the music business for this generation and, with Feldman laying down the patented “Philly” lick rimshots, Eddie Blair, Keith Christie, Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Scott and Terry Shannon all set to work in preaching the message. Closing the time capsule, there's a nice back-down-to-earth BBC announcement, a reminder that for all its modernity Jazz Club continued to operate amid an atmosphere of Reithian punctiliousness.
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POST-SCRIPT: “We believe he would be happy with our efforts.”
For Jack Sharpe, the man regarded as the straw-boss of the Downbeat big band, Tubby Hayes never stopped being a hero. After Hayes's death, in an affectionate tribute penned for Melody Maker, he called his old boss “a close friend – the kind you can't afford to lose” and, following the launch of his own big band a decade later in the 1980s, he was still championing Hayes's cause, stating his aim “to perpetuate his legacy of compositions and arrangements, from which we draw inspiration to create our own identity. We believe he would be happy with our efforts.”
Naturally modest, Sharpe - a man who had both produced and performed on albums featuring such celebrated US jazz names as Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Ray Nance and Paul Gonsalves - had omitted to mention that, by providing a forum for Hayes's own writing skills back in the late 1950s, the Tubby Hayes big band whose music he now sought to keep alive had gone from a fantasy to a reality.
But then, Jack Sharpe's story, much like that of the Downbeat Club itself, is very much one of unsung achievement. The Downbeat Big Band may not be a name on everyone’s lips – it's certainly not gained a posthumous cult following like Tubby Hayes's own big band - and nor, despite its subsequent role in presenting Rhythm and Blues, Soul and Rock, has the Manor House pub quite achieved the hallowed status of the Flamingo or the Marquee - but without them both, its safe to say that the landscape of British modern jazz would now look just that little bit different.”
Simon Spillett
June 2015
This release is dedicated to the late, Jack Sharpe (1930-1994)
With grateful thanks to Dave Bishop, Tony Prior, Barbara Schwarz and the late Vic Ash.
1. Along Came Betty (Golson)
2. The Scene Is Clean (Dameron)
3. East Of The Sun (Brooks, Bowman)
4. Southern Horizons (South)
5. Blues At The Manor (South)
6. Confirmation (Parker)
7. “E” (Deuchar)
THE DOWNBEAT BIG BAND
Ronnie Scott’s Club, 39 Gerrard Street, London,
November 14th 1959
Bobby Pratt, Les Condon, Hank Shaw, Eddie Blair (trumpets); Hank Stampf* (trombone, bass trumpet); Alan Branscombe (alto sax); Tubby Hayes (tenor sax); Johnny Scott (tenor sax); Jack Sharpe (bari sax); Terry Shannon (piano); Jeff Clyne (bass); Phil Seamen (drums)
8. Ah Bah Chu (Deuchar)
9. East Of The Sun (Brooks, Bowman)
10. Confirmation (Parker)
11. Like Someone In Love (Burke, Van Heusen)
12. Une Momentum (Feldman)
13. Southern Horizons (South)
14. Sister Sadie (Silver)
THE DOWNBEAT BIG BAND
BBC “Jazz Club” Paris Theatre, London
broadcast live September 1st 1960
Bobby Pratt, Les Condon, Jimmy Deuchar, Eddie Blair (trumpets); Keith Christie (trombone); Alan Branscombe (alto sax); Tubby Hayes (tenor sax); Ronnie Scott (tenor sax); Jack Sharpe (bari sax); Terry Shannon (piano); Jeff Clyne (bass); Victor Feldman (drums)
Programme introduced by Alan Dell
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*Producers note: American trombonist Hank Stampf (sometimes misspelt Stamps) was not a regular member of the Downbeat big band but was briefly resident in the UK after touring the country with the Glenn Miller Orchestra directed by Ray McKinley. He is known to have participated in one other recording whilst in London, the album Don Carlos: Crazy Latin (Columbia 33SX 1237). He was also featured with the Denny Boyce Orchestra at the October 1959 Jazz Jamboree, held at the Gaumont State in Kilburn.
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