Count Basie band playing Neal Heafti. About 1958. You can tell they've taken a page from the bop players but this is still a swing band. And they do.

Nor do I.  He’s my all-time favorite drummer, and Zeppelin among my favorite bands.   Pure magic.

Scott Hamilton Quartet - went to see them last night ... excellent!

I was wearing a Navy linen John Simons suit, pale blue Brooks seersucker shirt, Madras pocket square and Allen Edmonds tan grain loafers without any socks.


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e-lMInCArls

I don't much about Jazz, but it always seems better when it's played by old blokes in suits.

Taxi Driver Theme - Yusuke Hirado

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lEqkn1qWKps

Just arrived this morning - Tubby Hayes - Grits, Beans And Greens

https://shop.decca.com/*/*/Grits-Beans-And-Greens-The-Lost-Fontana-Studio-Sessions-1969/65RQ0000000

Last night went we went to see Simon Spillet’s quartet at the Bulls Heads at Barnes and they were excellent. I was wearing a stone colored Keydge cotton jacket over John Simons chinos and madras shirt with Sander suede loafers. The Bulls Head serves a good pint of Youngs Special. There you are, clothes, jazz and beer all covered by this post.

Many of the tunes were a tribute to Tubby Hayes of whom Spillet has been a lifelong devotee, to the extent that he researched and wrote a biography of Hayes called the Long Shadow of the Little Giant. During my researches I found this review of the book on the Jazzviews website, I thought that it was an interesting read in itself with its observations on British jazz in the 50s:

THE LONG SHADOW OF THE LITTLE GIANT
The Life, Work and Legacy of Tubby Hayes

By Simon Spillett

Published by Equinox

‘It wasn’t Birdland or The Village Gate or the Five Spot. It was: The Hopbine; The Dancing Slipper Nottingham; The Hope and Anchor; The Bulls Head at Barnes; The Flamingo; The Dog and Fox, Wimbledon; The Greenman, Blackheath; Dopey Dick’s Jazzhouse, Hampstead; The Little Theatre in Rochester.

Tubby Hayes played in all of them with braggadocio, finesse, and at times with almost bewildering speed.  During the fifties and sixties he dominated jazz in the UK.  Simon Spillett who was born (1974) the year after Hayes died has captured Hayes’s life in forensic detail with a biography that not only illuminates the life and the music but also the social history of the time.  Spillett’s skill as a writer gives the story a compelling narrative drive as Hayes, in Ronnie Scott’s words, burnt through the candle at both ends.

Spillett skilfully portrays the background of England in the 1950s and 1960s without interrupting the flow of his account.  Only by understanding that era can the pressures that bore down on Hayes be understood.  There was the exhaustion of a culture that had bankrupted itself to defeat the Nazis and was now, ‘A tatty lion presiding over a crumbling empire.’ Its poverty of aspirations is thrown into relief by the affluence of the American society.  In Britain, Spillett claims, ‘there was a deep cynicism that that the true victor (of the Second World War) hadn’t been the British people but the American economy’. 

Trying to understand the character and parochialism, at that time, of jazz in the UK, Spillett writes: ‘Copying the latest American licks was one thing, but English jazzmen didn’t really have much in the way of anything social to rebel against – the fierce demonstrative undertow that had fuelled much of the music’s progress in America simply had no UK counterpart. Charles Mingus could happily lampoon and demolish a figure like Governor Faubus (central to the Rosa Parks and Little Rock Nine incidents) but what did London’s jazzmen have to protest about at the end of the 1950s: early closing time on Sunday nights?  Blue Boar Services?’

The one musician, Spillett notes, who attempted to go his own way at that time was Joe Harriott.  His radical music was not well understood by audiences or players:  innovation rather than emulation.  Too far ahead of his time, Harriott was a lonely figure.   For Tubby Hayes, ‘inextricably bound by the terms of American jazz, such experiments seemed little more than a rebellious tantrum.’

Over laying everything, at that time in the UK, was the dominance of American jazz.  The players were intimidated, audiences saw the local musicians as inferior. Tubby Hayes was intent on proving that he was an equal.  Spillett notes that often Hayes would attempt to emulate, at different times, Getz, Griffin, Coltrane.

Obviously an admirer of Hayes, Spillett sees his subject critically.  The betrayals in Hayes’s personal life are explored, as well as the unflattering views from critics that Hayes as a soloist was glib, merely concerned with pouring out flurries of notes at high speed or, as one critic described his solos, ‘running on the spot’.

One of the key parts of the book is the description of the juncture in the sixties when the UK changed. The Beatles came along and produced popular American based music but with a British accent and when Michael Caine and Mary Quant showed that you could be true to yourself and make it.  ‘Britain could be a serious contender, rather than simply a pallid emulator.’

Spillett writes that Hayes ‘like many of his peers, had largely persisted in contriving to be a jazz musician on American terms.’   And that ‘somewhere within the ostensibly gritty language of hard bop that he had assimilated so well by the early 1960s lay a Britain of post-war dreariness, rainy one-nighters and transport cafes, a world away from New York’s searing hipness.’

There is humour in the book. Paul Desmond on the first tour of the Brubeck Quartet goes into a transport cafe asking if he can see the wine list!   Stan Getz intrigued all saxophone players, ‘One night the mystery of his other worldly tone looked like it might be cracked. The saxophonist had left his tenor in the club’s tiny office to step outside for a cigarette and, seated around the instrument, curiosity got the better of Hayes, Ronnie Scott, Stan Robinson and several others, who all took turns to play the horn and found it disappointingly ordinary!

One criteria of a music biography is:  does it make you want to listen to the music?  It does.  Spillett writes in a way that will enhance understanding of the key recordings such as ‘Tubby’s Groove’, ‘Mexican Green’ and ‘100% Proof’.  He also writes about the many recordings from clubs that have appeared in recent years.  Spillett’s playing background make his insights into the music particularly valuable.

By setting Hayes firmly in the context of his time, Spillett enables us to see a man who created some extraordinary music.  ‘His roots were in the same suburbia that most of us know and have experienced all of our lives, not in the steaming pressure cooker of New York, or the hallowed halls of academic jazz study.  For me at least, this has been the biggest inspirational aspect of Hayes’s career, the fact that the UK could produce an international contender – a player once described as  ‘Britain’s own Saxophone Colossus’- through sheer hard graft alone. ‘

This is a great, rich book of jazz writing which will stand comparison with any jazz biographies from the past.  Hopefully, its very Englishness will not obscure its virtues.’

Just reading (in passing) about Lee Konitz, who my late father saw playing in a pub in an obscure Leicestershire village.  Such, I'd guess, has often been the fate of jazz players.  I'm pretty sure he caught Tubby Hayes live at some point - the 'Dancing Slipper' gig is pretty well-known.
I picked up a Hayes CD for about 35p recently, played it, disliked it enormously, donated it to Oxfam and saw it on offer there yesterday afternoon at £9.99.
As Michael Caine might or might not have said, the best of British to them.  But I suspect it'll be there the next time I drop in.