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Tubby Hayes: A Man In A Hurry

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Colin H on Tubby Hayes

‘A Man In A Hurry’ is a terrific documentary about British jazz great Tubby Hayes (tenor sax/flute/vibes), a short fat man (1935-73) from London who was full of energy, had world-class talent, and was incredibly prolific on record, on stage and on screen, particularly in the period from the mid-50s to the mid-60s.

When you scour 1960s Melody Makers at the British Library, as I have done periodically, for information on other fragments of culture, your eye is often drawn to things outside your remit, and for me, Tubby Hayes is one of those. It’s clear he was a big deal at the time. Somehow, he faded away toward the end of the decade and, like fellow British modern jazz greats Joe Harriott and Phil Seamen (one might add Graham Bond to that list), would die prematurely in the early 70s – all of them having to a fair extent become yesterday’s men, and at least partly through substance abuse.

I’m fascinated by 1960s British jazz, of all types, but had little knowledge of Tubby Hayes. It turns out that Mark Baxter and Lee Cogswell, producer/writer and director/editor, respectively, of this wonderful film, could say the same – or maybe only the latter half of that sentence! Baxter is a Mod/social history author and, well, a man in a hurry, or at least a man who takes on projects and drives them through, with little or no money. Cogswell looks like a Mod too, much younger and with some small experience in low budget film-making.

The ‘Meet the Film-Makers’ featurette on the DVD really adds to one’s appreciation of the film because it’s clear that the whole thing was begun on virtually no money, purely from an instinct on Baxter’s part that he should do it, having heard Tubbs’ late 50s classic ‘A Pint Of Bitter’ on a vinyl compilation, and seen through over three years with bits of money from friends and relatives. (Paul Weller, Martin Freeman and a property developer appear among the Executive Producers; Freeman narrates – very well – while the property guy, a tad oddly, gets to make a comment on-screen.) It was a voyage of discovery for the pair, in terms of both finding out about Tubby’s story and finding out about how to make a film, and the sheer cost of archive material.

Well, in a way, that may have contributed to its charm and pace, because there’s a no-let-up immediacy to the film that in itself captures something of Tubby’s relentless drive. I’ve just watched it for a second time and one notices second time through the seamless quality of the writing/editing, keeping talking-heads’ contributions lean and pithy, linking into or played over perfect visuals – stills (with subtle animation techniques to give a sense of movement), archive film of London in a given period, people rolling reefers, or film of this or that other musician who’s just been mentioned (Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, etc.), or film (and plenty of it) of Tubby himself, from TV and celluloid appearances.

There are 21 on-screen contributors, notably painter Peter Blake, poet Mike Horowitz, son Richard Hayes, Flamingo club owner Jeffrey Kruger, biographer Simon Spillett (an essential anchor throughout) and three musicians who played with Tubby – a school orchestra peer, a late period big band colleague and his final quartet’s drummer. Most other contributors are post-Tubby British jazzers or record label/broadcasting people – some useful, one or two rather marginal.

If I have any criticism it is that a few more 50s/60s musical contemporaries couldn’t have been filmed. Brian Auger, for instance, often played with Tubby in the early 60s and is a wonderful anecdotist (albeit living in California); Danny Thompson, seen in a 1967 Tubby quartet in a couple of stills, is around; Val Wilmer (whose photos are credited) knew Tubby and lives in London; there are other working/retired jazz musicians – albeit not top league players – from that era who could have helped with the tapestry (in place of two or three of the younger/not personally connected contributors).

But I know how it is to start a long-form project and have to graft to see it through, with often very fragile economics, and I recognise something of Baxter’s instinct and make-it-happen attitude.

If you’re a jazz fan, you need this film. But I’d strongly encourage anyone interested in ‘the sixties’, especially ‘Swinging London’, to buy this DVD as well. It’s a rich snapshot of that era, a time when Tubby Hayes could be seen as often on British TV as the Beatles, fronting his own series or backing musicians like Ella Fitzgerald. Don’t wait for it to appear on BBC4 – it may not. It’s implied that the guys tried to get a commission but didn’t. Still, in an ideal world, BBC4 would license it, the guys would get some of their investment back, and the channel would show an hour of ‘Tubby Hayes at the BBC’ afterwards.

I’ve yet to read Spillett’s biography, but I’ve ordered a CD of ‘Mexican Green’, regarded as Tubby’s most essential album, and his last major studio solo set toward the end of the 60s, incorporating some of the then new ideas in jazz. He died of heart issues, after a valve replacement, in 1973, but he would surely have remained a major figure creatively and critically, if perhaps not commercially (few of the great Brit jazzers of the 60s had their due in that respect), had his lifestyle not left him with a price to pay.

http://amaninahurry.london/

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Comments

    • If you’re “fascinated by 1960s British Jazz”, have you read Duncan Heining’s book “Trad Dad, Dirty Boppers and Free Fusioneers (British Jazz, 1960-75)”? I bought it to find out about Mike Taylor, with whom I’m obsessed, and it introduced me to a whole load of great music and context. Highly recommended.

      And since I’m on a mission from god …

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51thObVNurI

      • I have, Dwight. I’ve also read John Wickes’ ‘Innovations In British Jazz: 1960-75’ (1999), Ian Carr’s ‘Music Outside: Contemporary Jazz in Britain’ (1973), Jim Godbolt’s ‘A History of Jazz in Britain 1919-50, Trevor Barre’s ‘Beyond Jazz: Plink, Plonk and Scratch: The Golden Age of Free Music in London 1966-72’ (2015) and memoirs by/biographies of various progressive Brit jazzers of that era (Graham Bond, Jon Hiseman, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, Georgie Fame) – although there are far fewer of these than there should be, in comparison with mainstream jazzers of the same period (Dankworth, Lyttelton, Melly, Gobbolt, etc).

        You might enjoy my book on John McLaughlin – two-thirds of it is on London’s rich tapestry of musical scenes in the 60s. I occasionally ponder writing another jazz-focused book on that era but I’m enjoying a novel period of making enough money to live at the moment, doing something else. I might continue for a while!

  2. It’s the way you tell them, Colin. I suspect there are few musical topics that would not become interesting in your hands.

    But I am already very interested in what was happening in popular music in the 60s so I really must try and get hold of this. Perhaps @duco01 and I should have a TV evening together: don berets, drink cheap red wine, chainsmoke Gitanes and watch it?

    The story of how the film was made is as interesting as the subject matter.

    Here’s Tubby with Suddenly last Tuesday from 1965.

    • You’re very kind, Fats, but this is about Bax & Cogswell, not me!

      Funny you should mention having listening/viewing evenings – I’ve recently bought some new audio gear (first time in 20 years); bluetooth (blu-tooth? who knows…) turntable, Ruarc speakers (fantastic, with built in amp), and a Cambridge Audio CD separate. No amplifier necessary. I’ve just put a jazz LP on and I was thinking, ‘I wonder if I have any friends who might like to come round and have an evening of listening and bonhomie?’ I’m not sure that I do, sadly.

    • I think this is the one where Steve Race makes some monstrously patronising remarks about ‘beat combo’ guitar players in one of his intros.

      At least one other shows in the series is notable in featuring future Mahavishnu Orchestra bassist Rick Laird.

    • Who could forget Steve Race’s pop music by numbers introduction to the Beatles’ “Our World” performance of All You Need Is Love?

      “This is Steve Race in the Beatles’ recording studio in London, where the latest Beatle record is at this moment being built up. Not just a single performance, but a whole montage of performances. With some friends in to help the atmosphere, this is quite an occasion.

      “There’s several days’ work on that tape. For perhaps the hundredth time, the engineer runs it back to the start, to yet another stage in the making of an almost-certain hit record. The supervisor is George Martin, the musical brain behind all the Beatles’ records. There’s the orchestra coming into the studio now, and you’ll notice that the musicians are not rock & roll youngsters. The Beatles get on best with symphony men.”

  8. 60s British jazz is my core interest, Colin, so thanks for the review. I got the DVD as soon as it was released and agree with every word. I’ve also read the Simon Spillett biography which fills in a lot of the details of Tubby’s life. Pretty much anything by Tubby is worth a listen but if you want to hear him in a big band context then ‘100% Proof’ is the one to go for.
    I absolutely agree that delving into 60s British jazz provides a greater insight into London life of the time in particular. There was a great little short film, which I think was shown as part of an 80s ‘Jazz Night’ on BBC 2 called ‘The Street’, where a group of jazzers like Ronnie Scott, Hank Shaw etc gather in Ronnie Scott’s club to look at old home movies of 50s and 60s Soho and musicians (including Tubby). Very funny as well as historically fascinating:

    • Great stuff JazzJet – I’ll watch it later. One sees clips from these silent films in various documentaries – I didn’t know their provenance (Dennis Rose) before.

  9. As mentioned on the Fellini thread, I’m rather fascinated by those serious young men and women who went to jazz gigs in the early 60s. To be in their mid-twenties, they would all have lived through WW2. Probably they had been sent out of London to live in the safety of the countryside.

    Was there any jazz on the radio?

    How did they find out about jazz gigs? Where were the gigs? (100 Club or the Marquee?).

    No TV so they probably were lout and about a lot. A new French film at an art house cinema. Beyond the Fringe at the theatre. A gig at the 100 Club.

    But as we know from Philip Larkin, sex had not yet been invented:

    Sexual intercourse began
    In nineteen sixty-three
    (which was rather late for me) –
    Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
    And the Beatles’ first LP.

    Up to then there’d only been
    A sort of bargaining,
    A wrangle for the ring,
    A shame that started at sixteen
    And spread to everything.

    • I think the world of communication pre mobile telephones, let alone pre internet, is almost impossible for us to understand now (although personally I’ve never had a mobile phone). But the world worked perfectly well (is the short answer).

      There was an ‘R&B boom’ in Britain – chronicled by the Melody Maker – during 1963 when within months dozens of clubs up and down the country that had previously been platforms for jazz (trad or modern) went over partly of wholly to the new R&B sound. The Graham Bond Quartet (1963) and then Organisation paved the way, the Rolling Stones had the first significant hit and thereafter all is well known.

      The 100 Club had previously been called Jazzshows’ Jazz Club (run by an agency called Jazzshows) – not a name anyone remembers – before changing its name and giving over some of its nights to R&B. The Marquee was once wholly jazz in policiy (part-owned from the start and then throughout the 60s by trad jazzer Chris Barber), before beginning a one or two night per week R&B evening, initially split between Big Pete Deuchar (a trad jazz chancer and previous employer of John McLaughlin in his late 50s band the Professors of Ragtime, who was ahead of the curve in spotting the R&B trend and was pretending he was a blueser) and the embryonic Manfred Mann.

      The Marquee continued putting on jazz on one night a week (Saturdays, from memory – ie memory of research – I wasn’t there) through the 60s – the 100 Club was more loyal to modern jazz, with most nights remaining jazz – yet this has been largely airbrushed out of its story or forgotten about. Tony Bacon left out all the jazz gigs from his Marquee listing in his ‘London Live’ book, for inastance.

      The BBC gave significant airtime to jazz in the 60s, with lots of live sessions from British mainstream/modernists and, from 1966, from the younger generation including ‘free’ players like John Stevens, Howard Riley, et al. Of course, they all complained at the time that there wasn’t enough etc etc. But if they had a crystal ball they would have realised it was a golden age.

    • I think it’s been mentioned somewhere else but Pete Frame’s ‘The Restless Generation’ is well worth reading to get a better understanding of post war pop culture in London (mainly) and the rest of the UK.

  11. A “jazz-related favour”? That sounds seriously dodgy, Colin. The admins will be down on you like a ton of bricks!! We all know that those jazz clubs are dens of vice.

    Thanks for your interesting comments about how the jazz clubs gradually went over to R & B. Many of the jazzers also changed genre too, realising that there was more money to be made. And their musicianship was a great boom to many emerging rock bands.

    Thanks for the book tips @jazzjet and @dwightstrut.

    Here’s a piece about the Frame book.

    http://justbackdated.blogspot.se/2014/07/pete-frame-restless-generation.html

    It quotes the odious Steve Race, who hosted Jazz 625.

    “Viewed as a social phenomenon, the current craze for rock and roll is one of the most terrifying things ever to have happened to popular music,” wrote Steve Race in Melody Maker in 1956. “The promotion and acceptance of the rock and roll cult is a monstrous threat… Let us oppose it to the end.”

  12. 1. Cheers for the Tubby Hayes documentary recommendation. I may well get it.

    2. I like the illustration on the front cover of the DVD

    3. Martin Freeman would appear to have impeccable taste in music.

    4. Talking of jazz DVDs, I’ve been waiting for a DVD release of “My Name is Albert Ayler” for years now. This documentary had a limited cinema release ages ago (which I missed), and then … nothing. Has any Afterworder seen the film?
    It can’t be easy to make a documentary about a musician of whom no film footage exists…

    • 1. Well, I did indeed buy the Tubby Hayes DVD. I watched it last week, and it is indeed a little cracker, beautifully put together. Nice to see John Simons being interviewed – I bought a jacket from his store earlier this year!
      I just wish the film had been half an hour longer, but I suppose one shouldn’t complain.

      2. I see that, gratifyingly, my final statement in no.4 above is no longer true. Two or three minutes of actual footage of Albert Ayler performing (in 1966) has now surfaced on YouTube and elsewhere.

      And here it is:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-q3h7QwWNc

    • Ha!

      Presumably you found this blog after googling Johnny Trunks, you brazen hussy.

      While I’m here, the music blog Gertie Grunties this week carries an essay on Roy Castle’s tonguing technique.

  14. Thanks Mini! There are also two new Tubby releases. I didn’t want to clutter the AW with a whole string of Tubby Hayes threads, but I’ll mention them here.

    The first one, out last month, is ‘Split Kick: Live in Sweden 1972’, with a terrific booklet by Simon Spillett. For anyone not sure if audience recordings of late period Tubby shows are the best way in, fear not! This one is a pristine recording drawn from two Swedish radio concerts at either end of 1972. Tubby died in 1973, and his last album proper was 1967’s ‘Mexican Green’ so this is a fantastic opportunity to hear what he could do in the ‘dark ages’ in perfect sound, with two different local rhythm sections, including some now well-known players. Here’s the link:

    The second one is out in November – an even later live recording, purporting to be his last known recording (as band leader). Here is the press release:

    Acrobat Records are to release the final known live recording of the Tubby Hayes Quartet in November.

    ‘Invitation: Live at the Top Alex’ is culled from tapes recorded at a Southend hostelry in March 1973, barely three months before Hayes’ tragic death, aged 1973.

    Packaged with rare photographs taken at the venue and an extensive booklet essay by Hayes’ biographer, saxophonist Simon Spillett, including the memories of those at the gig, such as the Hayes bands drummer Spike Wells and audience member Digby Fairweather, this issue is, according to Spillett “one of the most significant finds of the entire Tubby canon.”
    Acrobat have previously issued several unearthed Hayes performances, including sessions with Tony Lee and the Downbeat Big Band, but Invitation marks a very special moment for Hayes.
    “This was one of the last gigs performed by Tubby’s ‘classic’ late quartet, which played together on only a handful of gigs that year,” says Spillett. “Not only that, it is currently thought to be the last ever recording of Tubby leading his own group. After March 1973, there were a few radio broadcasts in bands led by others but that was it.”

    Spillett aligns the release to Coltrane’s posthumously issued Olantunji Concert, released in 2001: “This could be called Tubby’s Olatunji moment. It’s the last time we get to hear him take his own group through a repertoire of his choice, in his own direction.
    The music reflects both his past and his present and gives some clues as to where he may have headed next. It’s literally the final stop on his musical journey.”

    Tubby Hayes Quartet – Invitation: Live at the Top Alex (Acrobat ACMCD 4391) is issued in November.

    http://acrobatmusic.net/?cid=5&AlbumId=1087

  15. Tubby Hayes, along with the likes of Mssrs Brubeck, Dankworth and Mingus, appears in the 1962 “Othello with jazz” film All Night Long…can’t remember whether he gets a solo spot, or just lingers in the background.

  16. Sorry if this has already been mentioned but….

    I used to have a cassette of the Tubbster called “For Members Only” (hurhurhur). I think it was BBC recordings from the mid-60s… very good too. Very funky flute on one track at least.

    Is this stuff available digitally these days? I’d look, but it might be a needle in a Hayes-stack.

    Hoi! That’s my shin!

    • I have For Members Only on second hand CD (not expensive) – it is indeed 1967 BBC sessions (cunningly disguised/not mentioned, like the Ian Hamer 2CD ‘Acropolis’, which features Tubbs on most of the fantastic late 60s/early 70s sessions therein).

      Incidentally, Tubbs plays fabulous flute on two of the ‘Split Kick: Live In Sweden’ tracks.

      • Split Kick! I know that by Max Roach with Clifford Brown (another one gone wayyyy too young)

        Swedish radio is a bit of a goldmine in terms of jazz, as I recall. When I was over there in 99-00 you could get some pretty good stuff by major artists over the counter in Konsum and the like. It looked like bootlegs.

        “Right luv, I’m off tert’ shops for some herring, lingonberries and Dexter Gordon”

          • “….Take me back…. swingin’ out of Ikea with some meatballs and a Startbox… Icicles.. ICICLES formin’ in me nostrils… all afternoon swearing puttin’ together a Billy with an Allen key, then down to the Pressbyrån for a six pack of Pripps… the sound of the Hives comin’ through the ether… on the phone to Telia internet customer service… take me back… all night in the Tvättstuga with a tin of Snus stinkin’ out the room… Ingvar, Ingvar, Ingvar Kamprad, let your inspiration flow…”

            • Ahem… here’s one I prepared earlier (i.e. it was on aprevious Sweden-themed thread)…

              ‘Goin’ down to the Stockholm archipelago, playin’ R’n’B an’ hardanger fiddle wi’ Duco an’ Locust an’ kaisfatdadKaisfatdadKaisfatdad… Eatin’ fermented potted herring an’ almondy pies an’ blueberry soup – blåbärssoppablåbärssoppablåbärssoppa… Pasty suppers wi’ lingonberry jam an’ cabbage rolls – kåldolmar, ärtsoppa, smörgåsbord smörgåsbord, pancakes an’ crayfish, Wallenbergare, Kroppkakor, Korv Stroganoff, GrisfötterGrisfötterGrisfötter – an’ a Paris bun in case we get famished… Playin’ Celtic soul wi’ Ingrid Bergman, Ulrika Jonsson an’ Saint Bridget – Agnetha Fältskog an’ Emanuel Swedenborg comin’ through the ether, comin’ through the erther, Radio Luxembourg, Helvetia, Sunne och Torsby Radio Fryksdalen 100, Stockholm Järva och Västerorts närradioförening Spånga och Vällingby 90, timmy Mallett, TIMMY MALLETT, ED STEWART, DAVE CASH DAVE CASH ELTON WELLESBY BO HANSSON TOM BOMBADIL ARTHUR ASKEY SVEN GOREN ERIKKSEN THAT GUY IN THE MUPPETS THAT GUY IN THE MUPPETS!!!!!

              Take me way back – the days before rock’n’roll, rock’n’roll, Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie, Olof Skötkonung, Karl Gustav von Wrangel, Raoul Wallenberg – who are these people? Who are these people? I SAID WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?!!?!”

              (continues for several hours; appears in 2030 on deluxe 6CD box set ‘We Tried But We Couldn’t Stop Him Now: Live in Sweden’)

  17. Mention of Chris Barber and The Marquee led me to this:

    Family – Old Songs New Songs from Music In A Doll’s House. Tubby leads the Jazz backing from the halfway point.

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