Simon Spillett

It was with great sadness that the British jazz community learned of the sudden and totally unexpected death of bassist Jeff Clyne earlier this week, aged 72.

Other online obituaries have already outlined Jeff's enormous contribution to jazz in this country, but suffice to say that in a career stretching back over half a century his impressive CV  included stints with The Jazz Couriers, an appearance on the seminal Stan Tracey recording of Under Milk Wood, avant-garde adventures with John Stevens Spontaneous Music Ensemble and opening up the roads of fusion and jazz-rock with Nucleus and Turning Point. Latterly Clyne had devoted much of his time to education, imparting fifty years of jazz wisdom to a new generation of young performers.

On a personal note, I got to know Jeff about five years ago and since that initial meeting we've occupied the same stage together several times, as well as sharing some wonderful social times. Indeed, Jeff was above all, a beautiful human being, kind, warm, enthusiastic and with that rare quality of total humility coupled with a formidable musical gift. If I write that, alongside his artistic gifts, Jeff was at heart an "ordinary bloke" it isn't at all meant to imply any sort of mundanity. Rather, he was a supreme example of a world-class musician who never lost sight that it is people and not isolated egos that make music. Indeed, Jeff would sometimes call me for no other reason that to hear how I was doing, something I never really got my head around. Hang on, this was Jeff Clyne, he of Milk Wood, The Couriers and all that, the guy who played on one of my favourite albums, The Couriers of Jazz.

Jeff and I played together at several venues through the last few years, the odd private function (I once played a seventieth birthday party with Jeff, Allan Ganley and Brian Dee and I still marvel at the tales these three legendary figures exchanged in between the background chatter), the 606 club, Ealing Festival and, most often, the Coach and Horses in Isleworth, a gig run by his close friend, drummer Trevor Tomkins which Jeff appeared at with almost residency-style frequency and which, with supreme irony, he had taken on after the original bassist Phil Bates had become too ill to perform. Close to forty-eight years earlier, Clyne had also taken over from Bates in the Jazz Couriers.

I heard the news of Jeff's passing just as I was editing a chapter of my biography of Tubby Hayes in which I drew heavily upon an interview I'd conducted with him in 2007, detailing his time in Tubby's quartet during 1959 to 1961. He made a great interviewee, commenting time and again on his apparent "luck" at finding favour with Tubby. What Tubby heard, as indeed did all of Jeff's musical colleagues, was an accuracy and sense of time rare among British bassists of the era. In fact one of the last times I spoke to Jeff it was concerning the discovery of a recording of Tubby's quartet from 1959, which I was able to send to him, and which he was delighted to hear for the first time after fifty years.

But Jeff never became a misty-eyed nostalgic. "I've always wanted to be up with what's happening" he once told me and he was just as enthusiastic about the latest young players and the diversity of today's jazz scene as he was when recalling how he'd once moved effortlessly from Blossom Dearie's trio to the Spontaneous Music Ensemble in the space of a single evening.

There's tons of Jeff on record and I'm not going to close with a potted discography but rather with a nod to a few of my favourite performances of his: Blossom Time at Ronnie's with Blossom Dearie, Experiments with Pops by Gordon Beck's trio, Split The Difference by Splinters and, of course, Tubby's Groove by Tubby Hayes.

Jeff Clyne (29th January 1937 - 16th November 2009)