In the late summer of 1963, ‘Jazz News and Review’, by some measure the most insightful of the tiny handful of British jazz periodicals of the day, published an interview with Tubby Hayes conducted by a young female jazz writer then just beginning to hit her stride, Valerie (later more commonly known simply as Val) Wilmer. Already demonstrating her knack for eliciting illuminating responses from those she buttonholed, a talent that was to grow exponentially over the following decade, Wilmer’s piece captured Hayes ranging freely on all manner of subject matter dear to him; his recent disappointment with John Coltrane; his innate suspicion of the avant-garde; his appreciation of New York’s musical opportunities; even the loaded question, much debated at the time, of whether white jazzmen could ever truly be said to possess ‘soul.’ She also pinned him down on his immediate plans, which were mooted to include a wholesale evacuation to the America. ‘I’ve got so much work that I think I might as well stay in Europe,’ he confessed. ‘My name seems to be getting better known on the Continent and also I’ve got a wife and child and another on the way to consider.’
History, of course, would soon record the dysfunctional aspects of Hayes’ personal life (that same year he began a cat-and-mouse flirtation that would eventually escalate to wreck his marriage). On ‘the Continent’ though, his thoughts were firmly realistic. Europe would, indeed had, become a valuable platform for his work. In 1963 alone he’d visited Norway and Germany twice, while over the preceding four years there had been working trips to Sweden, France and Italy, each helping fly the flag of British jazz that much more visibly. International ‘stardom’ hadn’t obviated all his critics though. To his fans Hayes was an unassailable success story – a Little Giant striding out onto the global stage in seven league boots. To others he was less an ambassador than an irritant, whose sheer ubiquity raised the blood, his virtuoso instrumental execution and superhuman consistency not admirable but annoying. ‘I am never so bored as when Hayes goes into his long, frantic solos at the [Ronnie Scott] club,’ observed one peevish reviewer. ‘He seems to spend a lot of time, a lot of energy and a lot of sweat saying nothing of worth, and although one must grant his great technical ability, his sets are just there to fill in time.’
Such opposition couldn’t ever really hope to stop the Hayes roadshow from steaming onward. ‘He knows exactly what he’s doing and where he is going,’ the ‘Sunday Telegraph’s Peter Clayton wrote of him in 1964, the year in which he made his first, and what transpired to be its only, stop over in Spain, playing a short season at the Indigo Club in Palma, Majorca that July-August.
We know a little about this trip from Hayes himself, who recorded his memories of it in a hand-written autobiographical account of his life penned in the late 1960s, which surfaced ten or so years ago. These tell us that although the gig had given him in further international jazz exposure it had simultaneously spelled the beginning of the end of his marriage to his second wife, Rose, who’d briefly accompanied him on the trip before fleeing home to London. Volatility, it was said, had reared its head, as it had so often done throughout the Tubby-Rose union, though this time the damage was less easily papered over. When Hayes himself flew back to the UK he did not return to his family, thus beginning his spiral towards still more calamity.
All this made for a less than edifying autumn to what had been a truly remarkable year, even by Hayes’ standards of achievement, beginning with a much-applauded ‘sit in’ with the Duke Ellington Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall, the making of his first big band album ‘Tubbs’ Tours’ and six weeks of filming for a forthcoming feature film, ‘Dr. Terrors House of Horrors’, soon to become the celluloid representation of his charismatic talents. Set beside such high profile victories, a few weeks’ blowing with a resident rhythm section in a tiny club on an overseas island might not have appeared of any great importance. But then, as with all things Tubby Hayes, there was a story there too, not just of marital breakdown, but also of music made in some surprising locations, and of new friendships forged. Indeed, for all the familiarity of the guest-soloist format, the trip to Palma was never destined to be just another gig. The Indigo’s unique provenance had seen to that.
Opening in August 1963, in premises that had begun life as a man-made cave converted into a garage, the Indigo was an unlikely oasis for jazz. Launched by Catalan drummer Ramón Farran, whose trio accompanied the club’s guest soloists, the venue’s survival through its first year had been against long odds. Partly inspired to start his venture by a visit to Ronnie Scott’s original basement club in Gerrard Street, W1., Farran faced almost identical challenges to the man he was aping, as an English newspaper article published to mark the club’s first anniversary made clear. As at Ronnie’s passing trade often spent more time passing than trading. Bills were paid but only just. Things hung permanently in the balance. Audiences could be sketchy. Visiting tourists ‘their evenings planned with...Butlin’s-like precision’ had ‘lost all initiative to chose [entertainment] for themselves’ ‘Revellie’s Bunny Lewis reported, with cynical observation of the peculiar characteristics of the various nationalities that fitfully darkened the Indigo’s door, the Germans (‘notoriously lacking in taste’) and the French (‘concerned with their stomachs’) especially. Only the Americans and English showed any real appreciation of the endeavour set before them. The locals, Lewis revealed predictably, as if writing about the jazz audience back in London, were ‘indifferent.’
Fortunately, there existed those who saw only positives within the whole idea, and who’d back it to the hilt come what may, including one especially noteworthy individual whose patronage leant the enterprise an air of immutable gravitas. Ramón Farran was the engaged to – and would soon marry – Lucia Graves, the daughter of author and poet Robert Graves, the literary titan who had gifted the world ‘I, Claudius’, who had lived at Canelluñ, the idyllic home he’d built in Deià, a pretty village on the island’s north-west coast, since the late 1920s. It was Graves, Bunny Lewis revealed, ‘who had used his influence to get [the Indigo’s] license extended until 2am.’
Those who knew the author well were hardly surprised at such a practical interest. Scholarly and formidably intellectual, Graves was also preternaturally hip, with a deep respect for the behind-the-scenes ‘ephemera’ that periodically stimulated creative art. Such openness would fitfully shock the unsuspecting. One of his son-in-law’s guests, Ronnie Scott, was more than a little taken aback by Graves query of ‘what’s the pot situation like in London these days?’ upon their initial meeting.
The old man could be jarring in other ways too. According to Scott’s biographer, John Fordham, when confronted with his extensive library (‘he seemed...to have written most of them himself’), the saxophonist sheepishly confessed he’d tried writing too, but found it difficult in the extreme. ‘Of course you will,’ Graves boomed back, ‘unless you’re God’.
The company the writer kept was equally intimidating. ‘They had all read so much, and they were so funny, but with a sense of humour impenetrably dependent on knowledge and an education Scott hadn’t had the benefit of,’ observed Fordham. Regardless, the saxophonist was drawn to Graves’ natural energy, which burst ceaselessly from within despite his advancing years. Who couldn’t feel affected by such a force?
And what then might Tubby Hayes have made of such company, given his own inexhaustible reservoirs of energy? Indeed, beyond those distressing revelations of a failing marriage, what did the saxophonist find in Palma that far off summer, sixty-two years ago? An enthusiastic audience, mere novelty, or maybe a few fleeting moments of beauty and enlightenment? Does the story put Hayes in Canelluñ too, alongside the literati, taking his nightclub brand of art into a quite different cultural environment? Did he too come to Deià as one person and leave, as others have remarked of the experience, somehow transformed? The questions and the possibilities pile up. What more might lie behind the thumbnail sketch that is our existing picture of those two weeks that summer? And who might be able, six decades later, to help us see that much broader canvas?
Contemporary sources don’t tell us much. Bunny Lewis’ piece in ‘Reveille’, written during Hayes stint at the Indigo, is almost purely press-fluff (‘Inside I found that rotunda of British jazz...having a blow’) and the few surviving photographs from the engagement reveal little – just jazzmen in shirtsleeves playing it up for the camera. There exists one photo that’s less opaque though, showing Hayes, his jacket still on, standing almost dejectedly in front of his accompanists, his forlorn look a jolting reminder that there existed, beyond those characterful wide-smiling shots that capture his legend, a far deeper, far more layered individual, one whose every professional accomplishment came to some degree at a very human cost.
Like their guest that July-August Ramon Farran’s colleagues in the trio were both Englishmen, lured from London in that high summer of Beatle-mania by the prospect of consistent work, in one place, in good company and in a climate – both musical and otherwise – that promised something restoratively healthy. Pianist Johnny Mealing had even left a regular band to make the gig, ceding his chair in the fast-evolving maverick quintet of tenorist Don Rendell and trumpeter Ian Carr to Colin Purbrook. The trio’s bassist, Ron Rubin, a figure like many rhythm section players of the day less tethered to one jazz style (he played piano too) had likewise made the trip to Spain as a fugitive from a well-regarded group, that of clarinettist Sandy Brown. The timing had been absolutely right. What work there had been for Brown’s group was fast descending into the absurd; shortly before Rubin’s departure for Palma they’d participated in a disastrous live radio broadcast from the Ideal Home Exhibition, hardly a natural habitat for the common-or-garden jazzman. Beat music was pushing jazz into ever tighter corners, making life for any musician not sold on the idea of screaming teenaged hysteria ever more difficult. The moment had come to try your luck somewhere else, somewhere new. In Rubin’s case the commitment was total; his wife Marie and their two young children were coming with him too. Bridges to London were unceremoniously yet quite willingly burned away.
Rubin, who passed away, aged 86, in 2020, would later write himself into the affections of the British jazz public with his skill at penning highly amusing limericks (he eventually published three volumes of these); his wit and speed of thought were not solely focused on the written page though. A Liverpudlian by birth, he’d been in a position to see the transition of the city’s Cavern Club from Trad jazz venue to spawning ground of Northern beat, before heading to the capital at the dawn of the Sixties to begin a playing career as diverse as it was lengthy. Over a span of forty-five years he performed with an eclectic array of jazz talent, from touring Americans such as Henry ‘Red’ Allen and Ray Nance to indigenous avant-gardists like the enigmatic pianist Mike Taylor and jazz-poetry pioneer Michael Horovitz. A lengthy stay with the fitfully surreal George Melly-John Chilton axis only served to prove his remarkable adaptability. A thinking man’s jazz musician, much like Melly, Rubin possessed the rare ability to translate the quick-witted responses of a working performer into prose. And while the limericks captured his lightning-fast mind making merry for the reader’s momentary entertainment, his surviving long-form writing displays a far wider degree of emotion. Late in life, he penned an as-yet-unpublished autobiography ‘Jottings From A Jazzman’s Journal’, fleshing out decades’ worth of contemporaneous diary entries with hindsight-fuelled reflection. Writing about jazz music is rarely so focused or balanced. Composed by a gifted wordsmith, these memoirs are a genuine joy to read, alternating candour, humour and a certain wistfulness to winning effect. Would that they could find a suitable publishing house.
Freelance jazz journalist Matthew Wright recently shared with the author several excepts from these ‘jottings’, specifically those concerning the bassist’s time at the Indigo, which are, as with all his anecdotal writing, funny, touching and revealing in equal measure. And while they largely confirm what we know of Tubby Hayes’ one and only Spanish sojourn, they also add to that story a far broader narrative – that of Rubin’s own musical journey, and of the refreshing perspective gained from abandoning the tight face-fitting cliques of early-Sixties jazz London. Even more intriguing, they catch the contrasting life enjoyed by a young man suddenly pitched into an entirely different cultural/intellectual milieu. One moment Rubin is playing a London jazz venue with (he discovers in horror) a ‘whites only policy’ the next he’s drinking wine with a man who wrote that ‘civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought.’ It makes for quite a jump cut..
Work at the Indigo, Rubin reveals, began on Thursday April 9th 1964. ‘The island’s first jazz club’, he records ‘was originally a cave tunnelled out of the rocky hillside and had been used as a garage and later to stable a donkey’ (Bunny Lewis ‘Reveille’ piece is titled ‘Caveman Ramon Jazzes Up Majorca’).
‘For six months we worked five hours a night, seven days a week; wages £15 a week,’ he writes, outlining a job equal parts regular income and artistic wish-fulfilment. Despite the gruelling workload ‘this is where I matured as a bass player, and I loved every minute.’
‘My fingers [became] as tough as steel,’ he recalls. ‘I could play any tempo all night – and of course bass players didn’t use amplifiers in those days.’ Even a visiting Julian Bream, we learn, finds his technique admirable.
The trio’s leader had built up his stamina too, sometimes displaying it at extreme length.
‘He [sometimes] took ridiculously long solos,’ Rubin remembered. ‘John M[ealing] and I used to time them – the longest was 23 minutes, so we started sloping off to the bar next door for a snifter or two. Ramón protested that we ought to stay on the bandstand to give him moral support…’
Rubin also remembered that the club, small and atmospheric though it was was ‘pretty sweaty, especially in mid-summer. There was one crummy old electric fan on top of the piano which played a loud F#, so I had to turn it off. I lost a stone in weight during my six months there.’
Life beyond the club’s walls seemed brighter. He writes fondly of Robert Graves and his family (‘everyone calls him Robert’), recalling that house guests at Deià included among their number fellow writers Alan Sillitoe and wife Ruth Fainlight, and on one memorable occasion the irascible Kingsley Amis. Touchingly, he notes the utter naturalness of Graves’ children, who lovingly interacted his own son and daughter, Dominic and Deborah, as if they too were family. He gifts records by Charles Mingus to Graves’ son Juan; Lucia reads stories aloud; long afternoons pass in sunshine and laughter, within an Eden set among ‘the surrounding slopes covered with fig trees and orange and lemon orchards.’
Of Graves himself, like Ronnie Scott, Rubin saw only unbound energy. ‘Trouble with you, Ron, is that you’ve got pavement legs’, the writer upbraided him one afternoon as they wound down through the almond and olive groves to the sea. Physical shaming of his unfit guests wasn’t the only critique on offer; Graves was also unafraid to loose off on the work of other literary notables. ‘Flabby, too flabby’ was his verdict on John Betjeman, to pick one victim. Nor was ‘stardom’ something he courted, confessing to Rubin that he’d turned down an acting role in the John Huston film, ‘The Night of The Iguana’, protesting that he was ‘playing the part’ already, an allusion to his existing Professorship at Oxford.
‘Iguana’ star Ava Gardner was a visitor to Deià too (‘a bit tipsy, but beautiful as ever’) and accompanied Graves to the Indigo one night, much to the awe of the assembled audience. But then there was always an air of unpredictability to the Indigo’s evenings. Every so often, the old man might gamely play Farran’s drums for a number or two. ‘There can’t be many jazzmen who can boast of having played in a rhythm section that included Robert Graves,’ Rubin delights in telling us. He also remembers the club being frequented by a young English fan named Robert Ellidge - ‘a lovely sensitive, intelligent chap who aspired to be a jazz drummer’ who spent his days doing odd jobs for the Indigo. Like Rubin, Ellidge (née Wyatt) was a fan of the author William S. Boroughs, and within a couple of years he would borrow a line of Boroughs for the name his new band; Soft Machine.
Life in Spain for Rubin and his family was a juxtaposition then; one minute partying after-hours with a Hollywood glamourpuss, or sat among the intelligentsia at Canelluñ, then next returning to their own dilapidated rented accommodation (the bassist, his wife Marie and their children shared a house with a drunken Dutch couple and a host of highly active nocturnal cockroaches). There was something positively romantic to it though, for all its alien qualities. ‘We[d] drive back [from Deià] through groves of gnarled old trees that looked like petrified old men frozen in grotesque or comical gestures’, Rubin writes poetically, ‘then over the mountains to Palma, the sun set hanging like a huge red eye on the horizon. Back to siesta, and so to work.’
This then was the mise-en-scène for the arrival on Saturday July 18th of Tubby Hayes. To place the Indigo engagement in context, that summer was bracketed by the saxophonist’s quintet having just completed filming for the Amicus Films production ‘Dr. Terror’s House of Horror’ and the unit’s disbandment, a break-up which surprised many, but which the leader himself attributed to his own desire to move his music into freer waters. The day after his final night in Palma, on August 12th Hayes returned to London to start rehearsals for two editions of BBC-2’s ‘Jazz 625’ programme, fronted by American tenorist/composer Benny Golson, for which he’d also ‘fixed’ the orchestra. Anyone who has seen the ‘Jazz 625’ footage can tell you how relaxed and happy Hayes appears, an odd sort of mein for a man whose life was otherwise falling apart. Whatever his state of mind, when Golson cues another tenor chorus on a hard-swinging blues, there is no doubt that we are witnessing a player in his pomp. ‘I’ve no complaints,’ he told ‘Melody Maker’ that September. ‘This year, as I’ve said, has been successful, my most successful so far, without doubt. I’ve got my band manager’s word for that.’
Hayes was following fellow tenor Dick Morrissey into the Indigo, but whereas the younger Morrissey was more a go-with-the-groove rather than go-for-broke performer, Hayes had a long-held reputation to upkeep. ‘Wonderful creativity and exhilarating fast tempos’ was Ron Rubin’s abiding memory, adding of the latter that ‘these were no problem for our tight rhythm section.’
Neither was there any social incompatibility. In their off-hours, Rubin, Hayes and John Mealing would hang out, on one afternoon driving across the imposing Tramuntana mountains to the north-west coast haven of Puerto de Valldemosa. ‘Tubby [was] absolutely terrified of the winding unfenced road and sheer drops’, the bassist remembered. Once at the beach ‘we drank beer in the shade and bathed amongst the piled-up seaweed and shingle, Tubby lying there like a great beached white whale.’ They talked music too, Hayes confessing that although ‘Terry Shannon was his all-time favourite pianist’ ‘he doesn’t see too good’, apparently a reference to his poor sight-reading ability.
There was merriment at the club too. That night, after an equally hair-raising reverse trip over the mountains, the Indigo played host to Lucia Graves 21st birthday party (‘a super evening’). Yet the disparity between what Hayes and the other musicians wanted to get up to and what Rose Hayes thought appropriate was beginning to tear the saxophonist apart. ‘He [was] the life and soul of the party [and] drinking prodigiously,’ Rubin remembered. One night, someone slipped the bassist some hash which he and Hayes sat up all night smoking (‘watching the dawn yawning into life and talking brilliant rubbish’). The following day the Hayes’s weren’t even talking, Rose ‘sitting disconsolate on her own.’ Things came to a head with an explosive argument. Mrs. Hayes returned to London that same day, while, on his gig that night her husband exorcised all sorts of demons. ‘I’ve never heard him play better,’ Rubin writes, adding that Hayes had observed ‘Shit – all I care about is my horn, man!’
‘Nobody is permitted to see beneath the mask,’ Rubin concludes perceptively.
Hayes’s residency was due to end in mid-August with Ronnie Scott (‘the Monster of the Tenor Saxes in Europe’ read the club’s advertising) following him in to the club the following evening. There was still time enough for further shenanigans though and with Rose now no longer a watchful presence, Hayes was determined to make the most of these unrestrained circumstances. A black-tie party at a cliff-top villa in Camp der Mar on Saturday July 25th, full to bursting with local dignitaries, Spanish celebrities, radio and TV crews, even the ‘Daily Express’s William Hickey, was riotously gate-crashed by the saxophonist and the Farran trio. Urged to play, but more interested in drinking themselves towards the morning, the musicians demurred, Hayes eventually hiding under a table to avoid a pestering press man. ‘I kept him well supplied with brandy,’ says Rubin, ‘passing it to him through the voluminous drapes on the table cloth.’
Then there was the following night’s joint celebration of Robert and Lucia’s combined birthdays; he 69 she 21. ‘This is an annual event,’ Rubin noted. ‘There’s a feast of food and drink and a play is staged. Tubby played to the mountains under a full moon to everybody’s delight.’
How beautiful must have been the sound that accompanied that sight; Hayes’ saxophone serenading Graves and his party beneath a cloudless Mediterranean night sky. And how far from the pressured chaos that would await him back in London upon his return, his domestic instability resulting in a substance-fuelled, sofa-hopping, binge that lasted for weeks on end. That there were storm clouds upon Hayes’ horizon was in no doubt. Yet that glowering, doomy, overcast wouldn’t extinguish the light of those final few days in Palma just yet. Nothing but nothing could slight the mood of those afternoon parties in Deià. Nor anyone, it seems. ‘One Sunday,’ writes Rubin, ‘when a bunch of us were relaxing in the garden at Canelluñ, Kingsley Amis suddenly appeared from the house, blinking in the sunlight. Amis loathed bebop, or ‘modern jazz’, and as soon as he spotted Tubby Hayes – a master of the genre – amongst the guests, his face turned puce, and after glaring around ferociously for a few seconds, stomped back into the house, and that was the last we saw of him.’
Tubby Hayes never returned to the Indigo. Nor did he ever revisit Spain, a proposed all-star big band concert scheduled for 1968 falling in the face of his worsening health. Those brief few weeks in the summer of 1964 stood apart then from everything else in his career; a unique, at times unbelievable, moment in the sun. Idylls rarely last though, even for those who’ve invested in them with all they have. That autumn Ron Rubin also returned to London, driving via Paris and impromptu work with, among others, trumpeter Woody Shaw, in order to begin the next chapter in his winding way through jazz. ‘Tiresome gig [with] a banjoist [who] never knows if you’re joking, or whether you’re in F of Bb’, he writes wearily of one of his first nights back in the UK, a far cry for the kind of joy he’d been experiencing barely weeks earlier. There was more to come. The year played out at places like the Sink Club, Liverpool, Manchester Sports Guild, the Corn Exchange, Bristol, the Black Prince, Bexley, and finally a New Year’s Eve at a USAF base in Alconbury with altoist Joe Harriott (‘opposite a raucous singer called Tom Jones’). After one gig the band wagon he was in ran out of petrol on the M1, requiring a lonely trudge on foot to Watford Gap Services. At the start of a bitter British winter, Deià’s olive groves, those scented nights at Canelluñ, that red-eyed unblinking sun, all seemed a world away.
It was perhaps inevitable then that Rubin would return to Spain, which he did in 1969, this time staying for three years. And while his ‘jotted’ memoires of his earlier days in Majorca offer us a valuable ‘new’ insight into Tubby Hayes’ life and work, they also provide a testament to the sensitivity, wit, honesty, humanity and observational nous of Rubin himself. His are reflections too real to lay in obscurity. And like all memories of great jazzmen gone by, they bring us that much closer to the inseparable truths of both life and art.
My thanks to Matthew Wright.