Beyond the general gratitude due him for elevating the cause and profile of jazz in this country, I can’t help thinking that I owe the late Ronnie Scott a more personal debt. Years ago, when poring through the fading pages of old musical periodicals from the 1950s and 60s, in hot pursuit of titbits of historic information I could usefully siphon off for this article or that, I realised that his protocol regarding the answering of critics was as good a one to adopt as any.
If people wrote in haste about their personal misgivings about an act he’d booked for his club Scott responded in the only sensible way possible when in receipt of such a personal reservation; he said nothing. On professional critics, he was far less easy-going, in the words of his friend and colleague and fellow saxophonist Benny Green, always ‘quick to make nonsense of some ill-informed review he could have written much better himself.’ The key words here are ill-informed. Anyone can hold an opinion. Yet when misrepresentation occurs in print; what then? Do we sit and say nothing and stay a silent witness to the kind of piece that’s heady on conjecture and low on comprehension? If a review actually gets things wrong, rather than merely misreads them, is it cricket to call it out? Scott thought it was. And I rather love him for it. To pick one example, during the early 1970s, when another prominent UK-based saxophonist expressed some thorny views about his club’s booking policy in the pages of ‘Melody Maker’, he came out fighting, offering killer blows and sidelong wit in equal measure, reducing his opponent’s assumptions to the level of little more than peevish digs.
It’s no coincidence that Ronnie Scott should have crossed my mind today. I’ve just returned from a few weeks’ holidaying in the south of France, where I attempted to balance poolside indolence by a little sedentary learning. Or in this case re-learning, as among the several books I enjoyed was ‘A Fine Kind of Madness: Ronnie Scott Remembered’, written by the saxophonist’s daughter Rebecca and long-term partner Mary. At the time of its publication in 1999, I had found the book more than a little clunky, and thought it smacked faintly of opportunism. Now, having dedicated my own life (in part) to writing, and having grown up through my own career of musical and personal ups and downs, I’m far less cynical about its intentions and fully appreciate its unique value.
In fact, while it may not be quite right to express enjoyment over a book that frequently exposes the bleaker side of Scott’s life, time and again while rereading it I found something within its pages I’d failed to previously recognise; inspiration. The suicidal manic-depressive tendency was simply one aspect of a man who in other circumstances stood up bravely for all in which he believed, from his family to his club, his humour and his friends and, naturally, his own playing.
Countering fudged reviews may not appear an especially heroic thing to do; the inference of such a reproof, however, carries far greater importance. When you care about something, when you work hard to get it right and are sincerely presenting to the public that in which you’ve invested time, deep study and conscientiousness why shouldn’t you push back on critique that makes what you do look anything less?
This, unfortunately, leads me to the subject of this piece: a review of the recently issued boxed set of previously unreleased recordings by Tubby Hayes, ‘An Unexpected Pleasure’, issued last week by the Jazz In Britain label. My technical credit for this release is for having ‘compiled and produced’ its contents alongside the label’s head honcho, John Thurlow. I don’t think I’m stealing any of John’s thunder by saying that in reality I acted less as a producer more as a ‘curator’, helping pull together its varied source material, writing a booklet note and supplying photographic images and ephemeral memorabilia. I think the whole thing – the audio quality, the packaging, the artwork, the whacking delivery of a motherlode of rare material – is altogether rather special. And I’m rather proud of it too.
Today’s review, which comes via a well-known UK-based music blog, agrees with all the above, applauding how the box enables us to now ‘stand in the room’ with Hayes and his colleagues. It awards the set five stars. It says that naming the collection after one of its subjects compositions called ‘An Unexpected Pleasure’ is ‘exactly the right call.’
Why then, given all this purple prose, would I possibly take issue?
Well, it’s all a matter of misrepresentation. Or, rather, of a rather febrile rush to judgement. No, scrap that; it’s all to do with how one individual’s take on what the box doesn’t do rather blurs his opinion of what it actually does. ‘The absence is the story’, the reviewer maintains, assuming (incorrectly) that a credit to ‘one of the countries sharpest historians of British broadcasting’ means that the rest of us, who’ve toiled for decades deep-diving into the backwaters of Tubby Hayes life and career, via his diaries and contracts and personal relationships with many of his ex-colleagues, are somehow at a loss to sort out a few tape boxes.
‘The paperwork is ragged,’ he alleges of the background to the box, without first asking anyone concerned with its production. Really? Because from a compiler’s point of view it all seemed rather tidy and traceable. ‘The fact the compilers needed a broadcasting historian to work out where and when these reels arrived without their labels tells you they arrived without their labels.’ If that sentence means what I think it means (and it scans like porridge) then it’s pure guff.
Having co-authored a discography of Tubby Hayes, detailing great swathes of his radio work, I can attest that all the relevant information included in the box came via my own efforts, rather than from the authority he alludes to (a friend incidentally, whose credit is there for helping provide a tape reel of his own, not for digging John T. and I out from under a pile of old BBC contracts).
‘I’d defend every hedge in it,’ the reviewer says of a booklet that provides precise dates and personnel for all but one of the collection’s sessions. All of a sudden, music critique begins to read like wildlife conservation.
Before anyone stops reading and slopes off, fearing a blow-by-blow dissection of what is, after all, simply one man’s take on things, I’ll remind them of my opening caveat; opinions are opinions; assumptions are quite another thing, especially when they would have been rendered obsolete by a little more judicious reading. ‘Nothing anywhere carries a composer credit’, the reviewer says, plainly ignoring names that occur not once but twice within the package; on the rear of each CD wallet and within the booklet session data. Natch!
There is also this peach; ‘The big band at Maida Vale in July 1969 lists two bassists and drummers against a single take: one of each played it, and the listing doesn’t say which.’
This listing is correct; as those who know the back story of this famous session are already aware, on this day Hayes’ composition ‘100% Proof’ was retitled ‘200% Proof’ as it doubled up two rhythm sections and two tenors, Hayes himself and Ronnie Scott. Another assumption, another not quite effective ‘yes, but’ in play. Still, no schoolboy error here.
There are other such attempts at a rather insidious dissing; the January 1966 recordings of Hayes in Oslo, which the booklet notes make clear features one of the saxophonist’s own arrangements and one by his colleague Harry South, are for some reason mooted to have something to do with American trumpeter Donald Byrd. Quite why I’m not sure, unless this is the result of a quick bit of Googling simply in order to add something almost wholly irrelevant.
The worst offender of these odd asides is, to my mind, simply cloth-eared. Disc three, we are told, ‘is not a document of anybody’s peak’. The words ‘in my opinion’ are surplus of course, but as to why this allegation is made is anybody’s guess. As as saxophonist, I think I can identify world-class jazz tenor playing when I hear it and the October 1969 quartet session on this disc is most certainly that. In fact, I can’t think of many saxophonists anywhere at any time who can handle their instrument with such brilliance. Nor, for that matter, are there many big bands today that could explode in quite the same way Hayes’s does on the disc’s opener ‘200% Proof.’ Failure to launch? I don’t think so.
This begs a serious question; why is a writer, when presented with clear evidence that Tubby Hayes was still highly capable of truly towering performances in his later years, intent on peddling the myth of faded glories? One thing’s for sure; he got none of that from the words accompanying these recordings. By the time the reviewer has reached for his backhanded pay-off (‘Spillett has plenty to say, and the booklet gives him room to say it, though I’ll admit I reached for better light and a steadier pair of eyes to get through it’) I’d finally had enough.
If he’d bothered reading my notes, or anything else I’d written about Tubby Hayes in my ‘load-bearing’ work of the past 20 years, half his review wouldn’t have needed to be written at all. Nor, come to think of it, would this piece, a decision which would doubtless be welcomed by both parties.
Criticism I can take. What I can’t bear is someone not doing their job thoroughly; on ‘An Unexpected Pleasure’ Jazz in Britain – and myself – did just that, as indeed the label has consistently done for six years. There are no mysteries to solve; no fudges to be clarified; no super-sleuthing broadcast expert steering a couple of inept saps through some anonymous tape reels. I can’t speak for John Thurlow, but I imagine he’d concur with my belief that the devil is in the detail. The trouble is, it’s impossible to comprehend any of this with your knees jerking, no matter how steady you think your eyes.
I read the review in question to a good friend of mine earlier, a man whose pithy way with words I sometime envy. ‘Classic,’ he said. ‘He’s desperately looking for mild ‘gotcha’ things.’ I think he’s right. Still the five stars were nice. As for verdicts on all of this that actually matter, I’ll take this from Spike Wells. ‘What a fantastic compilation! And I shall have if Roy Haynes had been born in Kent and not Massachusetts engraved on my tombstone.’
Cue cymbal splash.