MAY 17

             TUBBY HAYES
         Down In The Village
        
               Recording Date:
                   May 17-18, 1962

               Personnel:
                   Tubby Hayes    TS,SS,VB
                   Jimmy Deuchar  TP
                   Gorden Beck      P
                   Freddie Logan    B
                   Allan Ganley       D

        






LINK RETIRED

One of England's top jazz musicians of the 1950s and '60s, Tubby Hayes was a fine hard bop stylist on tenor and occasionally vibes and flute. A professional at 15, Hayes played with Kenny Baker and in the big bands of Ambrose, Vic Lewis, and Jack Parnell during 1951-1955. He led his own group after that, and started doubling on vibes in 1956. Hayes co-led the Jazz Couriers with Ronnie Scott (1957-1959), and appeared in the U.S. a few times during 1961-1965. He headed his own big band in London, sat in with Duke Ellington's Orchestra in 1964, and was featured at many European festivals. Heart trouble forced him out of action during 1969-1971, and caused his premature death. Tubby Hayes led sessions for Tempo (1955-1959), London, Jazzland (1959), Fontana, Epic (a 1961 date with Clark Terry and Horace Parlan), Smash (a 1962 album which matched him with James Moody and Roland Kirk), 77, Spotlite, and Mole. ~ Scott Yanow

Tubby Hayes' ongoing appeal is virtually unique amongst British jazzmen of his era. Figures celebrated in their own lifetime, such as the drummer Phil Seamen or the saxophonist Harold McNair (both of whom also died young in the early 1970s), have achieved a kind of posthumous apocryphal value but their music is now all but forgotten. The music of Hayes, however, still possesses a charisma and vitality that ensures it is remembered both by fans and fellow musicians. The latter have perhaps taken too long to reappraise Tubby Hayes; when drummer Martin Drew's Celebrating the Jazz Couriers band, formed specially to reprise the music Hayes had written and performed at the close of the 1950s, secured first place in the small group category of the British Jazz Awards in 2001, it was a victory tinged with irony. Hayes' music, played by a tribute band consisting of four musicians too young to have ever heard him play in person or to have performed with him, had snapped up a contemporary jazz accolade in much the same dynamic manner as Hayes himself had once done. What could be seen as a telling reflection of the state of jazz in the early twenty-first century transpired to be yet another reminder of the unending vitality of Tubby Hayes' music.