A live performance celebrating the music of Tony Kinsey, a star of post-war UK jazz, is to be held in southwest London.  The drummer and bandleader recollects a seven-decade profession. Characteristic by John Bungey.

He’s, absolutely, the final man standing from the London membership scene of the Fifties, a pioneering period of contemporary jazz now fading into legend. It was a time when sharply suited adventurers introduced the brand new sound of New York bebop to the smoke-wreathed basements of Soho. Publish-war, pre-Beatles, a time remembered in black and white however pulsing with musical color for the inner-city in-crowd.

Drummer Tony Kinsey led poll-topping small teams in addition to sharing phases with such visiting luminaries as Billie Vacation, Sarah Vaughan and Oscar Peterson. He was resident bandleader on the fabled Flamingo Membership for eight years, and with Tubby Hayes, Joe Harriott, Johnny Dankworth, he was amongst that elite group who might maintain their very own with visiting American stars. Within the Sixties Kinsey branched out to jot down and organize for giant band and for strings, along with his music showing in movie and TV.

Now aged 96 and a longtime resident of Sunbury-on-Thames, Kinsey will see his life in music celebrated at a live performance on the close by Hampton Hub Membership on January 28. A starry huge band from the Method Out West jazz collective will embody Henry Lowther, Chris Biscoe, Tim Whitehead, Mark Nightingale and Andy Panayi. Central to the night shall be Kinsey’s eight-part Embroidery Suite, a musical portrait of his riverside neighborhood. Impressed, because the identify suggests, by the domestically made Millennium Embroidery, the suite was first carried out in 2006. There’ll be a brand new composition, “For Neil”, and others from earlier chapters of his profession, together with two or three of his songs. Kinsey wrote 80 for weekly broadcast on Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life TV collection with Tim Rice and Herbert Kretzmer as lyricists.

Defying age, Kinsey has stored up his drumming, however current sickness means he can’t be behind the equipment in Hampton. As he talks in regards to the programme, Kinsey shares some profession reminiscences – like the primary time he backed Billie Vacation on the Manchester Free Commerce Corridor within the mid-fifties. Kinsey recollects her strolling on, a tiny determine on the large stage, to sing The Man I Love: “You might simply really feel the environment construct together with her interpretation. However we acquired midway via and the microphone went off.

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“She was attempting to sing with out the microphone and impulsively a determine got here out of the wings in boots and overalls to repair the sound. And there was she singing, ‘Some day the person I like, he’ll come alongside …’ I burst out laughing and I couldn’t cease as a result of the environment had been so critical. The temper was damaged, however anyway she continued on and he or she acquired the temper again. She sang superbly, however she was offended – I don’t blame her.”

Vocalists might be tough. He recollects a gig with the American singer and actress Pearl Bailey. “She stated, ‘Tony after I come on I’m gonna do that blues.’ I stated, ‘What tempo?’ She stated, ‘Simply watch my heel in entrance of you’ –  which appeared peculiar. After six or so songs she tells me that the tempo on the primary tune wasn’t fairly proper. I stated, ‘You instructed me to look at your heel.’ She shouts, ‘Don’t watch my heel man!’” Kinsey laughs. “The idiotic issues it’s a must to put up with with singers.”

Accompanying Ella Fitzgerald, although, was a pleasure and he loved a two-week stint with Lena Horne on the London Palladium in 1952. “I keep in mind the bass participant and pianist had unbelievable rhythm, however what I keep in mind most was the odor of aftershave. We didn’t have aftershave on this nation, or it was definitely new to me.”

Kinsey talks in regards to the friendship he constructed with Paul Gonsalves, the good saxophonist who would drop into the Flamingo when the Ellington band was on the town. Of the homegrown musicians, Tubby Hayes was “unbelievable … he performed in my band and typically I performed along with his quartet.” Kinsey had begun his touring profession with the Johnny Dankworth Seven however life on the street within the pre-motorway Britain of 1950 was the alternative of glamorous. “I acquired fed up with the travelling – no heating on the coach – it was stone chilly – and getting house at 3 o’clock within the morning.”

He was there when the band auditioned Cleo Laine, who was married to a roof tiler on the time: “She had her husband together with her and I think about he regretted her ever going to audition – if he’d recognized she would go on to marry John.

“Her singing stood out immediately. We went over the street to the pub to debate what we thought. All of us thought she was one thing particular – musicianship at its highest.”

Kinsey’s stint on the Flamingo at all times suited him. He had freedom to play what he wished, there was by no means bother and he might drive house to Sunbury every night time.

Finally altering musical fashions impacted Soho. “It was about my eighth yr on the Flamingo and this rock’n’roll got here in. I wasn’t irritated, I simply accepted it was going to occur.

“I used to be packing up my drums one night and I keep in mind George Fame coming in for the all-nighter, and I assumed in his case it was actual enjoying – unbelievable – however I by no means wished to try this form of music myself, so I caught to what we name jazz.”

Within the scrapbook that Kinsey’s late spouse compiled, he factors out {a photograph} of the unique Tony Kinsey band. “All my colleagues in that image, I hate to say it, are lifeless.” There’s the saxophonist Don Rendell, and Jimmy Deuchar, trumpet, of their youthful pomp. “All of the blowers appear to kick the bucket. It’s horrible actually. I miss all of them.”

However Kinsey, and his music, reside on – as concertgoers will witness later this month.

The Tony Kinsey Huge Band at Hampton Hub Membership,3 Ashley Rd, Hampton TW12 2JA, 28 January; hamptonhubclub.com