This summer was saddened by the loss of two great musicians. Both Paul Rutherford and Mike Osborne had been major figures in the Westbrook Band in earlier times. Paul’s trombone was a feature of The Concert Band, The Orchestra, and The Brass Band. The current Japanese reissue of Goose Sauce gives but one example of Paul’s peerless playing.
Mike Osborne’s association went back to the early 60s, through the Sextet, Concert Band and Orchestra and he was a major contributor to the Deram albums, and Metropolis.
Mike Westbrook’s personal tribute to Paul Rutherford appears below.
An appreciation of Mike Osborne will appear in the next SAI. With all the British Jazz community we mourn the passing of such brilliant, committed artists. It is a privilege to have known and worked with them. We shall not see their like again.
The Dean
In 1983 I was working on After Smith’s Hotel when the Brass Band went to New York as part of a ‘ Britain Salutes New York ‘ Festival. We gave two performances of our William Blake programme at St Peter’s Church (where I had the chance to play the Steinway that had belonged to Billy Strayhorn), and also played at the Village Gate. No sooner had we checked in to the hotel. than Chris Hunter got a call from Gil Evans. Chris had recently met and worked with him in London. Gil asked if he would play that night at Sweet Basil’s in place of Dave Sandborn , who was unable to make the gig.
Heavily jet lagged, Kate, Phil Minton and I went along to the club, where we were given a table by the stage. It was a fairly big band, mostly jamming on simple arrangements and unison themes, with long solos. Hyram Bullock sat at one end of the stage, one leg stretched out in front of him in a plaster-cast which he had to swing like a gate to let people to go to and from the toilet. Chris was next to George Adams in the row of seven or eight horns that also included Marvin Peterson.
Chris wasn’t doing much, in fact he was rather ignored. Perhaps people thought that anyone who looked like Chris couldn’t possibly play. During Well, You Needn’t Chris stood up and seized his chance. The rest is history. Within weeks he’d moved to New York, where he’s been based ever since.
In the break Kate and I introduced ourselves to Gil and arranged to go round for tea the following afternoon. April 29th dawned - Duke’s birthday - and two radio stations were playing non-stop Ellington. Gil welcomed us in a one-room apartment in a block near Central Park that he was evidently using as a work place. There was a grand piano, a couch, and not much else. Gil was in the process of reducing an arrangement from five to three saxophones – a chore often forced on the composer/arranger by economic rather than musical considerations. We had Ellington on the radio all the time. Gil had never met him, but had once had a call from Duke (he described him as a ‘phonaholic’) who told him that he, Gil, was his favourite arranger. He was quite bitter about the way Ellington had been hounded by the tax authorities, “after all he’d done for the country”.
Clearly one was talking to someone who’d been around for much of jazz history. He was a lifelong admirer of Louis Armstrong. In fact he and Louis had planned an album together, until Armstrong’s manager, Joe Glaser, put a stop to it.
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In a wide-ranging conversation it emerged that Gil had only been paid an arranger’s fee for the Miles Davis Porgy and Bess album, and not shared in the royalties of one of the biggest selling jazz albums of all time. On the whole he was fairly laid back about it, but it clearly rankled that the Miles collaborations had received so much attention while his work with his own orchestra, to him far more important, was undervalued. In fact Gil was going through hard times. A legendary figure, one
of the great composer/arrangers in jazz, lionised in Europe, he was nevertheless marginalised and even neglected in his own country. And it hurt. Yet his commitment, his sense of the history of jazz and his openness to whatever, and whoever was new and exciting in music, was as vital as ever. And he was sustained by the love and respect of a new generation of musicians eager to play his music.
Our visit concluded with an exchange of albums and a stroll in the spring sunshine in Central Park. Back in London I added a new section to After Smith’s Hotel, entitled On Duke’s Birthday. A long and varied journey through the Blues, it was subtitled Listening, Talking, Walking..
Mike Westbrook
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I first met Paul in the mid-60s at The Old Place and The Little Theatre Club in London. We worked together until the late 70s. As well as various small groups, he was a member of my Concert Band, where he formed a great trombone partnership with Malcolm Griffiths, and of my larger Orchestra. He was a major soloist on such albums as Release, Marching Song and Metropolis.
When I formed a street band, The Brass Band, around '73/'74, Paul was one of the first to join. The approach of that group was basically to play whatever any member wanted to play, when and where anyone asked us to play. This was liberating, musically and politically. The Brass Band gave space for all the talents of those involved. This suited Paul who, while already established as one of the major improvisers on the scene, had many other talents and interests.
He enjoyed playing New Orleans numbers, arranging Renaissance pieces for the band, declaiming William Blake’s poetry and singing Brecht songs, as well as writing nonsense lyrics and generally exploiting the comic possibilities in any situation. Paul, one of the greatest musicians I’ve ever worked with, was also one of the funniest. With Paul, the seriousness and the jokes were just sides of the same coin. The musician who could move you to tears with the beauty of his playing one minute was the clown who could reduce you to helpless laughter the next. A truly Brechtian juxtaposition of High Art and Low Comedy. This duality, this interleaving of opposites was always present in his playing. He had the ability to play within the structure of the material, while yet taking it somewhere else altogether. A simple example,- when he soloed on Creole Love Call with the Big Band, he was playing both inside and outside the Blues. And however far things went, Paul could always take them further out.
Those early years with the Brass Band seem like a Golden Age of travelling and playing all kinds of music, in all kinds of situations all over Europe. In that time we became very close friends, Phil Minton, Kate Westbrook, Dave Chambers, Paul, and I. Memories come crowding back of our many adventures, musical and geographical. One day maybe the full story will be told of what someone once described as our ‘Wandering Everyman Troupe’.
Eventually things changed. Whether as a result of outside political and cultural forces, or inevitable developments in the music, the scene became polarised. Where it had been possible for musicians from different backgrounds and with different approaches to march together under the same banner, now people started putting down boundaries. The implication was that “While all musicians are free, some musicians are definitely freer than others”- to misquote George Orwell. When Paul decided to leave it was partly a natural move to concentrate on his solo career. But, as he explained at the time, it was also a response to pressure from those hard-liners who maintained that his credibility as an improvising musician was being compromised by his membership of the Brass Band. Given this dilemma, Paul made the only possible choice .And it was the right choice as his artistic achievement and international recognition testify. Sadly we seldom met again. As often seems the case with bands, when you’ve been very close but there’s nothing left to play, there’s little left to say.
I’m grateful to have known Paul and worked with him through such an exciting and creative period. It was a time of hope, when all seemed possible . Latterly when idealism gave way to pragmatism we were all in trouble.. Some of Paul’s contemporaries found ways of adjusting to the changing scene. The path that Paul had chosen didn’t include a contingency plan.
On tour I remember Paul not only as a wonderful trombonist and euphonium player but a warm and generous friend, full of wicked good humour, and an excellent drinking companion. As things got more difficult, however, in more recent times the jokes became bitter. And the drink nearly killed him in 2000. He pulled through, and when Kate and I saw him at his benefit gig at the 100 Club and talked a bit about old times, he was frail but just the same Paul as ever was. Soon he was back travelling and playing. But these are cruel times for the creative artist, and with ever diminishing opportunities a sense of hopelessness can easily take over. There was no turning back for Paul, nothing to fall back on. He risked everything to be free. And his life, cut off too short as it was, was yet a triumph of the creative spirit.
Paul Rutherford changed music and changed lives for ever. I know he changed and enriched mine. Rest in Peace.
Mike Westbrook
