Tubby Hayes

Double CD Edition, comes with a 36-page booklet. Every national jazz history has its unrepeatable figure. Britain's is Tubby Hayes, and this is the deepest single drop into his archive that anyone has yet managed - thirty-six performances, every one of them previously unissued, drawn from ten different settings across fourteen years. He was called the Little Giant, and both halves of that name did real work. Barely taller than the tenor he carried, Hayes was a professional at fifteen, a member of Kenny Baker's sextet at sixteen, and by his mid-twenties the one British soloist whose velocity, harmonic reach and sheer combustion travelled without apology. Ronnie Scott never forgot their first meeting: a boy not much bigger than his saxophone, who scared him to death. The two of them would go on to co-lead the Jazz Couriers, the band that settled the question of whether British modern jazz could stand in the same room as the American article. Hayes added vibes in 1957 and flute in 1958, cut Tubbs In N.Y. with Clark Terry and Horace Parlan, held down residencies at the Half Note and the Manne-Hole, fronted his own television series and his own big band, and then watched the venues that sustained all of it turn to R&B and rock. Illness, addiction, two heart operations. He died in June 1973, thirty-eight years old.

An Unexpected Pleasure charts the arc while it was still ascending, and then follows it all the way out. Disc one opens with a full 1958 Jazz Couriers session in London - two tenors in close, competitive conversation over Terry Shannon's piano, Jeff Clyne and Bill Eyden - and then does something stranger and rarer: it drops Hayes, in June 1959, into the middle of Kurt Edelhagen's continental all-star band at the Duisburg jazz festival, a wall of European radio-orchestra brass with Dusko Goykovich and Derek Humble in it, and lets him take Cherokee. The disc closes with the November 1962 quintet expanded with extra brass - Jimmy Deuchar on trumpet and mellophonium, Eddie Blair, Leon Calvert, Keith Christie - the poll-winning group at full stretch, with Modes and Blues and Valves and Mallets among them.

Disc two is the travelling years. A 1964 quintet broadcast with Hayes moving between tenor, flute and vibes. A single tune with Bora Rokovic's trio in Cologne. Two pieces from Oslo in January 1966, fronting Thorleif Østereng's big band, including a 100% Proof that predates the studio version everyone knows. Then a London quartet date with Mike Pyne and Tony Levin, the first of the two drummers Hayes discovered himself.

Disc three is the one that will sit heaviest. A 1969 big band take of 200% Proof from Maida Vale, with Scott back in the saxophone section. Five titles from the September 1969 quartet with Pyne, Ron Mathewson and Spike Wells - the group whose lost Fontana studio session, surfacing in 2019 as Grits, Beans and Greens, forced a wholesale reassessment of his late work. And finally September 1972, Golders Green, nine months before his death: Lady Celia, Trenton Place, Sienna Red and the title track, a man playing with less breath and no less intelligence, the phrases shorter, the thinking undimmed. Simon Spillett, author of The Long Shadow of the Little Giant and the most rigorous custodian this music has, supplies the booklet essay. Rare photographs and memorabilia from the family archive, compiled and produced with John Thurlow, prepared from high-quality tape throughout. Jazz In Britain do this work because almost nobody else will, and few of their rescues have carried this much weight.

An unexpected pleasure indeed!