Review: Nigel Clark & Tom MacNiven Quintet Celebrate Bobby Wellins, Glasgow Jazz Festival

Nigel Clark & Tom MacNiven Quintet Celebrate Bobby Wellins, Drygate, Glasgow, Saturday June 23rd ****

Saturday night at the Glasgow Jazz Festival was all about one of the city’s greatest musical exports – the tenor saxophonist Bobby Wellins, who died in November 2016 at the age of 80.

The esteem in which he’s held by successive generations of players and the fondness with which he’s remembered radiated through the three-part tribute which featured musicians he worked with in Scotland – notably trumpeter MacNiven and pianist Brian Kellock – and those, such as guitarist Nigel Clark and tenor saxophonist Helena Kay, whom he encouraged when they were starting out in jazz.

Kicking off the proceedings was a compelling documentary, Dreams Are Free, which was not only a lovely portrait of Wellins but also a reminder of how much films can bring to a music festival; for one hour, Wellins himself regaled the audience with his star-studded stories, and spoke extremely frankly about the struggle with heroin which kept him away from playing for a decade and nearly cost him his family.

Gary Barber’s film was followed by an exquisite solo set by Nigel Clark who was mentored by Wellins when they were both working down south in the 1980s and is, like Wellins, a master of ballad. Highlights included Oscar Peterson’s Hymn to Freedom and Antonio Carlos Jobim’s O Grande Amor.

Jobim also provided a highlight of the closing set – by an all-star Scottish quintet playing the tracks recorded 20 years previously on Tom MacNiven’s album Guess What?, which had featured Wellins. O Morro/Favela was one of the calmer numbers in an exuberant set which culminated in something of a party atmosphere with MacNiven’s Disciples of the Art of the Off Beat and an unexpectedly rousing take on Blue Monk.

Bobby Wellins Obituary

Bobby Wellins (c) Trio Records

Bobby Wellins, who has died at the age of 80, was not only Scotland’s first great jazz tenor saxophonist but also an icon of British jazz whose influence would have lived on even if he had never played again after 1965, when he featured on the iconic album of Stan Tracey’s Under Milk Wood suite. 

 

His gorgeous and evocative solo on the track Starless and Bible Black has regularly been named as the single most memorable British jazz solo ever recorded – and his haunting, Celtic-tinged sound was undoubtedly a huge inspiration on generations of young musicians, among them fellow tenor saxophonist, composer and educator Tommy Smith who was responsible for bringing Wellins’s own Culloden Moor Suite, to life five years ago when the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra and Wellins recorded it and performed it to considerable acclaim. Its concert performance at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland exactly five years ago was electrifying and Wellins, and the band, gave a tour-de-force performance which brought the house down. 

 

Smith, who was just 13 years old when he first heard Wellins on record, says: “Bobby was a grandmaster of the saxophone, a composer of profound integrity and a beautiful guy who will be greatly missed.” Indeed, Wellins was one of the best-loved musicians on the scene; a huge talent who was extremely self-effacing and likable and still very much, as he put it, “a Glasgow boy” at heart.

 

Jill Rodger, the longstanding director of the Glasgow Jazz Festival which most recently booked Wellins in 2013, says: “Bobby was an absolute pleasure to work with and to know. He was a very humble person who made no demands – as some do – other than a packet of potato scones to take back to Bognor Regis after his Scottish gigs!”

 

Clark Tracey, the son of the late piano giant Stan, says:  “Bobby was legendary, influencing goodness knows how many saxophonists and inspiring so many young musicians over the years with his generous nature.  He had time for anyone.  His sound was unique – a commodity sought by many but achieved by a few.  His groove was innate and he had limitless invention.”

 

Robert Coull Wellins was born into a showbiz family living in the Gorbals; he later lived in Carnwadric and attended Shawlands Academy. His singer mother and alto saxophonist father – the son of a Russian Jew who had emigrated from Minsch – worked in a show band which played in a local cinema before establishing their own double act which they took on the road around Scotland.

 

In an interview with me in 2011, Wellins explained: “They did sketches and she sang. My father played everything – musical saw, a bit of guitar, saxophone.” 

 

It wasn’t long after he returned from the war that Wellins’s father began to teach him to play alto sax. “My dad taught me and my sister to read music, we had to be what they called consummate musicians before they let us play for their showbiz friends at one of their Sunday get-togethers.”

 

Round about the same time, he bought the family a second-hand radiogramme which came with a jazz record collection which was almost a complete musical education.

 

That education continued with a couple of years at the RAF School of Music during his National Service – where Wellins switched to tenor sax – followed by stints with numerous big bands. 

 

By the time he began gigging on the London jazz scene in his mid twenties, Wellins already had what Clark Tracey describes as “a highly personalised sound.” Wellins befriended saxophonist playing club owner Ronnie Scott and later credited him with helping to launch his career. 

 

Wellins said: “Ronnie was a professional gambler and there was a place across the road from his club where a lot of heavy gambling went on. If Ronnie was on a roll then I’d be called in to dep for him, and that’s really where the quartet with Stan grew from.” Wellins twigged early on that he and Tracey had a unique intuition about each other’s playing. It shines through Under Milk Wood, which was recorded in just two days, and yet they never made a big deal about how much they enjoyed playing together.

 

“Stan and I never ever discussed what it was that we felt about each other but I do remember that it really struck hard when we were down at Ronnie’s one night and I said: ‘You know it’s a wonderful piece’ . And he said: ‘Well, I did write it with you in mind.’ That was quite a while after we had recorded it. But being the kind of people we were, we weren’t carried away with ourselves. I just felt it was such a wonderful vehicle for me. I felt it was just like me.”

 

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of that recording. Not only was it Tracey’s best-selling album, reissued five times after its initial release, but it put British jazz on the world map. It was, as Clark Tracey says, “something that stood up to an American release”. And that was significant during the period when British musicians were frustrated by the restrictions on them working in America and getting a chance to make their names there.

 

However, frustration and boredom for Wellins and Tracey partly led to drug habits which marred their lives for years. Clark Tracey says: “They were soon messed up pretty badly from the cheap, top quality, narcotics widely available in Soho.” Both eventually recovered, and Wellins, who moved to Bognor Regis with his family, worked with his own quartet of local musicians while recording a string of albums and writing prolifically during the 1980s and 1990s. He and Tracey always wanted to play together again, however, and they spent the last 15 years of Tracey’s life (he died in 2013) doing just that – on record and in concerts.

 

In 2011, Tommy Smith commissioned arranger Florian Ross to arrange Wellins’s Culloden Moor Suite, originally written back in 1964, for the SNJO. The resulting concerts and CD were a triumph and Wellins was thrilled with the whole experience. Smith says: “It meant a great deal to him – he couldn’t stop thanking me.”

 

Following a mild stroke a year ago, Wellins stopped playing to recoup. His death from leukaemia, however, was sudden and a shock to his family.  He passed away in hospital in Bognor and is survived by his wife Isobel and daughters Fiona and Elizabeth.

 

* Bobby Wellins, jazz saxophonist and composer, born January 24, 1936; died October 27, 2016

* An edited version of this obituary was published in The Herald on Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Review: Bobby Wellins Quartet

Bobby Wellins Quartet, Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, Sunday June 30th  ****

If the Glasgow Jazz Festival organisers thought that they were cruising on the home stretch by the last 24 hours of the event, they clearly had another thing coming when, on Sunday morning, word came through that British piano great Stan Tracey was cancelling his appearance at the closing Fruitmarket concert that night. Ill health forced the octogenarian to reluctantly pull out, but the rest of the band – bassist Andrew Cleyndert, drummer Clark Tracey and prodigal Glasgow son, tenor saxophonist Bobby Wellins – came north.

What was clear from the outset was that these musicians have played together so long and know each other so well that they are completely tuned in to the workings of each others’ minds. On the stand-out number, a cheeky My Funny Valentine, the ever-inventive Cleyndert seemed to finish Wellins’s phrases – such is their rapport.

You might think that a replacement pianist would struggle to fit immediately in, but Glasgow-based Paul Harrison – said to have been personally selected by Tracey as his dep for the night – did just that. And with considerable style. His Funny Valentine solo turned into a elegant duet with Cleyndert: it was as if they were operating as a unit. On Lover Man, taken at a brisk tempo and imbued with a Latin feel, Harrison stole the show with a dynamic, colourful solo which was nothing short of dazzling.

Earlier, Paul Towndrow (soprano saxophone) and Steve Hamilton (piano) had revealed that theirs is another class double-act. Their short set featured a string of original numbers, though the undoubted highlight was a gorgeous interpretation of a classic ballad, The Very Thought of You.

First published in The Herald, Tuesday July 2

Under Milk Wood – Again

It’s 20 years since I covered my first jazz festival – the 1993 Glasgow Jazz Festival, and 20 years since the  Old Fruitmarket was opened as the main venue for that same festival. This year’s event opens and closes with musicians who played in the Fruitmarket in its first festival. Here’s the article I wrote in 1993 about a couple of them….

To begin at the beginning. In 1965 the English jazz pianist Stan Tracey wrote and recorded with his quartet his Jazz Suite: Under Milk Wood, inspired by Dylan Thomas’s eponymous radio play. Now, 28 years later, what various critics have described as the best British jazz record ever made has just been reissued on CD on the jazz label, Blue Note. [2013 note: it’s now available on the Trio label.]

According to the original sleeve notes, Tracey played over to himself the dramatised recording of Under Milk Wood before he began to compose his themes. So how much of a resemblance does the Jazz Suite bear to the Thomas play, and does it really matter?

Being completely unfamiliar with both the Under Milk Wood works seemed to make me uniquely qualified to listen to it for its own merits before trying to make sense of its connection with the play.

As performed by Stan Tracey (piano), Glasgow’s own Bobby Wellins (tenor saxophone), Jeff Clyne (bass) and Jack Dougan (drums), the suite is a collection of eight tracks – each distinctive in character but linked by a bluesy feel and some of the best playing I’ve ever heard.

The opening two tracks are wonderful: the first is the instantly hummable Cockle Row, a groovy number that introduces the splendid Tracey/Wellins partnership. Starless and Bible Black is a complete contrast, laidback and beautiful.Wellins’s breathy sax breezes over a repeated series of haunting minor chords on the piano, bearing echoes of Eric Satie.

Another personal favourite is Penpals, with its catchy theme, funky beat, and changing moods – happy to sad, then back again, like an exchange of letters. But for me the loveliest example of this ensemble’s work is the track based on the play’s title, Under Milk Wood.

The melody – far more optimistic this time, but tinged with yearning – is carried by Wellins, clearly under the influence of that other great Stan, the late Mr Getz. Tracey’s piano is flawless, a perfect complement to the evocative lyricism of his sax man.

The play itself was a revelation. Having absorbed the Tracey suite, I was all set for a sad romantic melodrama. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood covers a day in the life of a lively Welsh village peopled by characters with such inspired names as Organ Morgan (the organist), Willy Nilly (the postman), and the fisherman, No Good Boyo. Despite the apparently everyday nature of the town in question, all – including its name, Llareggub – is not what it seems.

We know this because we are privy to the thoughts  and fantasies of the superficially normal villagers – like Mrs Ogden-Pritchard, who sleeps between the ghosts of her two nagged-to-death husbands and makes them chant in unison household rules such as “I must blow my nose in tissue and burn it after.”

I listened to the 1963 BBC radio dramatisation of Under Milk Wood, narrated by Richard Burton – probably the same version that inspired Stan Tracey, and it would be easy to see why. With its oddball characters and rich range of voices, its vivid tableaux of village life and poignant black humour, there is enough in this superb play to inspire a few more recordings.

And so to the connection between the Dylan Thomas and Stan Tracey masterpieces. No doubt Tracey was moved by the play to write some music for a jazz quartet, but there was little in the dramatisation that reminded me of the music. The only specific evidence of the link is the titles of the individual compositions: Tracey’s LP is really a collection of highly personal impressions of phrases (“starless and bible black”), characters (No Good Boyo) and places (Llareggub).

It could equally have been called Eight Eccentric Aunties from Edinburgh. But who cares, when the results are so outstanding?

(First published in The Herald, Friday July 2 1993)

* Under Milk Wood is the subject of a Classic Album Sundays listening session at the City Halls Club Room on Sunday June 30 at 6pm, and the Stan Tracey Quartet, featuring Bobby Wellins, plays the Old Fruitmarket at 8pm that same night. Visit www.jazzfest.co.uk for full details.

Review: Bobby Wellins/SNJO: The Culloden Moor & Caledonian Suites

Bobby Wellins/SNJO, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Saturday October 29th ****

You’d be forgiven for thinking that by night three of a four-concert tour, 75-year-old tenor saxophonist Bobby Wellins might be flaggging – but that was far from the case when he and the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra played on Saturday night.

This was a tour-de-force performance – and not just in the actual playing; but in the composition of the music too. The focal point of the evening was Wellins’s Culloden Moor, originally written back in 1964, but only now arranged, by Florian Ross, into a suite for the full band.

It proved to be an utterly compelling piece of music: evocative, dramatic and harnessing the haunting quality that is a key characteristic of the Wellins sound. The atmospheric and eerie opening and closing movements suggested the influence of the arranger Gil Evans, but it was the section entitled The March – which kicked off with everyone in the band stomping their feet before swinging into action, and peaked with an extended, show-stealing, snare drum solo (by Alyn Cosker) – that pinned punters to the edge of their seats. The overall effect was absolutely elecrifying, reminiscent of the opening track of one of the great Duke Ellington suites of the 1950s: hell, this was Anatomy of a Massacre.

How to follow that? Well, it might have been better not to: the Caledonian Suite of the second half certainly had its moments – notably The Tartan Rainbow and The Wind That Shakes the Barley – but Culloden Moor was the talking point of the night, and the music that most of us would have liked to have had ringing in our ears as we went home.

First published in The Scotsman, Monday October 31st.

CD Recommendations

Bobby Wellins: Time Gentlemen, Please (Trio Records)

Some players just get better with age – and, judging by this new CD, Bobby Wellins is one of them. Featuring a wonderfully eclectic and imaginative selection of tunes from his working repertoire, it finds the great Scots tenor player in terrific form whether he’s powering through such uptempo tunes as the title track, balladeering wistfully on a standard or giving I’m Wishing (the love song from Snow White) a stylish, funky going-over. Of course, it helps that he’s surrounded by an ace trio – notably his long-term pianist John Critichinson.

Jump Presents Private Treasures from Allegheny Jazz Concerts 1950s-2000 

For lovers of classic jazz, the Allegheny Jazz Society is a familiar name as it has issued many great recordings on the Jump label. It has also played host to some great live performances, as this superb two-disc compilation demonstrates. Comprising numbers recorded across a 50-year period, it features groups including the likes of Marty Grosz, Ken Peplowski, Bob Wilber, Dick Hyman, John Sheridan and Scott Hamilton – all of whom have been regular visitors to British jazz festivals – as well as by the late, great Ruby Braff and Lee Wiley.

Howard Alden: I Remember Django (Arbors Records)

Two of US guitarist Howard Alden’s earliest influences were the gypsy jazz pioneer Django Reinhardt and the American great Barney Kessel – and he pays tribute to both on this new CD which also recalls the fact that, back in 1999, he was responsible for coaching Sean Penn in his role as a Django-obsessed guitarist in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown. Featuring a Django-style line-up (two guitars and bass), this is a joyful album which showcases Alden’s lyricism and dexterity on 13 sublime numbers. Cornettist Warren Vache and clarinettist Anat Cohen’s elegant contributions are the icing on the cake.

Vince Guaraldi Trio: Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus (OJC Remasters) 

Italian-American pianist Vince Guaraldi – AKA Dr Funk – is best known for his catchy music for the Charlie Brown/Peanuts TV specials. However, before that association, he had already scored a hit with this 1961 album – which has at its core trio versions of the music from the influential 1959 film Black Orpheus (the movie that brought Brazilian music to worldwide attention) – and had topped the charts with his own complementary composition number Cast Your Fate to the Wind. Lovely, atmospheric stuff.

Bobby Wellins: The Scottish President

(c) http://www.triorecords.co.uk

He may be well into his seventies now, but the British tenor saxophonist Bobby Wellins shows no sign of slowing down. At least not if his latest CD – Time Gentlemen, Please (Trio Records) is anything to go by.

Wellins was born into a showbiz family living in the once- infamous Gorbals area of Glasgow. His mother, a singer whose stage name was Sally Lee, and alto saxophonist father worked in a show band which played in a local cinema before establishing their own double act which they took on the road around Scotland.

Wellins recalls: “They did sketches and she sang. My father played everything – musical saw, a bit of guitar, saxophone. My sister and I always went with them when they were working. As a matter of fact, they forgot about us one night – we were locked in the Argyle Cinema. When they got home they realised they’d left us there and they had to rush back in. The two of us were fast asleep in the front row seats.”

It wasn’t long after he returned from the war that Wellins’s father began to teach him the alto sax. Round about the same time, he bought the family a second-hand radiogramme which came with a jazz record collection which was almost a complete musical education.

That education continued with a couple of years at the RAF School of Music – where he switched to tenor sax – followed by stints with numerous big bands. “All the guys from the various bands who were married and wanted to have holidays would ask me to dep for them. It was a fantastic three years – the best foundation you could ever have.”

One highlight of Wellins’s own big band era was a trip to New York with Vic Lewis’s band and, in particular, a chance encounter with one of his heroes. Wellins recalls: “I ate just across the road from where we stayed because they did this cheap chilli dish which I loved – it was a bit like mince and totties – for $2. I suddenly saw this tall figure in a dirty raincoat and a pork-pie hat, standing outside the hotel looking awfully befuddled, and I thought ‘Oh my God, that’s Lester Young’. I couldn’t help myself, I just shot out across the road and shouted ‘Lester!’  I said I was with a British band and asked if I could buy him a drink.

“So we went in and sat down and of course as the guys were coming and going up and down in the elevator they were having a quick look in the lounge and they’d see me and I’d see this look on their face of disbelief and they’d come over and I’d introduce them. ‘Oh nice to meet you man’  [Wellins goes into female impersonator mode as he imitates Young’s squeaky voice]. We sat there for ages. We talked about everything, current affairs, New York – I told him I was too excited to take it all in . ‘Well, you’re only a baby, man,’  he said. He invited me along to a recording he was doing the following week, but we were flying back home so I couldn’t go.”

(c) http://www.triorecords.co.uk

There’s something of Lester Young’s melancholy sound in Wellins’s own playing, as well as a yearning which critics often describe as a Scottish quality. Does he detect something quintessentially Scottish in his music? “Well, I do sometimes think to myself: ‘This is terribly Scottish-sounding.’ I once played a 6/8 or 12/8 piece entitled Dreams Are Free at Ronnie Scott’s when Dizzy Gillespie was there. When I came offstage, he said: ‘That piece you wrote, it was very African.’ I said: ‘No, it’s Scottish.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘sounds African to me.’ Dizzy was very mischievous, mind. I said: ‘No, it’s definitely Scottish.’ ‘Ah, okay then.’

“So about six months later, there was a phone call at about three in the morning. The voice said: ‘It’s John Birks Gillespie here.’ Of course, I thought: ‘who the hell is John Birks Gillespie?’. Then I realised it was Dizzy. He said: ‘I’ve just been to a Scottish pipe band parade on 42nd Street. You’re right. That composition of yours is Scottish.’ And that was it. He hung up!”

Ironically, the composition with which Wellins is most strongly associated is not one of his own. Stan Tracey’s Under Milk Wood suite, which was recorded in 1965 and is widely regarded as the best British jazz album of all time, was effectively the product of a musical partnership which began within the Tony Crombie band and blossomed at Ronnie Scott’s club.

Wellins says: “Ronnie was a professional gambler and there was a place across the road from his first club where a lot of heavy gambling used to go on. If Ronnie was on a roll then I’d be called in to dep for him, and that’s really where the quartet with Stan grew from.” Wellins twigged early on that he and Tracey had a unique intuition about each other’s playing. It shines through Under Milk Wood, which was recorded in just two days, and yet they never made a big deal about how much they enjoyed playing together.

“Stan and I never ever discussed what it was that we felt about each other but I do remember that it really struck hard when we were down at Ronnie’s one night and I said: ‘You know it’s a wonderful piece’ . And he said: ‘Well, I did write it with you in mind.’ That was quite a while after we had recorded it. But being the kind of people we were, we weren’t carried away with ourselves. I just felt it was such a wonderful vehicle for me. I felt it was just like me.”

In characteristically self-effacing style and with typical Glaswegian frankness, Wellins concludes: “Let’s face it, most people wouldnae know who I was if it hadn’t been for Under Milk Wood.”

* Time Gentlemen, Please (Trio Records) is out today.