London bassist Dill Katz, who died on 13 June, aged 79, was an exceptional musician who touched profoundly the lives of innumerable listeners and fellow musicians.
Katz began his musical life as a guitarist playing in a Shadows-influenced school band, The Nocturnes. Still on guitar, his professional career began in Dublin, as a teenager, playing ballrooms of romance around Ireland with the showbands Maisie McDaniel and her Fendermen and The Madrid.
Back in London, and by now on bass, Katz played in highly rated and often very influential bands like Pacific Eardrum, Nucleus, Barbara Thompson’s Paraphernalia, District Six and Jazz Afrika.
Many who worked with Katz have been expressing movingly their grief over his death. Ray Russell, for example, posted on Facebook, “Dill was one of the greatest players, a lovely guy always helping younger players. We had fun on every gig we did … May you rest knowing you were loved.”
And in a piece written for the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Dudley Phillips affectionately noted that Katz’s playing “was instantly recognisable, with several humorous phrases that he would love to include. When you heard one of his false harmonic slides you sensed that Dill was happy.”
Steve Rubie booked Katz hundreds of times to play in his 606 club and Katz was also, for twenty five years, a member of Rubie’s jazz/Latin band Samara. He also enthuses about Katz’s musical prowess. “He was the first professional electric bass player in the UK to play fretless bass. He was a fantastic player: his time was great, his harmonic sense was really good, he was just a consummate musician, never flashy, never over-the-top. And he was very versatile. At one time we used to do a lot of commercial stuff, weddings and all that, and so we played a mixture of Latin and funk groove stuff which he loved playing because that’s what he’d played with Paraphernalia. And he was fantastic at it because his time was just completely solid. He could do the jazz thing, the Brazilian thing … He had fabulous ears – he could just hear something and play it.”
Sophie Alloway drummed in the band which Katz regularly led at the 606. She observes that he “wanted to give everybody else an opportunity to shine. He was very inspiring and playing with him was brilliant. I’ll always treasure that.”
It’s striking how beloved Katz was as a person as well as as a musician. “He was a delightful human being,” says Rubie. “He had no side to him, he was just a really nice person.”
“He was very generous, very encouraging and very funny,” adds Alloway. “A lovely guy. Any time his name came up [amongst musicians] people lit up and said, ‘Oh, Dill, he was so kind to me, what a great guy!’”
At the 606 Rubie witnessed Katz’s oft-remarked generosity to younger musicians. “Very much so. Like Sophie Alloway. At the time it wasn’t easy for female drummers, there was a lot of prejudice, so booking Sophie was a big deal and because he was so well respected it was a kind of statement.”
Alloway never forgot Katz’s encouragement. “I couldn’t find evidence of an ego with him, he was all about supporting these younger musicians he had found. But he was also very loyal. There were musicians in his band he had known since the 60s so being able to play with very experienced people as well as younger musicians was so valuable to me in my early twenties. My playing was certainly work-in-progress but he wasn’t afraid to say, ‘Go on, Soph, take a solo here!’ It was so important to my development.”
As well as playing in successful bands, Katz worked as a session musician, playing, for example, on records by The Walker Brothers and Ewan MacColl and on Play Away, the children’s TV programme. “He worked a lot with Dusty Springfield in the studio,” says Rubie. “She was very musical and he talked very highly of her.”
But, Rubie explains, from the late 70s Katz increasingly found himself playing sessions for producers who would arrive in the studio with only basic chord sheets rather than proper charts and expect the rhythm section to arrange the music. At one session he stood up for the musicians whom he felt were being taken advantage of. “It was classic Dill. He wasn’t aggressive but he made his point. But after that word got around and he stopped getting a lot of those pop things – which he didn’t want to do anyway.”
Katz also taught in the Guildhall, as Dudley Phillips, a former student, recalled in the piece he wrote for his old college. “Dill’s teaching style was one of general encouragement rather than specific musical pointers although he wouldn’t let anything untoward slip past. At his flat in north London students would be invited to check out the latest recordings of some bass legend and he would recommend those students he approved of for professional work. I owe the start of my professional career to his generous endorsement …”
In 1986 Katz and partner Colin Dudman opened The Premises, a rehearsal room and later also a recording studio. There he engineered albums for the likes of Christine Tobin and Liam Noble. “Dill was a great musician but as a business man, not so much,” says Rubie. “And after some years they got into financial difficulties. He got through it but it was really traumatic and stressful for him and after that experience he stepped back from the music a bit. I think he decided he just wanted to play music that he wanted to play and he stopped doing high profile touring and studio work.”
Shockingly, in 2019, Katz suffered a medical emergency playing on stage at the 606 with Rubie in Samara. “He had heart failure,” says Rubie. “It was very distressing. But he was fortunate that a consultant surgeon was there and saw very quickly what was going on and he was on the stage before Dill hit the floor. And then another guy turned up in about thirty seconds and said, ‘I’m a consultant cardiologist!’ so these two consultants kept him going until the paramedics arrived. He didn’t have too many after-effects and the hospital said that that was because he had had medical assistance within thirty seconds. But he did retire after that.”
Katz was single. “To my knowledge he was never married and had no children,” says Rubie. “But he was very sociable and one of those people that people just loved.”
“He seemed like a solo operator,” says Alloway. “He had loads of friends but he never married or had children. Maybe that’s why we had that long friendship, because I find really interesting the idea of someone being so inspired and fulfilled by music, playing, learning, listening, hanging out with musicians and having a slightly less conventional life. Music is such a huge part of [those] people’s lives, they’re just happy with that.”
Alloway visited Katz in his home a week before he died. “I took him a curry which was our routine and we sat and ate and he played loads of interesting music. He’d say, ‘Come on, Soph, who do you think is on drums?’ And he played a recording of a session Jaco Pastorius had done before he was famous, that had a little bass solo and he said, ‘Unbelievable!’ And sitting in his kitchen I said, ‘Dill, you’re still listening to lots of stuff.’ And he said, ‘Oh, yes, I’m always listening to music.’ And we watched a documentary about session musicians and had a laugh and talked about who was in it and who should have been. And he was always, even to the end, interested in what I was doing and how my friends and parents were and in what was happening.”
Despite his collapse at the 606, six years previously, heart problems weren’t the cause of Katz’s death. “No, no. He had a pacemaker but his heart was fine,” says Rubie. “It was sepsis.”
“That’s why it was such a shock,” sighs Alloway. “He’d had other health issues and lots of us used to go and see him in hospital but overall he was pretty good and after I saw him I was happily telling everyone that he was on great form. I think he had a little wound on his leg. He didn’t mention it to me, he wouldn’t think anything of it, but his immune system just wasn’t strong enough to cope with that infection, sadly.”
It’s something of a cliché to say of a deceased person that nobody had a bad word to say about them but that really does seem to be true of Katz. And it’s very touching that the memories of those who knew him focus at least as much on his goodness as a human being as on his greatness as a musician. The point is well made by Rubie: “The main thing to stress from my point of view was that he was just a very nice, very supportive friend – who was by chance incredibly talented.”
