UK Jazz News

Tony Kinsey – Celebration Concert, 28 Jan, Hampton Hub Club

Tony Kinsey in 2017, playing at his 90th birthday concery. Photo credit Paul Wood

A concert celebrating the music of Tony Kinsey, a star of post-war UK jazz, is to be held in southwest London.  The drummer and bandleader recalls a seven-decade career.

He is, surely, the last man standing from the London club scene of the 1950s, a pioneering era of modern jazz now fading into legend. It was a time when sharply suited adventurers brought the new sound of New York bebop to the smoke-wreathed basements of Soho. Post-war, pre-Beatles, a time remembered in black and white but pulsing with musical colour for the inner-city in-crowd.

Drummer Tony Kinsey led poll-topping small groups as well as sharing stages with such visiting luminaries as Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Oscar Peterson. He was resident bandleader at the fabled Flamingo Club for eight years, and with Tubby Hayes, Joe Harriott, Johnny Dankworth, he was among that elite group who could hold their own with visiting American stars. In the Sixties Kinsey branched out to write and arrange for big band and for strings, with his music appearing in film and TV.

Now aged 96 and a longtime resident of Sunbury-on-Thames, Kinsey will see his life in music celebrated at a concert at the nearby Hampton Hub Club on January 28. A starry big band from the Way Out West jazz collective will include Henry Lowther, Chris Biscoe, Tim Whitehead, Mark Nightingale and Andy Panayi. Central to the evening will be Kinsey’s eight-part Embroidery Suite, a musical portrait of his riverside community. Inspired, as the name suggests, by the locally made Millennium Embroidery, the suite was first performed in 2006. There’ll be a new composition, “For Neil”, and others from earlier chapters of his career, including two or three of his songs. Kinsey wrote 80 for weekly broadcast on Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life TV series with Tim Rice and Herbert Kretzmer as lyricists.

Defying age, Kinsey has kept up his drumming, but recent illness means he can’t be behind the kit in Hampton. As he talks about the programme, Kinsey shares some career memories – like the first time he backed Billie Holiday at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in the mid-fifties. Kinsey recalls her walking on, a tiny figure on the huge stage, to sing The Man I Love: “You could just feel the atmosphere build with her interpretation. But we got halfway through and the microphone went off.

“She was trying to sing without the microphone and all of a sudden a figure came out of the wings in boots and overalls to fix the sound. And there was she singing, ‘Some day the man I love, he’ll come along …’ I burst out laughing and I couldn’t stop because the atmosphere had been so serious. The mood was broken, but anyway she continued on and she got the mood back. She sang beautifully, but she was angry – I don’t blame her.”

Vocalists could be tricky. He recalls a gig with the American singer and actress Pearl Bailey. “She said, ‘Tony when I come on I’m gonna do this blues.’ I said, ‘What tempo?’ She said, ‘Just watch my heel in front of you’ –  which seemed peculiar. After six or so songs she tells me that the tempo on the first song wasn’t quite right. I said, ‘You told me to watch your heel.’ She shouts, ‘Don’t watch my heel man!’” Kinsey laughs. “The idiotic things you have to put up with with singers.”

Accompanying Ella Fitzgerald, though, was a pleasure and he enjoyed a two-week stint with Lena Horne at the London Palladium in 1952. “I remember the bass player and pianist had fantastic rhythm, but what I remember most was the smell of aftershave. We didn’t have aftershave in this country, or it was certainly new to me.”

Kinsey talks about the friendship he built with Paul Gonsalves, the great saxophonist who would drop into the Flamingo when the Ellington band was in town. Of the homegrown musicians, Tubby Hayes was “fantastic … he played in my band and sometimes I played with his quartet.” Kinsey had begun his touring career with the Johnny Dankworth Seven but life on the road in the pre-motorway Britain of 1950 was the opposite of glamorous. “I got fed up with the travelling – no heating on the coach – it was stone cold – and getting home at 3 o’clock in the morning.”

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

“Her singing stood out straight away. We went over the road to the pub to discuss what we thought. We all thought she was something special – musicianship at its highest.”

Kinsey’s stint at the Flamingo always suited him. He had freedom to play what he wanted, there was never trouble and he could drive home to Sunbury each night.

Eventually changing musical fashions impacted Soho. “It was about my eighth year at the Flamingo and this rock’n’roll came in. I wasn’t annoyed, I just accepted it was going to happen.

“I was packing up my drums one evening and I remember George Fame coming in for the all-nighter, and I thought in his case it was real playing – fantastic – but I never wanted to do that kind of music myself, so I stuck to what we call jazz.”

In the scrapbook that Kinsey’s late wife compiled, he points out a photograph of the original Tony Kinsey band. “All my colleagues in that picture, I hate to say it, are dead.” There’s the saxophonist Don Rendell, and Jimmy Deuchar, trumpet, in their youthful pomp. “All the blowers seem to kick the bucket. It’s terrible really. I miss them all.”

But Kinsey, and his music, live on – as concertgoers will witness later this month.

The Tony Kinsey Big Band at Hampton Hub Club,3 Ashley Rd, Hampton TW12 2JA, 28 January. Start time is 7pm.

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3 responses

  1. Tony, you and your fellow modernists really opened my ears
    as I was starting to find my way in jazz, in the 1950s. I heard you
    playing many times, with various line-ups, and remember heady nights
    at the Flamingo. For all that inspiration,much thanks. Have a great gig.
    Mike Westbrook

  2. Tony was one of my very first mentors in playing drums , i used to see him in Archer Street every Monday eventually taking lessons from him , he always got guys coming up to him offering him gigs , but curiously !
    none of them offered me except for a Wedding or two & USA air bases
    whereas Tony , Alan Ganley, Phil Seaman etc. etc. got the Jazz dates.

    Tonys Toutube ‘Jaffa Daze’ at the Flamingo with Peter King & Les Condon is more than wonderful

    Rgds Derek Coleman

  3. I can still picture Tony sat impassively behind Ronnie Ross as they played the crowd out onto the street on Sunday nights at the Flamingo in Whitcomb St. Jeff kruger and his missus were probably counting the silver (5s entry).

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