Tubby Hayes

Known by the moniker “The Little Giant,” the English saxophonist Tubby Hayes stood out as a commanding hard bop and modal stylist whose improvisations combined kinetic energy, meticulous phrasing, elaborate architecture, deep feeling, and inventive flair. Beyond saxes and woodwinds he proved equally adept as an arranger, composer, and vibraphonist of considerable accomplishment. Audiences witnessed a breathtakingly athletic performer whose torrents of virtuosic notes provoked equal measures of admiration and complaint. A constant figure on the British jazz circuit of the 1960s and early 1970s, he died in 1973 at age 38. His now-unquestioned stature has established him as the definitive representative of British jazz in the twentieth century. Although his American excursions drew scant notice in the jazz press, virtually every stateside musician who encountered or collaborated with him held him in esteem, among them Quincy Jones, Ella Fitzgerald, Charles Mingus, and Duke Ellington. Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Cannonball Adderley, Art Pepper, and Sonny Rollins likewise voiced profound respect.

Together with saxophonist Ronnie Scott he co-directed the Jazz Couriers in the late ’50s. Alongside trumpeter Jimmy Deuchar the two saxophonists single-handedly reshaped England’s jazz environment, previously dominated by dance bands dating back to the 1930s. Following the group’s dissolution Scott launched his celebrated venue, whose opening night showcased Hayes’s fresh ensemble, while Tubbs consolidated his reputation through an array of quartets, quintets, sextets, and big bands. He hosted his own television series and accumulated an extensive recorded catalog beginning in 1955 on Tempo, Fontana, Spotlite, Epic, Smash, and Mole.

Born Edward Brian Hayes in London, he grew up with a father who worked as a BBC studio violinist and itinerant dance-band director. Eager to transmit his musical passion, the elder Hayes provided early violin instruction. By ten the boy had taken up piano, and at eleven he began tenor saxophone. Jazz captured him through his father’s record library and European broadcasts featuring bebop trailblazers Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. After performing with several semi-professional London ensembles, he left school and turned professional at fifteen. In 1951, still sixteen, he joined Kenny Baker’s sextet and subsequently performed under Vic Lewis and Jack Parnell. Already an accomplished arranger, he supplied charts for the groups he served as a teenager. In 1955 he assembled his own octet, which toured Britain for eighteen months. He adopted vibraphone in 1957 after experimenting with Victor Feldman’s instrument at a gig, though he eventually set the vibes aside. Between 1957 and 1959 he and Ronnie Scott jointly led the Jazz Couriers quintet. The unit became the most sought-after act on the British scene and recorded for Tempo; despite its brief existence its impact persists into the twenty-first century.

Once the Jazz Couriers disbanded, Hayes formed a quartet and traveled to Germany. In 1961 an invitation brought him to New York’s Half Note Club under a Musicians’ Union exchange that sent Zoot Sims to Scott’s club in London. While stateside he cut Tubbs in NY with Clark Terry, Eddie Costa, and Horace Parlan. He returned in 1962 for Return Visit, featuring James Moody, (pre-Rahsaan) Roland Kirk, Walter Bishop, Jr., Sam Jones, and Louis Hayes. Further American appearances included the Half Note in 1964 and the Boston Jazz Workshop the same year. His first West Coast engagement came in 1965 at drummer Shelly Manne’s Manne-Hole in Los Angeles.

Back in London, critics subjected Hayes to vigorous debate while the public embraced his recordings. Ubiquitous on concert stages and television—he fronted three programs between 1961 and 1963—his biographer Simon Spillett observed: “Tubby faced almost as much criticism within the press as he did praise, most of it centered upon his technical ability…both a yardstick against which to measure others and, all too often, simply a club with which to beat him….He also suffered from something we appear to have somewhat of a gift for in this country: taking someone apart for doing nothing more than being superbly accomplished at what they do.”

Beyond broadcasting he contributed to film and radio, writing and arranging scores, commercials, and songs. In 1964 he substituted for Paul Gonsalves in Duke Ellington’s orchestra; the following year he recorded with the saxophonist on Just Friends and later Change of Setting. Screen appearances encompassed All Night Long alongside Charles Mingus and Dave Brubeck, his own group in A King in New York starring Charlie Chaplin (1957), and The Beauty Jungle (1964). He performed regularly at European festivals from the U.K. through Spain, Italy, Vienna, and Berlin. In 1965 he featured on several soundtracks, notably Lalo Schifrin’s score for The Liquidator, and appeared with his quintet in the anthology film Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors; the segment “Voodoo” placed the band behind actor Roy Castle portraying a jazz musician. Trunk Records issued a three-track EP drawn from that soundtrack, Voodoo Session, in 2009.

Although already prolific under his own name, Hayes also guested on sessions by fellow British jazz artists including the Harry South Big Band, the Ian Hamer Sextet, and Ted Heath’s Orchestra. Among his studio work he directed the brass section for Family’s 1967 debut Music in a Doll’s House, whose string and brass charts were supplied by a young Mike Batt who revered Hayes. Batt credited Hayes with rescuing his brass arrangement on “Old Songs for New Songs”: when the arranger discovered he had written parts in the wrong key, Hayes and his colleagues quietly transposed them by ear to align with the backing track. That same year Hayes’s quartet produced what many regard as his finest album, Mexican Green, issued by Fontana in 1968.

Hayes continued to record and tour amid challenging circumstances. The ascendancy of commercial rock & roll pushed jazz to the margins in Britain and, shortly afterward, in the United States. What proved to be his final recording of the period was the big-band project The Orchestra, a more commercial effort aimed at pop and easy-listening listeners that included polished charts of hit songs by the Beatles, Burt Bacharach, Nancy Sinatra, Fifth Dimension, and others. Released by Fontana as catalog number 6309 002 in 1970, it met with limited success. A longtime drug addict and alcoholic, Hayes began suffering serious health problems. Following open-heart surgery and extended recovery he resumed performing in 1971 and toured Norway and Sweden in 1972. In 1973 renewed health difficulties necessitated another heart operation, during which he died on the operating table.

His total discography as leader and sideman exceeds four hundred albums; up to one hundred of those releases appeared only after his death. In 2017 Spillett’s biography The Long Shadow of the Little Giant: The Life, Work and Legacy of Tubby Hayes was published by Equinox in the U.K. and received favorable notices on both sides of the Atlantic. Two landmark events in 2019 further broadened Hayes’s reach. The documentary feature A Man in a Hurry, directed by Lee Cogswell and written by Mark Baxter, appeared, as did the long-sought Grits, Beans and Greens: The Lost Fontana Studio Session 1969. Jazz writer and Polygram catalog manager Richard Cook had earlier noticed diary entries detailing the sessions; the 1969 tapes surfaced in the archive after Cook’s 1997 departure, their existence confirmed only in 2018. Decca/Universal engaged Gearbox Studios to master the material for the first time. In July 2019, ahead of the film’s commercial release, Gearbox issued the set in multiple formats: a 180-gram vinyl edition cut on a 1960s Studer C37 tape machine and Scully Lathe identical to the model used by Rudy Van Gelder, plus single- and double-CD editions. Spillett remarked, “It really is a lost masterpiece, make no mistake….It’s hard to believe that this music has lain unheard for 50 years, it’s so fresh. There’s no doubt in my mind that had they been issued at the time, these recordings would have been seen as Tubby’s last great album.” In September 2019 Decca released the twelve-disc box set The Complete Fontana Albums 1960-1969 (eleven LPs in the vinyl edition), remastered at Gearbox directly from the original tapes via a Studer C37 ¼-inch stereo machine and an all-valve mastering deck built for Decca in the late 1950s.