Geoff: 0:00

Hello, Podcats. Geoff Gascoyne here. Today I'm in Muswell Hill, and I'm going to see a wonderful stalwart of the UK jazz scene. A trumpet player and former violin player, Mr. Henry Lowther, who is a bit of a legend. Played with him a few times, not that many times, but uh it's always been great, and I'm sure he's got some brilliant stories to tell of a very long career in British jazz. So here we go. I was just doing some research actually yesterday. Just as a session musician, let me just start with this. Yeah, sure. Bing Crosby, George Harrison, Elton John, Henry Mancini, Paul McCartney, Van Morrison, Sir Simon Rattle, Nelson Riddle, David Bowie? Were any of that?

Henry: 1:11

Yeah, yeah. It's not it won't it wouldn't have been anything particularly noticeable. What I remember was a large session orchestra. The significant thing I remember about it, it was held on a bank holiday, which meant that musicians are actually paid double money. The names of the musicians are probably not even notated on the recording, I would have thought. So in other words, it was that was anonymous.

Geoff: 1:32

So that was just another session for you?

Henry: 1:33

It was just another session, yeah. Through contractors or fixers, as we call them, or concrete mixers in in in uh rhyming slang. So you just get a phone call, uh, and very often the money went through them too, according to Musicians' Union rates.

Geoff: 1:48

Right.

Henry: 1:48

And of course, the whole business about being a musician wasn't just about recording music for artists, it was also television, radio, and of course there was far more broadcasting in those days than there is now. Mrs. Thatcher killed that off primarily by removing uh the needle time agreement so that radio stations could play as much recorded music as much as they like. Whereas before they were limited to how much they could do it. So, in order to have a lot of music on their stations, they used to have to book musicians to play it.

Geoff: 2:18

Do you have some memorable sessions that you did of of those kind of poppy kind of era things?

Henry: 2:23

Anybody that knows me well will know that I have a very good memory. I can remember many recording sessions.

Geoff: 2:29

Wow, okay. Well give me a few memorable moments then.

Henry: 2:32

Okay. Paul McCartney, because it's the first one that came into my head, and I was booked by the contractor was George Hamer. George Hamer was the youngest brother of the Hamer brothers. Ian Hamer was the most well-known now. He's a trumpet player, but he was a big fixer, and he used to fix all the Beatles stuff and Paul McCartney. I never recorded with the Beatles, by the way, but I did record with Paul McCartney and George Harrison. However, the session that came into my head was Paul McCartney, and it was in the old Air Studios, which was above Peter Robinson's at Oxford Circus. It's owned by George Martin, the well-known Beatles producer. And indeed, he was the producer on this session. And I went there and I was with famous trumpet player Derek Watkins. And what I remember about it was as we sat down to do the recording, there were three tracks to record, and George Martin had done the arrangements. And we sat down and Paul McCartney was speeding. So he came up and said, I hear you two guys are the uh artists in town. And I also remember this because Ronnie Ross, the great baritone player, he was very nervous because on the previous occasion, because of his addictions, he got sent home off a session by George Martin. So he's very nervous in case George Martin would remember it. People like George Martin didn't take much notice of musicians in general unless musicians did something wrong. You know, I mean the musicians were just sort of cannon fodder to people like George Martin.

Geoff: 3:56

Do you remember which tracks you you played with?

Henry: 3:58

No, not at all. It's another characteristic of me, is I take very little notice of what I've recorded.

Geoff: 4:04

Have you not ever tried to track down some of the

Henry: 4:06

I haven't actually, but I do, in fact, have a record of what I've done through two or three people that's come my way. My oldest son went through all the recordings that I personally have that had been sent to me by record company sessions that I'd done. Then there was this French guy, Philippe Renault, who's a big fan of British music. He produced a book called Simply Not Cricket, and it was a list of all the recordings that British jazz musicians had done, like jazz recordings, but also at the back for a lot of British jazz musicians that also were very active in studio work. He also listed all the recordings that he could find of them.

Geoff: 4:44

Right.

Henry: 4:44

I can remember Paul McCartney himself trying to work something out. He sits at the piano and he's trying to work out a chords of us playing triads on the piano. And I always remember he turned to us, and his very words were, You must excuse me, but I don't know music.

Geoff: 4:59

What?

Henry: 4:59

That's what he said.

Geoff: 5:00

Paul McCartney.

Henry: 5:01

He said that. He said, You must excuse me, but I don't know music. So that was that one. And there was another sort of funny thing with producers I remember in the old Morgan Studios in Willesden when there was a large horn section, and we got there and the producer was not arrived, but we started running through. We couldn't play in tune because the bass was out of tune. It was extremely difficult for us to play in tune. Really, and it's really impossible to play in tune, you know, because the bass is out of tune with the keyboard and guitars. So they started blaming it on us. But eventually the producer arrived and he came out with immortal words as well. He sat down and said, Let me listen to it. I've got fresh ears. I always remember that one. And I also remember that one because the same producer, we've got it now, that's good. But I'll move over to a couple more tracks. Let's do it again. We'll do it again, just in case. And what they're doing is they're getting used to double track it. Double track without telling you. You know, and of course the union thing is they have to pay you another 125%. And of course, it was one way of trying to get away with it. So I , I it was me in the studio that put my hand up and said, actually, you know, you can't do that. I was a bit surprised by the other musicians didn't sort of come out very strongly to support me. So the producer got really angry with me, came rushing out into the studio from the booth, and he said to me, You should go and join the women at Grunwicks. Grunwicks was a famous strike that was going on in actually in Willesden for a photo processing laboratory. So that's a little bit of anecdotes from my I've got plenty more, but I'm sure we go on forever.

Geoff: 6:39

Well, I mean, I could talk all day. Can we go back to where you first got hooked on jazz? What was it that actually made you want to play jazz?

Henry: 6:46

Yeah, it's very interesting this because I mean, you know, although I grew up as a cornet player in the Salvation Army, throughout my teenage years I was a violinist. I went to the Royal Academy of Music as a violinist. And I wasn't interested in jazz particularly or anything, although I was aware of some popular jazz. My brother-in-law liked the Jerry Mulligan Quartet. But I shared a room with a guy, he loved Indian music, Indian classical music, and he introduced me to that. And I used to go on a lot, quite I got really interested in it, and also the notion that that there's a lot of improvisation in Indian classical music. I learned something about ragas and talas, about the way that Indian music worked against a drone. But I never thought of playing it because it was certainly in those days there was no way where you could go to learn. And secondly, still felt very alien. But on one occasion I was listening to a foreign radio station and I heard a saxophone player playing with just bass and drums. And it was all very asymmetric. And it to me it resembled in a kind of funny way like Indian music. It was like a line, a linear, accompanied by quite busy drumming, like the tabla drums in Indian music, plus a bass. And the bass, in a way, functions a bit like the drone in Indian music. And I I like that, and I thought I'd like to learn how to do that maybe. But I'll tell you what that track was. It was Sonny Rollins on the Way Out West album with Shelly Manne and Ray Brown. Of course, what I didn't know then, they were improvising on a chord sequence, but I wouldn't have known that then. I was a violinist really still, but it was modern jazz I was interested in, not sort of traditional. Certainly always had more technique on the trumpet than I had on the violin, you know. Because I was like a young prodigy when I was in the Salvation Army. So I I went back to playing the trumpet at this point. So naturally I started listening to the jazz trumpet, and that's the biggest ones for me were Miles Davis and Clifford Brown. And then I got very much into Fats and Vara's book a little.

Geoff: 8:47

Would you have transcribed? How would you learn the jazz vocabulary in those?

Henry: 8:51

There were no books on theory or anything in those days. You learnt by listening. I remember listening to some recording and working out the chords, and I was very pleased to find that many, many years later, when I actually saw these chords published or somehow that I did get them right. So I learned like that really, just listening. And then I was lucky enough to meet some students at Leicester University who had a mainstream style jazz thing, played uh modeled itself on Johnny Hodges' jump bands from the 1950s. Started playing with them, and that's the first experience I had of playing jazz.

Geoff: 9:27

Great. Well amazing. And then later on, you got into free jazz?

Henry: 9:32

Free jazz playing. In fact, I used to do free jazz playing with Jack Bruce and John Heisman. There was a sort of chain of events, this Jamaican drummer that I used to play with uh in Westbourne Park in a coffee bar called l'Escarpolette. Rather dodgy people used to hang out, like Michael X, Britain's Answer to Malcolm X. And also that notorious duo Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davis. They used to hang out in this bar. One of their cohorts was a record producer called Denny Cordell. And there were dodgy people, believe me, and drugs were everywhere. And I used to play there with this drummer called Don Brown, who was a junkie. But he formed a quintet, and I got the job. It sounded like it was going to be a big thing. And of course, like all these things, it never was. You know, we ended up playing this coffee or at least playing there regularly. The band was uh Lyn Dobson, a very, very fine saxophone player. Harry Miller was the bass player, and the piano player was Tony Hymas. And anyway, there was a progression from that band. We got rid of Don Brown because of his problems that he created. But then the band was became known as the Group Sounds Five. And it the line it was Alan Jackson started playing with us. And then Lyn Dobson inevitably used to fall out with people all the time. Jack Bruce used to come down and play with us in this place in Stoke Newington. So the final manifestation of that band was a trio. It was just me, Jack Bruce, and John Hiseman. Right. And we used to play free improvised music. It was around about that time that John Stevens started the Little Theatre Club. We played with the people like Evan Parker and uh Barry Guy, Tony Oxley. Many ways, we were playing free music before John Stevens, which is sort of interesting, you know.

Geoff: 11:23

Was this kind of groundbreaking at the time? Did you have people that you were inspired by? Were there Americans doing this?

Henry: 11:29

Oh yes, absolutely. Because it I mean, this was the era of in America, the rather unimaginative name, The New Thing. The late Coltrane music, you know, where the when he started playing uh all the free stuff, those cosmic music, those sort of records. And transition and that. Transition, yeah, all those. And uh that came out of the modal music that Coltrane was playing in the early uh 1960s. Uh so there was, yes, there were precedents.

Geoff: 11:55

Did at some stage did it get commercial? Did was there a peak of this kind of era that sort of in

Henry: 12:01

The s in one sense, you know, jazz has never been commercial anyway, and that music. It it's I think it's always been a good thing in British jazz or British music, if you like, that the different kind of music that's within what we simply just simply call jazz, it's never been so strict. I know that in France there's the different cliques, and they don't mix . In London it's always been mixed. You can move from one to the other, like like I've done, you know.

Geoff: 12:28

Yeah, well, I'm the s I'm the same. I mean, I've done lots of different things as well.

Henry: 12:31

I think it's much healthier in that sense in Britain than it is in p France.

Geoff: 12:34

But also it means that you can actually make a living, right?

Henry: 12:37

Yeah, as to how popular it was. It's a question that some interviewers have in recent years always asked somebody of my age to say, what's different today? And often they the mean is it any more popular than it was in a sense. I'd I'd say it's roughly the same. I don't think it's changed very much. I mean, what has changed, of course, is the academic background. You know, there's much more academic training in Jazz than you know, musicians of my generation didn't go to college. But funnily enough, I mean, perhaps it created more individuality than what happens now with an academic background. In America, maybe you've got sort of 2,000 tenor players that all sound the same and play Giant Steps faster than John Coltrane. You know, when you take single instrument in jazz like a tenor saxophone, and you look back at the history and you go back to say Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Sonny Rollins, you hear these people, you can hear them, you know who it is. That's not so easy now.

Geoff: 13:35

I know, I know.

Henry: 13:36

Musicians do sound it's like it's like they're almost like the academic background is channeling people into the same direction all the time. Jamey Aebersold records, yeah, they always have a list of records that you ought to listen to.

Geoff: 13:48

Yeah, yeah. So speaking of Jamey Aebersold and standards, I asked you to pick a standard to play today, didn't I? Yeah.

Henry: 14:01

And what did you pick? Uh, There Is No Greater Love.

Geoff: 14:04

And why did you pick that?

Henry: 14:05

From the top of my head, it's just a tune that I like.

Geoff: 14:08

It's a great tune. Um so I showed you my apps, didn't I? Yeah. Before we started. And uh I think it's the future, isn't it? It's it's the future of Jamey Aebersold.

Henry: 14:17

Yeah, I don't know. I'm very impressed as well, I have to tell you.

Geoff: 14:20

Thank you very much. Yeah. So we're going to play There Is No Greater Love. You're going to play two choruses, there's an eight bar introduction, and um here it comes. Okay. That's great. How did it feel to play along with that?

Henry: 16:27

Yeah, fine, yeah.

Geoff: 16:28

What's your approach to improvising?

Henry: 16:30

Oh, I don't know. No. I just make it up as I go along.

Geoff: 16:33

Of course you do, yeah, of course you do, but

Henry: 16:34

I, I'm I'm not I'm not a lick player, you know, I never really think in terms of licks, really. No. You know, because of the sort of one scale per chord, Jamey Aebersold, you know, advocates, and not only would I not teach that method, I don't even um advocate it. I I always think in terms of keys. You you take a you know, two, five, one, D minor seven, G7, C on the two chord, the D minor, you play uh a D Dorian, G7 chord, you would play a G mixolydian L scale. And then of course on the one chord you play a C major scale.

Geoff: 17:10

How do you flow from one to another? Yes.

Henry: 17:12

I mean, I I teach my students that for start that all the different kinds of minor scales are actually all interchangeable. I mean, even if you play something modal, you know, like So What, you know, you're in the D minor. If you just play a melodic minor scale ascending, or and play a melodic minor scale descending, or play a harmonic minor scale, you know, or or just play the Dorian mode. They all work, all of them. So I uh that's the way I teach harmony for improvisers, you know.

Geoff: 17:44

Yeah.

Henry: 17:45

I don't like that that sort of Locrian in mode, altered scale stuff, you know. Uh I love to use as an example the the classic quintet that Miles Davies had with John Coltrane. And it's interesting that both Miles Davis and John Coltrane both had completely different approaches to harmony. Miles Davis would see a sequence starts at C major, ends in C major. And Miles would see like this big arc. But Coltrane used to take each chord, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And in fact, that all that so-called sheets of sound business that Coltrane became famous for, in some ways originated with Thelonious Monk. You know, when he spent five months working regularly with Thelonious Monk, the Monk used to say to him, you know, I've got ten digits, I play all of these notes. Why don't you do that on the saxophone? Well, in order to play all those notes, you have to play them all really quick. And that's what Coltrane did. He tried to play it all the notes of every chord.

Geoff: 18:42

Yeah.

Henry: 18:43

All the time. It's interesting, as you know, I was a very, very close friend of Kenny Wheeler. And it was interesting to talk to him about these things because he always reckoned that he I mean, it's not true, but he always reckoned that he he couldn't play on Bebop changes.

Geoff: 18:58

Funny you should say that because Stan Sulzmann said exactly the same thing. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. But do you not think that those guys they had their own language almost? You know, they wrote their own music a lot and they played with each other such a lot that they kind of did develop their own language.

Henry: 19:12

I certainly think Kenny Wheeler did, because actually that's why when you hear Kenny Wheeler's compositions, you almost certainly be able to say, Oh, that's Kenny Wheeler. You could make a comparison here to a composer like Elgar. Elgar, you need two bars and you know it's Elgar. Well, what made it so recognizable? It was because Elgar had his favourite devices that he used all the time. Well, this Kenny Wheeler's very similar. But but Kenny used to talk about Jimmy Deuchar. Kenny used to say I could never play changes like Jimmy Deuchar. But he he thought when he first came across Booker Little and because Booker Little's writing, it it gave him a new direction. And of course, it was a mixture, it wasn't music that was entirely modal. Depends on what you mean by modal. I mean, how long do you stay on one chord before you can call it modal music? But the other thing, of course, it was very what became very popular around that time was the use of pedal point harmony. Putting a triad on top of a pedal point and shifting triad around. Yeah. You know, so then then, of course, what you you get, you get slash chords, like F sharp over G. It's a very specific sound. That's where Kenny came from. You know, I was in the Dankworth band, uh I thought I played on Windmill Tilter, the first Dankworth album. I had a day job at the time. I took time off from my job to play on the recording sessions. I remember when I saw some of the chords, you know, like F sharp over G, I didn't understand that at all. I didn't have a clue. No. I didn't know what it meant, but Kenny Wheeler had already discovered that. But then, of course, there were two or three musicians around then very interested in doing all that stuff. One was Bob Cornford, do you know who he was? He was a composer and arranger, played piano. He used to be an MD for Scott Walker. He was into all this, he was a good friend of Kenny, you know. Plus Pat Smythe played piano with Joe Harriott and people, who was a wonderful musician. He was the one that when he was dying in hospital, Stan Getz came all the way over from America, came over to London just to visit Pat Smythe, and then went back. He thought so much about Pat Smythe, Stan Getz. And also, notably with Kenny, of course, he had lessons off Richard Rodney Bennett, and I think he he learnt a lot of stuff about all that from Richard Bennett.

Geoff: 21:30

So he took a lot of classical music and brought it into jazz.

Henry: 21:33

Yeah. I remember Kenny telling me that one of the things he did with Richard Rodney Bennett did me he gave him three notes and said, write a wind quintet, use these three notes, and you can use them like like a tone row, like you can have them backwards, forwards, upside, inverted and inverted backwards. And also you can change the key. You can you don't have to stick to the same three notes, you can have all 12 keys. And he he wrote a wind quintet. And I remember Kenny telling me, I'm sure he told me this, that Richard Rodney Bennett arranged to have it published. But I've never heard anybody ever mention it. If it was published, where is it? I'm sure somebody would have found it. But I remember Kenny telling me that.

Geoff: 22:17

You know, yeah. So you played at Woodstock, didn't you? Yeah, 1969. So what do you remember about playing at Woodstock?

Henry: 22:23

Yeah, I can remember quite a lot, really. I mean you've got a great memory. The whole thing begins on the Friday afternoon when we first arrived at New York Airport. The the traffic jam on Highway 17. I've been people heading towards Woodstock, you know, and then I was getting buying a map in a diner and negotiating our way through the Catskill Mountains to the town where the hotel's supposed to be. But the booking system had broken down in the hotel, people sleeping in the corridors. Yeah, and it went on from there. You know, I've been flown in the next day with helicopter, did our bit. I heard Santana, what's it called? The Incredible String Band were playing. That was a British band. They were playing it as we managed to scramble on one of the last helicopters before it got dark. Because they weren't going to fly the helicopters once it got dark.

Geoff: 23:11

Was that the only way into the festival if by helicopter?

Henry: 23:14

Yeah. And they had the radio on saying, you know, the traffic jam on Highway 17 was now 10 miles long. Then a bit later it was 20 miles long. And then he said the the governor of New York are declaring this festival a disaster area, and they're going to send the army in. But the army never got there because they couldn't. Because all the roads were blocked. And then in fact, the the the the next day was this Sunday when we left and we're going toward New York City. There are all the people parked along the motorway, and all their cars are all the way along the motorway. Uh, the people who couldn't get there. And they just stayed with their cars to like just to be somewhere near. It was almost like a sacred event, you know. And the people partners as you're driving, they're all doing the old hippie thing, you know, like this as you drive by them and that, you know. And they were the ones sitting on the roofs of their cars on the motorway. Can you imagine that? Like the M1 with cars parked for miles.

Geoff: 24:14

I can I can imagine that. Actually,

Henry: 24:16

it was incredible, you know.

Geoff: 24:18

Yeah. Uh right, to to finish off, I've got some questions which I ask everybody in the podcast. Starting with what's your favourite album? It's hard to pick one, isn't it? Obviously, but you can have a couple of things.

Henry: 24:32

I think um Milestones, the one that preceded Kind of Blue Miles Davis. Okay. I think without doubt, that's my favourite.

Geoff: 24:40

Did that make a huge impression on you?

Henry: 24:41

Yeah, I mean, if you to pick one record to take with you to a desert island disc, I think it would be that one.

Geoff: 24:48

Next question. Is there a favourite musician alive or dead that you would have liked to have played with?

Henry: 24:53

Um, strangely enough, maybe Thelonious Monk, the kind of person you could learn so much from, a unique individual.

Geoff: 25:00

I always found playing his music quite hard. I mean, on paper it looks easy, doesn't it?

Henry: 25:04

Yeah, I agree. And I don't think he would have been easy to play with either. Maybe Thelonious Monk is not a difficult question, yeah.

Geoff: 25:12

Is there a highlight of your career? You've had such a diverse career and you've done so many things, but is there a couple of moments that you could pick out?

Henry: 25:21

Yeah, once again, it's difficult. Um you might ask me tomorrow and I might say something different, but right off the top of my head I would say playing in Canterbury Cathedral with Mike Gibbs. It was in 1970, it was the 800th centenary of Canterbury Cathedral. It was an absolutely amazing concert, Mike Gibbs. And he had Mike he had Mike Pine playing the cathedral organ. He had tube of bells and all sorts of things. And uh that was was two trumpets, that was me and Kenny Wheeler.

Geoff: 25:52

Trumpets sound great in cathedrals, don't they?

Henry: 25:54

Oh, I, I love playing in in large churches and cathedrals. Absolutely.

Geoff: 25:59

Basses, not so much, but uh yeah, trumpets sound great.

Henry: 26:03

Yeah, it makes playing the trumpet a lot easier because you don't have to work very hard. Certainly a lot easier than playing in the 606 club.

Geoff: 26:10

Yeah.

Henry: 26:11

Well, it used to exhaust me in no time at all. It was very loud as well, wasn't it?

Geoff: 26:17

We played we played with Peter King a many times, didn't we, in the 606? Do you have nice memories of Peter King?

Henry: 26:23

Yes, I did. I could do eight years with him, of course, in the quintet. Yeah, eight years, a very very nice memory. Although he wasn't a team player, Pete, you know. I mean, he he he played for it for himself always. Whereas the br the rest of that band played for with the for and with each other. And we something we all noticed and you know, often used to talk about it, even to the extent of actually asking Pete King whether we could rehearse more so that we could learn all the music we were playing from memory. So we wouldn't need music stands. But he never he was never warm to it, Pete. That was not his thing at all.

Geoff: 27:00

Complicated man, wasn't he?

Henry: 27:01

He liked he was just as happy playing with a local rhythm section somewhere as he was playing in a really good band.

Geoff: 27:07

Yeah. Funny that, isn't it? What was the last concert you attended?

Henry: 27:11

Um, Messiaen, playing the long Latin titled, Expectum Mortuorum uh whatever. It's a long title. They played this piece, and they were played also in the concert was Stravinsky's Mass, uh Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind, and some early works by Messiaen, and um some choral pieces by Duruflé and I think Pulang, if I remember rightly. That was a beautiful concert.

Geoff: 27:39

So you haven't lost your love of classical music. You always you always love classical music.

Henry: 27:43

Yeah, I do, and I have to say that uh almost in the form of a confession that I listen to more classical music than jazz, yeah. Right. And and and as a listener for jazz though, uh in many ways I'm still more interested in the music that I grew up with than what's gone on today. Not that that that's not a cr for a critic any critical reason. It's just that I've developed out of the music that that that I first heard when I was younger. It's not wholly true. I I do listen to jazz and I do hear some things that I really like. I'd rather go to gigs than listen to music at home.

Geoff: 28:16

Yeah. Do you have some favourite classical composers that you you go back to a lot?

Henry: 28:20

Uh that's changed over the years, but uh I I love Haydn and uh Brahms I love very much. Yeah. I love um I love Elgar, and I've mentioned Messiaen just now. Mike Gibbs also was always a big fan of Messiaen. Yeah, I could go on forever.

Geoff: 28:38

I could talk to you all day, but I'm I don't have the time, unfortunately. Um question five. Um, what would you say was your musical weakness?

Henry: 28:45

My chops.

Geoff: 28:46

Sounds pretty good to me. I it's a constant thing with trumpets, though, isn't it?

Henry: 28:49

Well, I'm thinking in terms of endurance. I often find some gigs very difficult to get through uh with with my full capabilities, because I get tired, and once your chops start getting tired, you stop thinking about the music. You start thinking about your chops, and then you start feeling that you're failing. It's even harder now at my age because I don't play so much as I used to. So to sort of maintain the chops, I have to do I have to do a lot of practice.

Geoff: 29:14

You've always been able to read music, haven't you? So you've never had any problems in sessions or um, you know, sight reading, things like this.

Henry: 29:22

No, in fact, um I can't remember you know learning to read music. I could read music at five years old. And I I realise that this is a difficulty for some people that that actually learn to play a musical instrument in the jazz. You wouldn't do this in classical music, of course, because you learning to read music is what you actually do when you play classical music. But where there's an improvisational sort of element, as in jazz, you might not actually need to, in many ways, not need to learn to read music. That's right. It's you get somebody on very irresponsibly, I would say, with Don Stevens used to go around telling students. Students not to learn to read music, because re learning to read music will will spoil you. What how irresponsible. I mean, you put people the wrong way.

Geoff: 30:09

You know what? You still s you still see that attitude.

Henry: 30:12

I can't understand why people could be complimented on something that they can't do. There's a funny story here. I'm going to be doing a session, there's a studio in Soho. I know later it might have been called Logarithm Studio or something. But I remember um as always with musicians who sort of go round the corner to a pub when the session's finished, pile your instruments into the corner, you know, you and and uh I happened to be sitting sitting down in there against this old guy, and he said, Are you guys musicians? You've seen the cases. I said, Yes. He said, Well, you should come down my pub in the East End. He said, There's a piano player who plays in the pub. He says, He's fantastic, this piano player. He says, Do you know what? He says, he can play the piano with only one hand. I've never forgotten that.

Geoff: 31:07

What's he doing with his other hand?

Henry: 31:09

I don't know.

Geoff: 31:10

Um, okay, next question. Do you ever get nervous on stage?

Henry: 31:14

Yes, all the time. There's kind of like the fear of failure. Right. But there's also it's not nerves so much as feeling self-conscious, and I don't enjoy it.

Geoff: 31:24

Is that to do with the chops thing or is that something else?

Henry: 31:27

No, no, nothing to do with the chops. Or that if you've got bad chops, that's enough to make you even more nervous. But I'm not I mean just the sort of sense of being self-conscious. But I've also found that nerves are irrational because there's sometimes you think I'm going to be very nervous doing this, and suddenly you find you're not nervous. And on other occasions, when you don't you think something's going to be easy, you're not you're not going to be nervous about it. Suddenly suddenly you get nervous. It seems to be unconnected, like many other things, while some days you feel good and other days you don't. I don't know. It's something yes, absolutely. I've always been nervous. I mean, Kenny Wheeler used to get so nervous, he used to put deps in on broadcasts. He was so he used to get so nervous about it he'd send a dep. I've never been that bad, but I mean uh yes, absolutely.

Geoff: 32:17

It's hard. Being a musician is hard. There's so many things I don't teach you in schools, no. A few more questions. Yeah. What's your favourite sandwich?

Henry: 32:26

Hardboiled egg and tomatoes with lots of salt and pepper.

Geoff: 32:31

Lovely. Um, what's your favourite movie?

Henry: 32:34

In The Heat of the Night. It's uh Sydney Poitier and Rod Steiger. In many ways, I like it because it's a sort of a lesson learned and a reconciliation. It's like this expert uh police officer turns up in a southern American town where there's been a murder. And because he's waiting for a train to leave, they'll ought to make the assumption is being a black guy that he's done the murder. So he gets uh arrested, and then they find out that he's a he's a he's a homicide expert working for police in a northern American town, namely Philadelphia. And uh the chief of police in this Mississippian uh town, you know, deeply like a lot of people in that area of America, particularly in those days, deeply r racist. And he might be surprised to find that this guy is an expert and he almost resents it. But during the course of the film, they become very friends. And the prejudice goes both ways, incidentally. You know, the black guy tries to pin the murder on a sort of wealthy person who at one time would have had slaves. And he wants he he he's prejudiced enough to infect his bias in in trying to discover the perpetrator of the murder. So it's a great film, sounds like it needs a remake, though. Great music by Quincy Jones. Right, wow. Yeah, great music too.

Geoff: 34:00

Uh has there been a favourite venue that you have played in?

Henry: 34:04

The Karamel.

Geoff: 34:05

The Karamel.

Henry: 34:06

In Wood Green. Okay. And which I'm well as well associated with.

Geoff: 34:11

Is that a current venue?

Henry: 34:12

Yes, venue. Very current, yeah. Oh, I don't know that. Yeah, Jazz there every Thursday, and I I book some musicians in it. Right. And the food, the vegan food is fantastic. I think I'm free next Thursday. Yes, again. It's it's got great um I do one a month. I book one a month. Right. They do their own, put their own things on. Uh it's just a great space, it's got a great sound, and it's got great food. Vegan food, particularly the Indian thalis that uh they that they do there. Although, yeah, it was undoubtedly my favourite venue, yeah.

Geoff: 34:46

Amazing. Well, it's it's it's great to hear.

Henry: 34:48

I'm planning to I'm planning to launch my big band album there.

Geoff: 34:52

You've got a big band album?

Henry: 34:53

I've got a big band album coming, yeah.

Geoff: 34:55

Wow, that's amazing. When, is it recorded already?

Henry: 34:58

Yes, yeah. So with the London Jazz Orchestra. Fantastic. And uh it's it's it's gonna be a double C D, double vinyl.

Geoff: 35:05

And you've you've composed for that, have you?

Henry: 35:07

I've composed all of it. I'd love to hear that. Yeah, yeah. That's coming out hopefully in February. At the moment, there's all this stuff going on with the artwork and uh and uh and uh other issues, you know. Right. Yeah, but anyway, I've decided that as I love the Karamel, it helps to put all the time trying to raise the profile of the Karamel. There's some reason it's difficult for people to get people to go there, but it's

Geoff: 35:31

Let me know when it is, I'll be there. For sure

Henry: 35:33

Yeah, it'll be it plan in the in the somewhere like February. Right. Fantastic. So yeah, we'll we'll see.

Geoff: 35:40

Uh two more questions. What's your favourite country or city?

Henry: 35:45

Italy. I uh yes, absolutely Italy. Uh well about favourite city there.

Geoff: 35:51

Uh it's funny because musicians well, I mean, from my perspective, don't tend to take too many holidays, you know. When you come back from a tour, you don't really want to go out again.

Henry: 36:01

Yeah, well, uh I'm I'm like that. And uh I hate airports and uh and flying. I'm not a nervous flyer, but I mean I don't like sitting in a sardine can in the in the air, you know, and and all the processing that uh you have to go through to fly. Uh I I I don't want to fly ever again. Yeah. But I I'm going to have to to go to Berlin.

Geoff: 36:24

Okay. So my last question is what's your favourite chord? I've had some interesting answers.

Henry: 36:32

I actually can answer that. I would say a dominant ninth chord in third inversion. Okay. Can you play it for me? Yeah. Come on then. I've got switch it on first. Oh, but it's basically G s G9. G9, yeah. But you but it's a third inversion, it's like the F's in the bass now.

Geoff: 36:56

Right.

Henry: 36:56

So leave the root out as well.

Geoff: 36:58

So that is nice, isn't it? So you've got F in the bass and you've got the B natural. Oh, yes.

Henry: 37:07

Oh, that's do you what's that who is composer? Is that you just that use of that tell you I probably can tell you. It's Elgar. Elgar love that chord.

Geoff: 37:20

Everyone should listen to classical. There's so much to be discovered, isn't there, from that?

Henry: 37:24

Yeah. Yeah.

Geoff: 37:25

That's brilliant.

Henry: 37:26

Do you do you uh what what sort of things do other people say when you ask them a favourite?

Geoff: 37:30

I've had loads of different things.

Henry: 37:32

It's a major seven, sharp eleven.

Geoff: 37:34

Someone said someone said a B flat triad on its piano.

Henry: 37:39

Just a B flat, a straight Yeah, that's yeah. Triads are underrated in modern jazz, it's true. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I know it's absolutely true, that is interesting.

Geoff: 37:49

You know, but it's interesting, um, you know, when I think of Kenny Wheeler, I just think of Lydian chords, you know.

Henry: 37:54

Yeah, absolutely, yeah, very much so. Lydian chords and sort of altered chords. Um I remember first time I came across this chord, I didn't know what it was.

Geoff: 38:05

Oh that's F sharp triad in the right hand over A.

Henry: 38:10

Yeah. It's it's basically a major chord with a minor third in the bass. And uh but in in fact, in fact, I mean we put put it down there, but what once you once you do. Once you do this, and then it's not so unusual, right? Because you've got the seven, it's an it's an A thirteen, flat nine. Yeah, that's all it is, yeah, isn't it? That's all it is. But when you first presented to it, like the first time I saw that, I thought, what the hell is that? You can't you can't put minor third in the base of a major chord.

Geoff: 38:47

How would you improvise over F sharp over A? What would you do?

Henry: 38:50

Like a diminished scale, really, I suppose. Yeah, you know. Right, isn't it right? I would say that really. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, diminished scale. It's it what it's what your core chords is interesting sometimes. Sort of example Mike Gibbs used to be very sometimes used to do that. So you get a sus. You get a sus chord, but you still put the major third in it as well.

Geoff: 39:30

Oh, that's lovely, isn't it? So that's G sus. That's G sus. So that's G, C, D, and F F, and then with a B natural above it.

Henry: 39:38

Then the question is, what do you call that? That's lovely, isn't it? Probably have to call it uh I would probably have to call that uh G7 add four.

Geoff: 39:49

That's probably what you have to Yeah, but it's specific because that that four, if that was up there, that would sound wrong. If that that C natural was up at the octave, yeah, yeah, because it wouldn't be right.

Henry: 39:58

But then it would be this.

Geoff: 40:02

Then you get a clash at the top if you want to split those two notes. Have you ever studied um big band writing? Have you had had lessons in it or anything like that? I've not had lessons with anybody, but I've I've looked at some. I mean, you must have learned from just from being in big bands.

Henry: 40:15

I'm lucky enough to have played, of course, in some of the real good big band books.

Geoff: 40:19

You played on the Music of Large and Small Ensembles, didn't you?

Henry: 40:22

I did, yeah.

Geoff: 40:23

Right. Do you remember about that?

Henry: 40:24

Uh yeah, it was amazing because um we were in the middle of the tour. It was in 1990. It was Kenny Wheeler's 60th birthday tour. And we we were in Cardiff one night, and then the next night we were in Liverpool, and we drove to Liverpool in a storm on the M6 motorway. There were sort of juggernauts lying on their side, been blown over, and it was a hair-raising journey, you know, with rain and wind. Almost late for the concert. We didn't have time to go to the hotel, so we went straight out on stage to play the gig. And after the gig we went to the hotel where we had to leave the hotel at six in the morning to get to the studio in CTS Studios in Wembley. It was all done according to Musicians Union two, three-hour sessions, ten till one, two till five.

Geoff: 41:14

But the band was well rehearsed because you'd been trained. We were on tour, so you just like bang, bang, bang straight through.

Henry: 41:19

Yeah, we thought we had an evening off, and then the next day we we had ten till one back in the studio in the morning, and then after the session was finished, the coach was there to take us to Birmingham.

Geoff: 41:32

That's crazy, isn't it? Straight to Birmingham to do the evening gig. So one take of everything or two takes of everything?

Henry: 41:37

Yeah, mostly, like first takes or maybe two takes, but then they take the first one anyway. I always remember Manfred Eicher, ECM Records, coming out into the studio when the trumpets were, and he stood there, and when we finished, he said, I've never heard a sound like that in my life. I always remember him saying that. He was so impressed. The other two trumpets, besides me and Derrick, were Alan Downey, who was one of the great lead trumpet players. In fact, uh some ways I preferred Alan Downey's uh lead playing to Derrick's, but Derek was much more uh mechanical and he he played well up on the beat. But but Alan Downey was a more of an old-fashioned tradition of lead trumpet playing, he played slightly behind the beat. And also he it was just an incredibly exciting lead trumpet player.

Geoff: 42:24

So, what kind of lead trumpet player were you?

Henry: 42:26

The times when I have played lead trumpet have been by really when I've been forced into it or or by default. I did play lead trumpet short two-day tour with George Russell. I played lead. I played lead when Gil Evans came to England in the 1980s.

Geoff: 42:43

What was it like playing with Gil Evans?

Henry: 42:45

Chaos. He was a very chaotic person, but a really lovely man. Right. Very sweet man.

Geoff: 42:51

Amazing.

Henry: 42:51

Yeah, I'd had a number of uh experiences with Gil Evans. And one of my favourite memories of Gil is when we played at Ronnie Scott's for two weeks, and on the Sunday between the two weeks, we we went to uh Antwerp, played a gig in Antwerp in Belgium. So it meant finishing at Ronnie's at three in the morning and then getting a plane early in the morning the next day. So I didn't go to bed as far as I can remember. And staying in a hotel after the gig in Antwerp, coming back on the Monday morning, and then to be in Ronnie Scott's that evening. Coming back on the Monday morning, I'm on the tube, and I get the Piccadilly line all the way from Heathrow to Wood Green, you know. So I'm sitting on the tube, and we got to Leicester Square tube station and I look out the window, and there's Gil Evans on the platform. And he he had all the band's music. It was a pile, he didn't have a bag, and a lot of it was just the music we're playing from was scraps as well. You know, pencil written. I was unbelievable. There's no organisation. And he's got a big pile of music under his arm, like this, no bag. And he's standing on the platform on Leicester Square tube station with this pile of music under his arm, looking up at the sign to see where he's got to go. And his eyesight was terrible, and he used to do this. Yeah. And he's going that and he's standing, and there's people going by him like this, with no idea who this man was. I wanted to cry, you know, like to see that that great that great man, you know, wonderful person and amazing talent.

Geoff: 44:24

Amazing. What a life. What a what's what great stories. Um I could talk to you all day. Thanks so much for your time.

Henry: 44:31

Well, it has been a great pleasure. Thank you very much. It's a wonderful idea. I had no idea. Yeah.

Geoff: 44:38

Um, maybe we'll do part two at some stage, but uh thanks for your beautiful playing as well, and thank you for inviting me. Great. Right, bye.

Announcement: 44:47

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