Coleman Hawkins At Birmingham Town Hall

Writing about tenor saxophonist Johnny Lippiett got me thinking about other tenor players, especially Coleman Hawkins, who effectively introduced the instrument to jazz, turning it into the pre-eminent and perhaps most expressive instrument of the music.

Those thoughts also reminded me I was lucky enough to hear Hawkins play at Birmingham Town Hall in the 1960s, in fact not long before he died in May 1969. It was one of the most moving experiences of my life.

The concert in question was one of those Jazz At The Philharmonic things that were, thankfully, all the rage in the 1950s and 1960s, managing to bring together some of the greatest American players of the preceding 40 years or so; players who very quickly turned the events into brilliant three hour jam sessions.

If memory serves me correctly the line-up back in 1969 included Louis Bellson drums, Buck Clayton trumpet, and Teddy Wilson piano, oh, and Vic Dickenson trombone. There was another sax player who might have been Zoot Sims, but I'm not sure.

It was a great concert, although Hawkins didn't appear until the last ten minutes, but when he did ( he was helped on by another musician who placed him against the curve of the piano) his somewhat battered sax suspended from his neck, the spotlight narrowed, Hawkins looked-up to his audience and, smiling, counted Wilson in to the introduction of his signature tune, Body and Soul, the recording of which, some thirty years earlier had turned Hawkins into a legend. And when he placed his gold-plated Selmer tenor sax between his lips I don't think anyone was prepared for what they were about to hear.

Like most Hawkins fans I was familiar with the Johnny Green song and was quite prepared to hear something of a pastiche. No way. Hawkins (although not well, and sporting a large beard that was a contradiction of his usual sartorial elegance) created a totally new composition that built in effortless upward layers of sound that came out of that well travelled horn with an exquisite fullness that belied the man's obvious fragility; and it was a fullness that overflowed with emotion - as if he knew he was nearing his end - that by the time Teddy Wilson gently played the last feathery chord, that went deliciously hand-in-hand with Hawkins' last breathy kiss of the reed, I was in tears, and knew I'd heard something quite unique from a master artist of unrivalled brilliance who, like Armstrong, changed the way we listen to music.

Johnny Lippiett - Tenor Saxophonist

Back in the early 1990s I heard a young British tenor sax player called Johnny Lippiett play in a small restaurant in Salcombe, Devon. I remember the food and wine as being excellent, and the playing of young Mr Lippiett as being completely out of this world.

And very young he seemed to be at the time too - he looked about sixteen - and was, I now realise, probably either waiting to, or was already studying music at the Dartington College of Arts at Plymouth University, which is effectively the only remaining link with the famous, and educationally progressive Dartington Hall School (created by Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst in 1926), which had finally closed its doors in 1987.

Afterwards I wrote a short glowing review of his playing (the wine and food got a mention too), which I sent to him. I received a charming letter back saying that no one had ever written about him like that before, and that he had, I think, some family connections in Stratford-upon-Avon. Sadly, five or six house moves later I've lost the letter, and the photos he sent along with it, which is a pity.

Over the years I listened out for him and his playing, but heard nothing more - he just seemed to have vanished off the jazz radar, at least off my jazz radar.

I got on with other things - starting and running a small theatre company, writing plays, producing and directing plays, helping to start-up a publishing house - but often thought about his extraordinary and innovative playing and how it reminded me of the young Tubby Hayes (he didn't actually get that old did he), and much less that of John Coltrane, which was a blessing as just about every tenor player in the 1990s seemed to have been grafted off that giant of the internal musical monologue.

And then, a couple of months or so ago, I was looking up some stuff about the brilliant sax player Mornington Lockett, and there was Johnny's name linked with his , and that he'd actually played with Lockett in a London based two tenor outfit (the New Jazz Couriers) in 2005. Johnny had also spent time studying with Lockett, but had, according to his own website (and how had I managed to miss that?) been living and working in New Zealand since 1999, which would account for him going off my jazz radar I suppose. Actually no: I should have tried harder to find him, because, listening to him now, via his CDs, his playing is better than ever.

Okay, so had I paid more attention I would have known that Johnny Lippiett had played with some of the best London based musicians around after I heard him in Devon, and that he'd even become a finalist in the Young Jazz Musician of the Year Awards in 1996. It was after that he moved to New Zealand.

Lippiett, like Lockett - and an ever increasing number of young British jazz musicians - was determined to learn his art at the highest level, which has included, in 1990, earning a Diploma of Jazz Studies from Chichester College, followed, in 1991, by a BTEC in Performing Arts from the same college. In 1997 he graduated from the aforementioned Dartington College of Arts with an Honours Degree in Music, which was followed, in 1998, with a Post-Graduate Teaching Diploma in Jazz from the University of London. In 2006 he won his Masters Degree (Mmus) in Saxophone Performance from the New Zealand School of Music.

The man is, apart from being seriously gifted, also seriously qualified.

But all the time he was studying he was also learning the day to day craft of being a jazz musician by travelling widely in the US and Canada where he played with some of the finest names in North American jazz.

Johnny Lippiett now divides his time between Europe and New Zealand, where he's on the staff of that country's School of Music.

Steve Newman's Jazz Groove

Steve Newman's Jazz Groove will be about all things jazz - musicians, the music's history, recordings, concerts, books, magazines, interviews, memories, instruments, photographs, festivals... in fact anything to do with jazz.

This site has now replaced my Jazz Groove site at Syntagma.