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Jeff Clyne

Jeff Clyne was a virtuoso bass player. Starting with a short spell as a military bandsman in 1955 he then played in London with Tony Crombie's Rockets and with Stan Tracey. In 1958, he joined the Jazz Couriers, a group co-led by Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott and Britain's answer to Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. He continued to work with Hayes' various groups for about ten years. Clyne was the bass player on the Tubby Hayes big band album, 100% Proof. In the early 60's, Clyne also worked with such avant-garde groups as the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and Amalgam, led by John Stevens and Trevor Watts. In 1965, he was a member of the Stan Tracey quartet, which recorded the classic album Under Milk Wood. Towards the late 1960's, he worked with Gordon Beck (playing on his influential Experiments With Pops album alongside John McLaughlin and Tony Oxley in December 1967) and Tony Kinsey. He also recorded a long out of print (and highly sought after) recording he co-led with Ian Carr, which also featured John Stevens and Trevor Watts entitled Springboard. He later took up bass guitar, joining Nucleus at its beginning in 1969 and staying until 1971. The group won first prize at the Newport Jazz Festival the same year, and at the Village Gate in New York. Jeff Clyne recorded on the first three Nucleus albums, Elastic Rock, We'll Talk About It Later and Solar Plexus. He also gigged with Keith Tippett's acclaimed sextet alongside Elton Dean, Mark Charig and Nick Evans. In November 1972 he was a founding member of Gary Boyle's Isotope, playing on the band's first album and gigging around England. He joined Gilgamesh in May 1975 in time for the recording sessions of the band's eponymous album. In 1976, with singer Pepi Lemer and former Isotope acolyte Brian Miller on keyboards, he formed Turning Point, a fusion band for which he composed much of the music and which recorded two acclaimed albums, Creatures Of The Night and Silent Promise. He has accompanied singers Blossom Dearie, Marion Montgomery, Annie Ross and Norma Winstone, and worked with many US musicians, including Lucky Thompson, Zoot Sims, Phil Woods, Jim Hall, Lockjaw Davis, Tal Farlow, and with the Belgian, Toots Thielemans. He has been active in education of several years and was co-director of the Wavendon Summer Jazz Course, and also was on the faculty of both the Guildhall School of Music and the Royal Academy of Music jazz courses.

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Album Review

Stan Tracey Quartet: Jazz Suite Inspired By Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood

Read "Jazz Suite Inspired By Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood" reviewed by Chris May


Pianist and composer Stan Tracey's Under Milk Wood, released in 1966, was among the first albums to prove that British jazz could, on a good day, stand as tall as its American parent. Over a decade would pass, however, before that fact was widely accepted by jazz lovers in either America or Britain. Indeed, it is only now, in 2023, following the international breakthrough of London-based stylists such as Nubya Garcia and Shabaka Hutchings, that British jazz has taken its ...

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Album Review

Nucleus: Nucleus Live at the BBC

Read "Nucleus Live at the BBC" reviewed by Maurizio Comandini


Dio salvi la regina. E la BBC. L'emittente di stato britannica ha capito fin da subito che da quelle belle energie musicali, che spuntavano come l'erba di Hyde Park sotto al tiepido sole di quelle latitudini, passavano le scelte esistenziali e culturali delle nuove generazioni e sin dagli anni sessanta ha dato ampio spazio alla musica, premiando non solo il pop ma anche le proposte più articolate e di nicchia e ha conservato in archivio una buona parte di quelle ...

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Album Review

Splinters: Inclusivity

Read "Inclusivity" reviewed by Chris May


Archive label Jazz In Britain comes up with another winner. Inclusivity is a 3 x CD collection of the complete performances of Splinters, an all-star 1972 septet comprising three hard boppers, two radical experimentalists and two in-betweeners. They were tenor saxophonist and flautist Tubby Hayes, alto saxophonist Trevor Watts, trumpeter and flugelhornist Kenny Wheeler, pianist Stan Tracey, bassist Jeff Clyne and drummers Phil Seamen and John Stevens. The band assembled for just two London gigs five months apart. It made ...

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Album Review

Mike Gibbs: Revisiting Tanglewood 63: The Early Tapes

Read "Revisiting Tanglewood 63: The Early Tapes" reviewed by Chris May


With British jazz in 2021 in better shape than ever before, record companies are being emboldened to revisit their tape libraries and reissue historic but long deleted albums. At the same time, recently formed specialist labels such as Jazz In Britain are making available club and radio broadcast recordings which have never been released before. The Rhodesian-born, Berklee-schooled orchestral-jazz composer Michael Gibbs, a truly iconic figure who continues to inspire young British musicians, is receiving attention on both fronts.

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Album Review

Ian Carr: Solar Session

Read "Solar Session" reviewed by Chris May


One of the first European jazz bandleaders to embrace synthesizers, bass guitars and other electric instruments, trumpeter, composer and author Ian Carr forged a singularly British style of jazz-rock with his band Nucleus, which he formed in 1969 and with which he recorded a dozen albums through the 1970s. Carr had previously paid extensive dues in acoustic jazz, most notably as co-leader with saxophonist Don Rendell of the highly regarded, culturally inclusive Rendell-Carr Quintet from 1964 to 1969.

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Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Solar Session

Jazz In Britain
2021

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Revisiting Tanglewood...

Jazz In Britain
2021

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Inclusivity

Jazz In Britain
2021

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