Tubby Hayes: No Blues: The Complete Hopbine '65

"Who the fuck are you?" said Tubby Hayes, encountering Ron Mathewson on the bandstand of London's Hopbine club an hour or so before the start of the gig which this album chronicles.

"I'm the bassist," said just turned twenty-one year old Mathewson, who had been booked to deputise for the Hopbine's regular bassist that night.

"Well, we'll see about that, won't we?" said Hayes.

So began a relationship in which Mathewson later became a permament member of Hayes' quartet and the bassist in all of his bands, large and small, up until Hayes passed in 1973.

The full story is told in an interview Mathewson gave, not long before he passed in 2020, to Hayes historian Simon Spillett, the author of the 24-page liner booklet accompanying the 2-CD live album No Blues: The Complete Hopbine '65. It is Mathewson's tape archive which we have to thank for this, the first complete recording of the gig, which has previously been released in bits and always with poor audio. Not only is the Jazz In Britain release the first complete recording, it is the only one on which sound restoration has raised the audio to a quality befitting the music.

And the music is superb. Many people consider Hayes to have been at his peak circa 1965, when, as Spillett observes, one hears the inspiration of Hayes' hero John Coltrane mixed in with Hayes' gift for Stan Getz-like balladry. In 1965, too, Hayes was still in good physical shape, before the effects of longterm heroin use kicked in. When he concludes his 44-chorus solo on Miles Davis' "No Blues" there is every suggestion that he could have maintained the energy level for another 44 choruses. There are similarly ecstatic performances of Cole Porter's "Night And Day" and Bronislaw Kaper's "On Green Dolphin Street," on which Hayes' is joined by fellow tenor saxophonist Tommy Whittle, organiser of the one-night-a-week jazz club in the back room of the Hopbine pub. There is balladry as well, with a gutsy exploration of Richard Rodgers' "It Never Entered My Mind."

Once again, John Thurlow and his dedicated team at not-for-profit Jazz In Britain are to be thanked for bringing a chunk of immortal magic back into the public domain.