Tony Haynes Has Left Town... But What A Legacy He Leaves Behind

The death of my friend musician/composer Tony Haynes aged 83 from cancer is a loss both to his wife and children and to the musical communities of East London whom he served with such passion. A jazz enthusiast from his early teens, he studied music at Oxford and Nottingham, while at the latter working simultaneously as musical director at the Nottingham Playhouse. Later at the Liverpool Everyman, he composed scores for plays by left-wing playwrights like John Arden, Adrian Mitchell and Edward Bond. Brecht was a major inspiration and Haynes was a founder-member of the left-wing Belt & Braces theatre company. His background in theatre and love of jazz have combined in so many ways during his career most importantly in the Grand Union Orchestra, that he co-founded in 1982 and led for over forty years.

Haynes' politics were defined by anti-racism, internationalism and anti-militarism and infused the music he created throughout his career. His activism extended into community education and local, national and international politics. He was one of those rare individuals who succeed in integrating all aspects of their life, personality and beliefs into a unified whole. And that unification and integration was always expressed most clearly in the music he created.

Between 1975-9, Haynes led the tentet, jazz-rock group RedBrass featuring saxophonists Pete Hurt and Chris Biscoe, trumpeter Dick Pearce, bassist Butch Potter and singers Heather Jones, Josefina Cupido and (briefly) a young Annie Lennox. Biscoe, Cupido and Potter would all feature in Grand Union, with Biscoe serving to the present marking an association lasting over fifty years. Indeed, one of the most significant features on the orchestra is the way it has maintained continuity of it musical personnel while bringing in newer younger musicians into the fold. Loyalty and commitment are impregnated in Grand Union's DNA.

The orchestra grew out of the Grand Union Theatre troupe formed by Haynes, along with John Cumming (later of Serious productions) and others. The company's first show was Jelly Roll Soul, based on the life of Jelly Roll Morton and featuring original compositions by Haynes and his arrangements of pieces by Morton. As a sign of how times changed, the company's third show, Strange Migration, toured the UK three times with each tour lasting ten weeks. Funding for artist— led companies is increasingly a thing of the past in the UK now, a fact that Haynes tried hard to confront. It was during the Greater London Council's "Year against Racism" in 1984 that the name Grand Union Orchestra was used for the first time with the GLC-commissioned show The Song of Many Tongues. These early shows set the tone for everything that was to follow, fusing jazz with musics from South and Central America, the Caribbean, the Indian Sub-Continent, South and West Africa, Iberia and even China. Haynes' had a rare ability to make these disparate musical languages speak to each other in ways that transformed the dialogue into something simultaneously of its individual parts but also expressing what we all have in common in the world.

This was really brought home to me recently in an academic piece I was working on. I referred to the piece "Notun Desh, Notun Jiban" from Now Comes The Dragon Hour (2002), describing it as "dialectic" in the Brechtian sense of "dialectical theatre." The extract lasts twenty minutes and divides into six sections featuring voices, Bengali rag-based folk melodies, sitar and tabla combining with a South American groove, big band jazz riffs, the exquisite voices of Lucy Rahman and Akash Sultan and solos on flute and tenor sax from Louise Elliott. For me, it summed up Haynes unusual skills and I wrote:

Haynes uses both the music and the words to pose questions, with the jazz instruments often acting almost as a Greek chorus embracing, commenting upon and extending what is happening elsewhere in the performance. In this context, the fusion element is not only musical but social as well. It is as if these musics connect as an echo of shared experience or as a gesture of support from one side of the world to another.

Performances were always epic and spectacular affairs with Indian, Chinese, Caribbean, African and South American instruments alongside the saxophones, trumpets, trombones, electric guitar, bass and drums. Percussion was always at the heart of the music but so too were the voices uniquely singing in Portuguese, Bengali, Chinese and English. Shows like Here Comes the Dragon's Hour, If Paradise (2005) and Undream'd Shores (2014) had an almost operatic quality featuring lyrics and poetry that told tales of struggle and survival. It was all fired by Haynes' strong sense of justice but was never preachy. The music always came first.

Song of Contagion from 2017 was one of the company's most ambitious projects. Available on DVD, the show explored the differential impacts of disease dependant on an individual or community's race, ethnicity, place of birth and, not least, class, raising questions about big Pharma, an industry disinterested in human need unless profit comes attached. It might sound didactic but it certainly was not. It was one of the most powerful and compelling of Grand Union's performances—and given the Covid pandemic that followed and the lessons yet to be learned from that, it was as timely as it was prophetic.

But then, dedication to education and to community and communal music-making was as important to the shows. Under Haynes' auspices, Grand Union developed and sustained a youth orchestra, the Re:Generation Band for graduates of the former, a community orchestra and a choir—all within the East End of London the orchestra served. Operations with much greater arts funding boast of less in their prospectuses. The slogan "Think globally, act locally" could have been coined with Haynes in mind.

Unforgotten Voyages, performed at the Hackney Empire in June 2023, was the company's last show. It commemorated the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks in 1948, bringing workers from the Caribbean to help rebuild Britain after the war. I interviewed Haynes for an article about the show. For jazz purists, Grand Union was perhaps never "jazz" enough," while the world music audience never seemed to cotton on to the orchestra's vibe. Haynes' success in building an audience that defied category was one of his many achievements. Lucid as always, as we talked, he summed up perfectly his and the orchestra's approach, while tying it to the wider jazz tradition.

Jazz is an attitude to music-making. It's an approach to music that can be replicated in lots of different forms. I feel we follow directly in the footsteps of Jelly Roll Morton. Think about the things Grand Union has in common with the jazz created by Morton, Ellington and Mingus, the things that appealed to me about jazz. But it also tells dramatic stories like Duke Ellington did and then later Mingus.

By that point, the asbestos-related cancer had truly begun to take its toll on his, hitherto-astonishing, energy levels. He knew this was probably his last show. I visited him a few months before he left town, to use Charles Lloyd's lovely phrase. He was struggling to concentrate and the signs of the disease were visible now. It was, of course, very sad to see him like that; there had always been something truly elemental about him. But that flame might have flickered but was definitely still there and he still made more sense than many an arts industry wonk!

Tony Haynes is lovingly remembered by his wife Caroline, children Gabriel, Will and Lily, and grandchildren Jesse and Eve, by his dozens of colleagues and by the thousands upon thousands of lives he touched with his music. He was a rare talent and the music he created for Grand Union is a testament to that talent and to the person he was. Tony Haynes might have left town but what an amazing legacy!

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