WAILIN' WELLINS - THE SAGA CONTINUES...........

The CORK jazz festival in 2004 was thoroughly enjoyable – what a beautiful place! 

We played evening gigs in the Legends Suite and the Rhythm Room at the Gresham Metropole and did an afternoon set at the Tryskel theatre, where I ran into my old friend from Oxford days Brian Priestley and we caught a bit of guitarist Louis Stewart’s trio set with Stephen Keogh on drums. Another happy reunion: Louis and I were in Tubby Hayes’s 1968/69 quartet.

I remember a soothing waterfall outside my ground floor hotel window and Bobby upstairs leaning out of his, puffing away. The indoor smoking ban (as yet unknown in England) had come into effect in Ireland shortly before our arrival!  There was a doorman/bouncer at the Gresham Metropole stopping us taking a pint out on to the street during the intervals so it was either a pint indoors or a fag outdoors. Standard procedure nowadays but a novel irritant back then……………  

By the by, Bobby’s choice of cigarettes was either horrible little gold packets of Sovereign (“they’ve got a good pull on them” he would insist) or superior SG red packets imported in bulk from his holidays in Portugal. (I smoked too – anything from joints to roll-ups to Gitanes to Havana cigars - and gave up in 2007, not early enough unfortunately to stop me being diagnosed a couple of years ago with mild emphysema.)

Anyway, back to the music.

The quartet including Mark Edwards and Andy Cleyndert was firmly established and gigs were becoming more plentiful.

We were booked at Neil Ferber’s sadly missed APPLEBY British jazz festival in July 2005 and we performed in the main marquee as the first act of the day one noontide. There’s something special about those early sets at festivals (same thing at Swanage) where you start from cold and quickly warm up while the audience gathers in strength and the beer barrels at the back of the tent provide the hungover with a hair of the dog…….

By your second set, the band is firing in all cylinders and signs off to applause from more or less a full house.

Appleby 2005 also marked the beginning of the classic era of the Andy Cleyndert professional live recording which has left us with a priceless legacy.  As far as the drums are concerned, Andy got a marvellous sound by placing small microphones under the cymbals.

Our appearance at the festival came out as a CD on Andy’s TRIO label (Trio TR 572) entitled “When the sun comes out”. This is a beautiful Harold Arlen song which was one of the tunes we performed and is probably the highlight of the set.  You can listen to it now on the Music page.

In the following months, we played the then usual circuit of venues (in no particular order, which is how the gigs themselves always pan out!) – Northampton, Coventry, Cheltenham, Brighton, Worthing, Chichester, Truro, Wakefield, Hastings, Lewes, the Vortex, the 606, Southport, Berkhamstead, Wavendon, Cleethorpes etc etc. 

Meanwhile, Andy, Mark and Bobby were working on a new concept – an album to feature the quartet with the addition of DON WELLER, a string quartet and multiple clarinets to be dubbed on by Alan Barnes. This eventually came to fruition in May 2007 when the basic tracks without strings and clarinet were laid down by Bobby, Don and the rhythm section at Doz studio, Langton Green outside Tunbridge Wells where Andy has engineered a number of studio recordings. 

When the strings and clarinet had been added, a CD was issued called “Nine Songs” on Trio TR 577. Mark Edwards wrote superb arrangements and Andy had the idea of adapting part of a Chopin Nocturne (No.15) for saxophone. Bobby performed this along with three other tunes, Don performed four, and they got together for a quintet arrangement of “Di’s waltz”, Don’s stately tribute to his late wife Diana. Don wasn’t usually fastidious in his musical instructions but this time he made it abundantly clear that the first beat of the third bar MUST be absolutely silent and that anybody infringing this order would incur his extreme displeasure.  If you listen to the track, which is now up on the Music page, you’ll see what he meant and it’s very effective.

One of Don’s solo features was “We’ll be together again” and I can’t listen to this (you can now do so on the Music page) - with its ethereal and almost spooky multiple clarinet backing without getting churned up being reminded of Bobby’s funeral service at Chichester crematorium on 21st November 2016.

Don was of course determined to be there and Andy Cleyndert had agreed to drive him down. I thought it would be magical if Don would play a little unaccompanied tenor saxophone in the chapel amid the otherwise verbal tributes but we all know how shy, taciturn and stubborn he could be. It took a great deal of gentle persuasion by Andy but Don did reluctantly bring his horn in the end and he was brave enough to play a couple of choruses in front of the coffin and the assembled congregation of……………….”We’ll be together again”.

Bobby and Don together before