Recording of the Week, The Piccolo: Tender Plays Tubby

Today’s Recording of the Week comes courtesy of multi-instrumentalist and head of London-based record label 22a, Ed ‘Tenderlonious’ Cawthorne, paying tribute to a fellow British jazz multi-instrumentalist, Tubby Hayes. Hayes himself was probably best known for playing tenor saxophone, particularly alongside fellow saxophonist and London jazz club owner Ronnie Scott, with a career spanning just over twenty years. Though Tender is no stranger to more traditional flavours of jazz, his solo-penned work has tended to draw from the more electronic and hip-hop influenced corners of the genre.

A multi-instrumentalist by trade, his tools of choice this time around are predominantly flute and piccolo, as well as soprano saxophone - with the piccolo in question being Hayes’s own that came into Cawthorne’s possession. With that in mind, I suppose it was only a matter of time before Cawthorne paid tribute to a fellow British jazzer. Accompanying him this time around is a cast of well-honed London jazz musicians; 22a labelmate Nick Walters playing trumpet, Hamish Balfour on keys, Kamaal Williams collaborator Pete Martin on bass guitar, Aidan Shephard on accordion and Tim Carnegie on drums. True to his versatile nature, Ed Cawthorne sounds just at home in a conventional jazz sextet as he does in his solo home studio recordings.

Tender’s picks for the record give us a sense of the scope of Hayes’s lifetime in music; from the jaunty opener ‘Down in the Village’, Carnegie’s drumming in particular shining through as the band kicks off at breakneck speed while Walters’ trumpetting compliments the high-end pipes from Tender’s piccolo. The ballad ‘Trenton Place’ gives us time to cool off as Cawthorne solos gracefully above, before ‘Raga’ takes us into more modal territory, and finally the romantic ‘In the Night’ capping the record off. Tender Plays Tubby is a brief introduction to Hayes’s work, a short and snappy EP that gets straight to the point, with plenty of little bitesize pieces that don’t overstay their welcome.