Tim Huskisson

You're from Rochford aren't you?

 

Yes, from Rochford

 

What got you interested in music in the first place?

 

78 records, there were always 78’s in the house and I used to play them and I suppose I got my taste in music from what I heard. I heard lots of vintage music if you like, it wasn’t all Jazz but certainly I heard an awful lot of music that was to shape what happened afterwards. There was a piano in the house and I supposed I used to just bang on the keyboard and try to reproduce what I heard and it all came from there really. It wasn’t until much later on that I really decided what I liked and what I didn’t like. Certainly all through my childhood and teen years it was all vintage music and the older I got the more focused I was in enjoying Jazz, specifically Jazz. Early sort of hot dance bands I was into, the dance bands when they were playing Jazz.

 

What 20’s?

 

Yeah 20’s stuff, I loved, bit like Alex Mendham that you’ve probably come across and some of the stuff he does, that was what I was really into until I started seeing (stop me if I’m going too far) but in those days there was quite a lot of Jazz on TV and so I was fascinated by seeing documentaries about people like Dave Brubeck and Stay in Canterbury mentioned, Oscar Peterson often had chat shows on TV and I was enthralled with all this stuff and I used to go for my clarinet lesson. Sorry I started clarinet lessons when I was 9 and my dad used to drive me to Ron Meachan, who was my clarinet teacher, and we used to stop off at Southend library on the way where they had a record library. Digby Fairweather was the librarian there at the time and he had filled the record library with Jazz records so I would pick up two or three LPs and have them for a couple of weeks so I got to hear so much Jazz, and that was it. I wasn’t interested in anything else but Jazz by that time. 

 

So when you were first having clarinet lessons did the teacher understand that’s what you wanted, that you wanted to play Jazz or did you have to go down the classical route to start with?

 

Well the classical route was inevitable because I was being taught to play the instrument, you know, and as I’d say to anybody “Get a classical education if you can”. I was very lucky to have a very good classical education in clarinet. But my teacher was a big Jazz fan himself and playing clarinet of course we would do all the classical stuff but then he would give me a transcription of a Benny Goodman solo for example. So we would finish the lesson and before long I was actually improvising as well with him. I would do my lessons, go home and play along to the 78’s and we had these jam sessions. I’ve still got recordings of me playing with him in the 1970’s, it’s not very good but at the time it was great to actually have a teacher who understood and encouraged me to play Jazz.

 

How long did you have lessons for?

 

About 10 years I suppose. I think I did all the grades and that was it. I think he said “That was about as far as I can take you now” and by that time I had started playing in Trad Jazz bands on the circuit.

 

Tell me about the early days of gigging then, what were your first experiences of gigging and where did you go from there?

I joined a band called Geoff Wilkinson and the Music Warehouse Cats featuring Linda, great name for a band. Geoff moved in from London and set up a music shop here called the Music Warehouse, which is in London Road, and he wanted to pull a band together to promote the shop. So we would rehearse in his shop once a week and he got a residency of the, what was then called 'Barons', it was on the side of The Elms pub and we did every Thursday night there.

 

When was that?

 

1980 I reckon, yeah 80 into 81.

 

So you hadn’t really done any gigs before then?

 

Only things with my, because I was at the sixth form college, so we’d got together with students and I did things at the Musicians Union club.

 

What the Black Rose?

 

No the Lindisfarne. It was at the Lindisfarne club I met Geoff Wilkins. He came and he heard me but I had my college Jazz group there and I was playing piano on it but I did a sort of a 15 minute interval spot playing clarinet with a couple of guitar players, college friends. And that’s what Geoff was looking for, he was looking for a clarinet player for his band and I had never envisaged myself. It’s strange I spent 10 years having clarinet lessons but I always thought of myself as a piano player as my first instrument even though I was self taught. So I was very surprised that he wanted me on clarinet and not on piano, which I had spent most of the gig doing. It was really quite an important thing because all my Jazz gigs from then on, in fact until after 2000, was always on clarinet playing Jazz but my main career was as a keyboard player outside of Jazz, not playing Jazz. So it was quite interesting but I worked with Geoff for a while. It was quite a rough band but he was great at the publicity we were always in the Evening Echo and even on the front page on one occasion.

 

What kind of music was that?

 

Dixieland and Traditional Jazz. Yeah I mean the usual sort of repertoire, but he’s very good at the image thing, we were always very smartly dressed or the publicity side of it. He was running it like a pop group really and he had had some success as a song writer, he had written something for the Dooley’s and he really wasn’t a very good trumpet player but he as very good at this band leading thing. But it was through that band that I got to know Dennis Field and Eggy Ley, Hugh Rainey and ultimately, Digby Fair-weather, who booked me for a cruise to Sweden, a week thing, where I was in the company of some very fine musicians - Pete Strange trombone player, Spike Heatley bass player was there, Tony Allen drummer, Digby was running the band we were the Essex Radio Allstars and this was tremendous exposure for me because nobody had ever heard of me but here I was as one of the Essex Radio Allstars, all broadcasted on the radio.

 

What that put together by Eddie Blackwell?

 

Eddie Blackwell, that’s right. So it was great.

 

It must have been early 80’s because Eddie stopped Essex in '85.

 

The cruise was in 82, early 82, but it’s ironic really that just at that time, or just before I was listening to....... sorry I should say that parallel to all the Jazz I was into, from the age of 16, basically when I got into sixth form college, I discovered Soul music and Funk and I was really, I had this sort of battle going on, the two seemed to be so opposed. But what really did it for me, I was inspired by Jazz musicians playing funk like Herbie Hancock and Quincy Jones, Donald Byrd and all these guys. And so it made it sort of legitimate and of course the more I listened to it the more I listened to that and the less acoustic swinging Jazz I was listening to then. It was almost like a rebellion if you like and I got into Elixir as a keyboard player.

 

Were you going to any clubs, like the Goldmine or any of those clubs at all at that point?

 

I went to the Goldmine a couple of times with Elixir, once just socially I think. I was never part of the club scene although I did, I can remember really enjoying the atmosphere of hearing this music played, in those days people were dancing to records with Jazz solos on them, there was quite often you’d have quite long sax breaks and great stuff.

 

I got into it. Chris Hill was the DJ at the Goldmine and he was the main man for playing Jazz on the dancefloor, Jazz Fusion.

 

It was a great time, I suppose a lot of it is a bit cheesy by today’s standards.

 

The more lighter stuff was, you got some of the heavier stuff there. Everything seemed to have Jazz in it, even the soul music, all the Philadelphia Soul.

 

Really all that Philadelphia stuff, when you analyse it, it’s not that different from the big band era. You’ve got large bands with horn sections, strings and stuff.

 

Extended solos.

 

So I loved all that and I still do.

 

Elixir made quite a big impact didn’t they, locally certainly.

 

Yes, it was a good time. But I wasn’t earning any money and I needed to earn something, Geoff Wilkins gave me a job in his piano shop. By then his music warehouse had closed and he’d opened another shop in Hamlet Court Road called Pianoscope. So I was learning how to restore pianos and used to go up to the London College of Furniture for some training and then I was with Elixir, I got made redundant from Pianoscope, I left Geoff’s band, I was in Elixir and then I got in to a function band, terrible function band for a short time called Soap. Actually Alex Field was in that band, have you come across Alex Field? And Jo Paton was on bass. It was while we were playing the Travellers Joy in Rayleigh that I met Phil Aldridge who ran Black Gold and he invited me to do some deps in his band with Wendy Roberts, and of course I was depping for Pete Jacobson, monster musician, I’ve never met a finer musician anywhere. Certainly no one with his ears and memory, just an unbelievable musician and I have said this to people before: having access to Pete Jacobson was like having Keith Jarrett or Herbie Hancock living just round the corner. So began 20 years more or less of playing in function bands, to backing cabaret acts and ultimately the bigger things that I did in musical theatre working with Brian Conley. Sorry I’m giving you my life story here. But nothing to do with Jazz, all my work was in commercial music.

 

And you weren’t keeping your toe in, with Jazz and all that?

 

Very occasionally, I did leave, I can remember saying to Digby shortly after that cruise actually that I’m packing it in and I’m stopping playing clarinet, I’ve got a job in a function band, I need to earn money and he actually announced it on stage. I can remember on a gig he said “Tim’s leaving us for Rock and Roll” which I remember thinking “It’s not Rock and Roll, I don’t even like Rock and Roll”. I’m still playing some good music but there’s nothing wrong with Rock and Roll. A lot of it’s good. At the time it was hardly what I was interested in. I was into Herbie Hancock and all that. So I spent years mainly in Wendy Roberts band, Black Gold had changed its name to the Wendy Roberts Band, Pete had left and I got to know Reg Webb and Pete very well. We had got to do studio sessions occasionally, doing these radio and TV jingles for a chap called Nick Ryan and Reg was always first call as he had the best gear, the best synthesisers and if he wasn’t around Pete would do it and if neither of them were around I got the job.

 

To be third best to those two isn’t the biggest insult in the world is it?

 

I don’t regret that at all, and even today there are certain musicians that you have to look up to and know your place. But it was a good time.

 

So what got you back into playing Jazz again?

 

When the showbiz thing came to an end, just briefly I ended up MD’ing for Brian Conley, I did 6 years all of his live shows, I did some TV with him but it wasn’t so much in 'music director' role it was more part of his comedy routine. And he went into the west end, he did Jolson the musical, Al Jolson and I ended up doing, well I was deputy MD for quite a period I was MD’ing the show. All these things I was doing I was completely unqualified/untrained for, I was just thrown into one thing at a time and when Brian stopped touring for a while, he was so big then he wasn’t doing cabaret shows anymore just doing musicals and stuff. I joined Joe Pasquale for a while and then I joined the Rocky Horror Show touring Europe. What brought me back to Jazz was the fact that in end of 1999 my Mum died and I was told while I was on a tour bus in Germany and I wasn’t there. She had motor neurone disease, terrible terrible thing, so I knew she was very ill but it was a real frustration to be stuck in Germany, the Black Forest somewhere and not to have been able to have been there in her last days. So they flew me home to the funeral, but when it came round to and I got the usual call “Do you want to come back and do the next tour of Rocky Horror Show”, this is in early 2000 my Dad was taken ill and I thought “I’m not going to have this happen again. I need to be here for him” and just at that time a friend of mine said that I could probably get in Musicland. I should say that I did do a period of about three and a half years at a music shop in Basildon in the 1980’s during the quiet period so I do have some experience in music shops. So, cut a long story short I got into Musicland, started September 2000 which was quite a shock to the system as I was used to touring, top quality gigs with Brian Conley and stuff and all of a sudden I was back on the shop floor, selling guitar picks and strings and stuff and it became very comfortable and I enjoyed it.

 

You enjoyed the regular money?

 

Well the money it was alright, the work I was doing towards the end of my professional career was very well paid, so to come back to earning ordinary money......... but what I liked about it was that I could go home every night. I loved being at home and I wasn’t stuck at the other side of the world. I wasn’t doing any gigs but obviously it was an opportunity now to rediscover my roots if you like, don’t forget I had listened only to Jazz when I was a youngster so I got the clarinet, I bought a new clarinet, started gigging on the scene, the Trad Jazz scene, and parallel to that Kenny Baxter walked in one day and suggested he wanted to put a quartet together or something and I thought “I’d be up for that”. I’d never played Jazz piano on the circuit, I’m known as a Jazz clarinettist but I’ve spent the last 20 years as a keyboardist in commercial music so why not do some Jazz. So Ken gave me that chance and I’ve been playing clarinet and piano since then and what can I say, Musicland closed their shop in 2008 and I had loads of gigs in the diary, mainly Trad Jazz things, and just about enough to scrape by a living and so that’s what I did. I decided to turn professional again but just try and play Jazz. It was only possible because having lost my Mum and Dad I had a bit of an inheritance. I was able to pay off my mortgage so my overheads weren’t what they were before.

 

Obviously being a clarinet player, the main reason for interviewing you is that you are so versatile in all forms of Jazz, your name keeps on coming up over and over and over again in these interviews so but one thing I’ve learnt is that different areas of Jazz have different expectations of style so how do you adapt to all these different ways of playing? These people that will listen to New Orleans they ignore Chicago altogether.

 

I’ve listened to so much Jazz and as a clarinettist and a pianist I kind of know the styles. Really I got that skill from Pete Jacobson because that one thing that I’ve always found inspiring about Pete, apart from being one of the greatest Jazz pianists this country has ever known, I was baffled in a way that he seemed to enjoy playing things outside of Jazz even more sometimes than the Jazz. I had a conversation with him once and said to him “Surely you must find it frustrating with some of the bands that you have to play with and singers that you work with and stuff, to play this stuff that you have to do”, and he said “No I love it. I love the challenge of everything”. When you heard him play Country music, I really don’t like Country music at all, but when you heard him play it, it was like listening to someone whose been in Country music all their life, he played it better than anybody else. There wasn’t a hint of Jazz in it, it was purely Country music.

 

He understood the style.

 

He was so acutely aware of what the rules were for that particular kind of music and I can remember chatting with him at the bar when he was supposed to be accompanying a Blues guitarist who had come over from America, can’t think of his name, Wendy Roberts’ husband brought him over and she booked Pete to play it and I have never seen Pete nervous before but he was nervous. He didn’t feel that he was a Blues pianist but of course when he got up there he played proper Blues piano. So all those sort of things really inspired me, I just thought if you know what to leave out, the usual problem is that you over play things, you get up and you just do what you normally do and just play it so if you can tame yourself and only play what you’re absolutely certain will fit in with the music around you and stick to the idiom then 1) the end result will be better to hear and also, from my point of view I would get more gigs because people would say “Be good for this particular gig and be good for that one”. I just found a way of adapting to different kinds of music, so yes when I am playing clarinet if it’s a New Orleans band I would play lots of vibrato and a big sound.

 

No blues notes?

 

Well lots of blues notes, lots of that there. If I’m doing a Swing gig, playing Swing or Mainstream clarinet then it’s a much more like Artie Shaw, different sound entirely, different approach. If you are playing Modern Jazz, I don’t get very modern on clarinet but I know enough to get by with it but the harmony changes and becomes more interesting. Certainly on piano it is very noticeably different, if I do a Swinging Belles gig with Heather Simmons it’s 20’s & 30’s piano, but of stride and stuff, if I play with Kenny with maybe Steve Waterman comes down and guests with them then its 50’s hard bop style of piano playing and if I played with Neil Robinson and you of course, you did some stuff, it’s Funk. I’m doing a little group called Tim’s Groovy Trio which is all 60’s, terrible name for a group.

 

(Laughs) It is yeah I must say.

 

You’d better forget the name and also the word groovy could mean absolutely anything so it actually gives us the scope to play almost anything I want to that could remotely be called groovy.

 

You should put TGT and then, what does that stand for, Tim’s Groovy Trio.

 

No I’m really quite happy with this crazy name and of course all I’m doing is playing quite a lot of Ramsey Lewis stuff on piano, but then other things like Otis Redding tunes, Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay but just in a Ramsey Lewis sort of style with bass and drums. Everything’s got a back beat and nothing swings. The main purpose of it is that when all the New Orleans Jazz clubs fold and the gigs dry up I need to be able to earn money doing other stuff.

 

Do you see them all folding?

 

Yes it’s very sad in a way, because the Traditional Jazz clubs survive on nostalgia, the vast majority of people that go to them were there when it was happening in the late 50’s, early 60’s. It’s nostalgia for them. Very few of them are real die hard Jazz fans they don’t really know much about Jazz, they want to go there for the jive. You have to play it at a much slower tempo, if you listen to the original records they are proper jive tempo, but all the bands now take them at much slower speeds because they jive in slow motion. It’s very sad in a way but there are some very fine young players playing New Orleans and Dixieland Jazz, they’ve got a slightly different take on it because they’ve come to the music quite late but they are out there but there isn’t an audience, not that’s going to give them work for the next couple of decades. It’s not going to happen. I know that there is a sort of vintage thing going on at the moment and there is a popularity with the whole thing, wearing the clothes and the period - we’ve just mentioned Alex Mendham - he’s having some success, some very great success and good luck to him, but I rather fear it will be a short lived thing. It will be a thing that we will move on, anything that is a revival is going to be temporary because the general stream of music always moves forward.

 

I see what Alex does though as 'something'. I think it will survive and I think there is a market for it but in a different.... it’s the kind of thing where I see it as being something where he will be working in expensive functions and the corporate. There may be a theatre show there.

 

He will be the champion of that thing. Any of the big jobs that will require a band like his he will probably get all the jobs. He’ll be alright for the rest of his life and he’ll be able to make a great career of that and he will probably become quite well known because of that. But as an average musician that wants to play, that’s a bit of a specialist thing, I’m talking about the New Orleans and the Dixieland players, swing players, the gigs that are around. There are lots of little Jazz clubs around but gradually they will fold and there will be nowhere for musicians to go.

 

It’s quite sad isn’t it, there main problem is getting young people. Why would young people listen to that?

 

They wouldn’t and the reason is, people of our generation Traditional Jazz was very unhip as I was growing as it was associated with our parents and you never like your parents music. I suppose there is some hope as the young generation now don’t really associate it with anything, they can’t say it’s their parents music, it’s actually their grandparents or their great-grandparents music. I suppose that there is a possibility that they will take an interested in it but that’s not enough really, music never goes backwards, the future in music is related to the technology at the time as well. Any new developments in music always involve the technology at the time. It’s always led by young people as well, new music. So the best we can hope for is that there will be Jazz of a kind and there will be gigs but it won’t be the sort of Jazz that I’ve been playing.

 

They need to go back to having Jazz societies at Universities and the bigger Colleges like they would have done years ago. Young people want to see young people playing.

 

It’ll be a different music, there will always be Jazz of a kind. So much music has been merged and influenced other music that it’s difficult to say what Jazz is now isn’t it? It’s easier to say that there will always be good music running at parallel to music that sells, that isn’t to say that music that sells isn’t good music, an awful lot of it isn’t though. But there will always be people searching for spontaneous creative music that in the past there has been Jazz of different kinds and there will always be something there but it won’t be the same. Music changes. I just think it’s sad that the skills to play Jazz, the way Jazz was played through the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s, although it evolved even then, but the idea of picking up an instrument and playing along to chord charts, difficult to say what’s going to happen there as they do have Jazz education and they still, even the contemporary musicians do improvise to chords. Spontaneousness of it I don’t know where that’s going to go or what the music is going to sound like, certainly not going be like it was in the hey day of Jazz.

 

No that’s right. So your names about everywhere at the moment, right across the board. It’s a bit of a hard question really but over the last 5 or 6 years who are some of the people and groups that you have been playing with?

 

Well, let’s see, crikey that’s very difficult there are an awful lot of people.

 

Like Pete Corrigan?

 

Yes I know Pete. I’ve played a few guest spots at his thing, Hornchurch. I’m a member of George Tidimans band, very happy to be in that band especially with Denny Ilett on trumpet, Denny is absolutely wonderful. He’s a good example of the kind of musician whose skills we are not going to see again, absolutely a natural musician, self-taught I think.

 

Louis Armstrong style?

 

Yes, he’s a cross between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie, he’s got the chops of Dizzy Gillespie and he’s got the range of Kat Anderson, he can get right up the top, very hot player really fine player. Well there's Kenny Baxter, very pleased to always play with Kenny who has been the figurehead of Jazz in Southend for decades, and of course I knew Vic Wood very well, and he and Vic worked together for years. Mick Foster who moved to Southend, the baritone player, very important figure now in Southend.

 

When did he move to Essex?

 

It must be about the early 2000’s I think, 2000/2001. I met him actually at Musicland, very fine musician. This is probably the best I’ve ever know the area for Jazz, it is going through quite a positive stage at the moment, we’ve got Steve Fishwick living in Southend, Paul Jayasinha is an amazing trumpet player, really impressed with him as well. He did a thing with Heather Simmons and he played a typical 1938 type jazz trumpet solo thing, again the sort of skill that Pete Jacobson had, to actually focus on what’s really great. It’s a good scene. Who am I playing with? Jackie Free, trombonist who used to play with the Freddy Randall band, Dave Hewitt’s Condoniuns, Dave Hewitt’s a trombone player from Surrey used to play with Dave Shepherd the clarinet player and Freddy Randall and he’s got a very good band modelled on Eddie Condons band playing piano with Jackie Free and Dave Hewitt. Hugh Rainey I play with sometimes, Digby still, played with Humphrey Lytteltons band about a month ago at The Bulls Head in Barnes, I do Jazz cruises sometimes, just got off a cruise with a chap called Richard Pite who runs a thing called The Hundred Years of Jazz.

 

What an incredible drummer he is.

 

Do you know him? Yes he’s great. The London Hot Rhythm boys which is basically a small section of the Pasadena Roof Orchestra when they work I usually play with them, usually on clarinet and sax I do the arrangements for them as well and Enico Tomasso.

 

You don’t dep for Keith Nicholls then with the Blue Devils or anything like that? Because it seems like you know half the band, Richard Pite, Enrico and Keith.

 

No I don’t. Keith is the best vintage style piano player in the country. Him and Martin Litten are the two big names. I suffer in many ways because in spite of my assets, which is to be able to play different kinds of music, inevitably I’ve never been brilliant at anything in particular. I’m quite happy to be known as that, as a suitable dep but I have limitations as well of course, and one of which is as a piano player I am not a good sight reader because I am self-taught. I never went through proper classical training on piano, I did on clarinet, so that rules me out of a lot of those sorts of gigs. Even though I can play the style and play probably a competent solo, as far as the arrangements are concerned a lot of them I would be alright on and a lot of them I wouldn’t. Clarinet I do read very well. I’m very happy with what I am doing, I’m doing a variety of music that I like and continually trying to get people to broaden their horizons. I feel sorry for people that can’t enjoy different kinds of music. Why can you not enjoy Louis Armstrong and also enjoy Stevie Wonder? They are both brilliant. Why can’t you get the same amount of enjoyment from both? So that’s one thing I’m very pleased that I’ve experienced and can appreciate. I find it a bit sad when I meet musicians that are very set in their ways and they only like one thing and they don’t realise what they are missing out on. Going back to when I was playing with Geoff Wilkinson and the Cats, which was the very first band I played with, Barons, next to The Elms, and Geoff would get guests every now and then and one of those guests was George Chisholm! So there I was at 18 or 19 years old on the same stage as George Chisholm which was, looking back on it, was a very special moment, because George Chisholm of course was one of the pioneers of British Jazz. A lot of the older generation would have played with George Chisholm. He played with lots of people, toured around the country, for me that was a rare privilege to be able to say that I actually met, played with someone who recorded with Fats Waller and all the greats, very special moment. Shame the band was shite!