Sir John Dankworth:LAST NOVEMBER, Sir John Dankworth, who has died aged 82, elicited the most heartfelt standing ovation of his 60-year career in music for what was possibly his briefest and quietest performance.
He had been taken to hospital during the run-up to the London Jazz Festival show at the South Bank for him and his singer wife, Cleo Laine. But he emerged in a wheelchair just before the interval. Laine, his daughter Jacqui, son Alec and many of the big band, looked like they could hardly bear to watch him slowly bring the alto saxophone to his lips.
Then the opening notes of Duke Ellington's Tonight I Shall Sleepfilled the hall, vibrating gently with Dankworth's delicate, richly clarinet-like ballad sound and everybody breathed out.
Dankworth spent his life bringing music lovers closer together and drawing jazz into the mainstream. Although Laine called them "old codgers", the partnership was never nostalgic.He was producing music into his last years. He loved jazz and believed it could play a role in the evolution of the world's music. In his 1998 autobiography, Jazz in Revolution, he argued that the position of the music had become "an ideal one".
“It is not governed,” Dankworth wrote, “by the senseless world of current style that pervades and pollutes popular music . . . nor is it part of an established hierarchy, so that it is cloistered and protected.”
As a saxophonist, clarinettist, band leader, arranger and composer, Dankworth devoted much of his career to putting jazz and classical music on the same stage.
Like his contemporary Ronnie Scott, he made his reputation as a saxophone soloist of an early maturity and of distinctive sound. He was born in Woodford, Essex, and played the violin as a child. He attended Sir George Monoux grammar school in Walthamstow and studied the clarinet at the Royal Academy of Music.
Dankworth took to the alto saxophone after hearing Charlie Parker's Cherokee. In May 1945, he led a quartet that won the North-West London Melody Makercontest, and, in 1949, he played alongside Parker at the Paris Jazz Festival, even lending Parker his sax.
He had also performed and recorded with Freddy Mirfield’s Garbage Men, an association that continued during his army service. But in the years that followed, Dankworth became a campaigner for bebop-influenced “modern jazz”. In 1948, he became a founder member of the London boppers’ Soho-based tribute to a New York jazz club, Club 11. Dankworth and Scott led the bands there. Dankworth also freelanced with the Ambrose band until 1949, and, alongside Benny Goodman as a member of the Skyrockets.
He then formed one of the UK jazz scene’s most celebrated groups, the Johnny Dankworth Seven, recruiting the smoky-voiced and then unknown Laine.
But Dankworth gave his composing side the upper hand when he created his big band – the most adaptable vehicle for his ambitious vision. Though rock'n'roll had displaced jazz from the pop charts, Dankworth joined that exclusive group of jazz musicians who occasionally made it back there: Experiments with Mice(1956) and African Waltz(1960) invaded the British Top 10.
In 1958, film director Karel Reisz hired him to write the score to We Are the Lambeth Boys, after which he provided scores for The Criminal(1960), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning(1960), The Servant(1963), Darlingand Return from the Ashes(both 1965), Morganand Modesty Blaise(both 1966) and Accident(1967).
In 1958, he married Laine.Dankworth's career moved into composing for theatre: he worked on Boots with Strawberry Jam(a musical about George Bernard Shaw) in 1968 with Benny Green, and, in the 1970s, the musical Colette as a vehicle for Laine.
His high public profile led him towards genre-crossing ventures. The London Philharmonic Society commissioned him to write Improvisations for Jazz Band and Symphony Orchestraand the National Theatre requested a score for its production of Marlowe's Edward II. The Man of Modefor the Royal Shakespeare Company and Lady in Waitingfor the Houston Ballet, were added to a growing list of his achievements outside the jazz world. But Dankworth never lost his knack for a catchy melody – in the 1960s he wrote themes for the TV series The Avengersand Tomorrow's World.
In 1985 he founded the London Symphony Orchestra’s pops programme. He toured and conducted the programmes with leading orchestras, including the San Francisco Symphony.
Dankworth and Laine’s onstage ease and relaxed musicality made them theatrical, entertaining occasions, bringing distant musical worlds together, anticipating the crossover music that became widespread as the 20th century ended.
In 1988, he got a Grammy nomination for a version of Ellington and Juan Tizol's Caravanwith the London Symphony Orchestra, recorded Gillespie's the Symphony Sessionsand made Echoes of Harlem, a tribute to Ellington.
His recorded output in his later years included a vigorous retrospective of the Big Band's work to the album Dankworth Big Band: Live at Ronnie Scott's, a testament to how compelling his jazz work sounded after more than half a century. Advancing years did not stop Dankworth and Laine: in 2007, as part of the celebrations for their 80th birthdays, they triumphantly performed their famous Shakespeare and All That Jazzprogramme for the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. Dankworth reportedly jammed until 3am on his birthday and rose at dawn to work on Worldjazz– a new piece he later performed at St Luke's in London. The pair also released a voluminous retrospective album.
He got a fellowship of the Royal Academy in 1973 and the next year was appointed CBE. He was knighted in 2006, the first British jazz musician to receive this honour. Cleo, Alec and Jacqui survive him.
John Philip William Dankworth, born September 20th, 1927; died February 6th, 2010