Jazz often confirms that the most wilfully egocentric performer can produce the most sensitive and hospitable music; but if ever temperament and style faithfully mirrored each other, it was in the case of the great swing saxophonist Buddy Tate, who died on February 10th aged 87. One of the most relaxed, humorous and amenable of musicians, Buddy Tate's personal style was glowingly reflected in the lissom and occasionally gently mocking elegance of his saxophone playing.
Like many of the lyrical and romantic jazz performers of his era, Buddy Tate could perform miniature miracles with minimal materials, and to hear him embroider a ballad like I Can't Get Started in unaccompanied performance, merely shuffling a handful of soft, buttery notes and mingling them with a textural repertoire of intimately whispering intonations, was one of the most agreeable experiences in post-war jazz.
But Buddy Tate could also be an exciting, hard-swinging player too, and his control of the horn in its upper register predated many of the technical advances in saxophone playing that were made by the modernists in hard bop and the avant-garde.
Buddy Tate came up in the 1930s when swing ruled popular music and instrumental stars were heroes whose reputations were not far behind those of singers. But the connection between the song and the sound of a saxophone, trumpet or clarinet was closer then.
Bebop, with its intricate, cliffhanging melody lines and unpredictable resolutions had not yet arrived to launch a jazz sound very different to the shapely lyricism of vocalised instrumental methods that mimicked singing. Buddy Tate, therefore, learned from the examples of saxophonists Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and Herschel Evans.
He began working with the territory bands that travelled around the south-west in the tough years following the Depression and before swing took off. He worked with McCloud's Night Owls, the St Louis Merrymakers and a band led by Terrence Holder that was later to be taken over by the celebrated Andy Kirk.
Buddy Tate worked briefly for Count Basie on Young's temporary departure, but this early incarnation of the Basie band soon broke up for want of bookings. But Basie's chance came again when swing became popular in the mid-1930s.
In 1939, Buddy Tate got his big break when he was invited to join the then successful Basie orchestra following the sudden death of tenorist Herschel Evans. The two had been old friends and Buddy Tate maintained later that he had dreamed Evans had died before he ever heard the news, and was sure that a call from Basie would come.
Buddy Tate stayed with Basie for nine years, until post-war economics forced changes in the line-up and the saxophonist decided to look for work that would keep him closer to New York. He played for bandleaders Lucky Millinder and Hot Lips Page and in Jimmy Rushing's Savoy Band. He eventually secured a residency at the Celebrity Club on 125th Street in Harlem, and stayed for 21 years until the rise of jazz-rock and the eclipse of mainstream in the 1970s.
Nevertheless, he continued to record regularly, toured with the irrepressible swing trumpeter Buck Clayton and kept himself in the public eye by preserving a Basie-influenced small-group music that was affectionately received by every kind of jazz audience.
He also appeared with Jay MacShann, the bandleader in whose outfit the young Charlie Parker's tentative bop experiments were first heard, and with trombonist Al Grey, a musician with much of Buddy Tate's own relaxed grace and lyricism.
Buddy Tate was badly scalded in an accident in 1981, but returned to playing through the 1980s - sometimes with the hard-swinging ensemble called the Texas Tenors.
Buddy (George Holmes) Tate: born 1913; died, February 2001