At a time when few British jazzmen had even a feint whiff of authenticity about them, Terry Shannon stood out, despite being within two thousand miles from New York's Birdland. Like his predecessors, Shannon was a self-taught talent, relying more on what could be gleaned from records than on any academic training. This is all the more surprising when one considers how harmonically erudite his playing was.

Shannon entered the music business with some reluctance, abandoning a good day job to join the quartet of clarinettist Vic Ash and to work on record with musicians such as trumpeter Dizzy Reece and saxophonist Ronnie Scott. One of Shannon's earliest recordings was the 10" Tempo album Dizzy Blows Bird on which he accompanied Dizzy Reece through a programme of numbers associated with Charlie Parker (A New Star). The two takes of Parker's blues Bluebird contain superlative early Shannon; he already displays the virtues that would lead many of Britain's modernists to cite him as their favourite pianist, the grooving sense of time, the assertive but never boisterous accompaniment, and solo lines which snake through the chord changes with a knowing sophistication. Shannon named his favourite pianists as Tommy Flanagan, Horace Silver, Bud Powell and Sonny Clark, and it is possible to hear elements of each of those performers in his work at this time, and also, in the telling economy of his statements and comping, that of John Lewis.

In 1957 Shannon joined the Jazz Couriers led by Ronnie Scott and Tubby Hayes, and it is hard to imagine a better context in which to place his gifts. Like Hayes (who tolerated Shannon's poor sight reading skills because he admired his playing so much), Shannon was a perfect synthesiser of the latest jazz trends from America, and yet he never sounded empty or faceless. His work throughout the four Jazz Couriers albums (available on several reissues) is that of a master pianist, and one can cite his tactful comping on After Tea from The Couriers of Jazz album as an excellent example of his skill as musical prompt, or his solo on The Serpent (now on the CD Some Of My Best Friends Are Blues) as an example of his ability to develop the thread of a solo, or his brief improvisation on My Funny Valentine (again from the The Couriers of Jazz CD) as an example of his re-harmonisation of a hackneyed theme.

Hayes was quick to praise Shannon's contribution to the Couriers music, and when the band split in 1959 Shannon would stay on and spend a further five years working with Tubby's various groups. This work is spread across several albums, including Tubby's Groove (included on The Eighth Wonder), Palladium Jazz Date, Tubbs, Tubbs' Tours and archive issues such as Tribute to Tubbs, Live In London Volume 1 and Volume 2 and Night and Day. Throughout this impressive body of work Shannon emerges as an amazingly consistent performer, unfazed by Hayes' virtuosity, and even, by dint of a canny brain and a subtle technique, able to undercut the nominal star. Blue Hayes from the 1959 Tubby's Groove set is a masterpiece for Shannon, joining the performance on Blues For Tony which he recorded with Jamaican saxophonist Wilton "Bogey" Gaynair the same year (the album Blue Bogey) as evidence of Shannon's genuine ability to play the blues in a convincing and sincere way. Frustratingly, Shannon's career began to falter in the late 1960s, through a combination of the usual jazz vices and bitterness (he was especially cynical about the lack of cohesive rhythm sections on the local scene), and by the end of the decade he was almost invisible on the musical radar. His career since then has been a similarly inconsistent mix of potential comebacks, dissipation and abstraction, and despite the efforts of his one time producer at Tempo, Tony Hall, to get Terry to record again, he has become all but musically silent, an ignominious shame for a musician who was once central to one of the finest jazz groups this country has produced.- Simon Spillett

I just came across this and had to e-mail you
We moved to Grimsby in 1987 and had the great pleasure of having Terry for a neighbour for 5 years.  Having been in group myself and fancying myself as a musician I can't imagine a more pleasurable way to be proved how wrong I was.  I can only say that sitting in his house, listening to him improvise hour after hour was just incredible.  I even got to roadie for him at local gigs and once he persuaded me to accompany him on bass (though in the end I doubt the audience heard me - but he did).  Just as good was that he and his wife would baby sit with our kids,- who all loved them both.  Last heard he was living in Wragby ( a village nearer to Lincoln) and still playing with local bands  Jazz Eddie - thanks for this contribution from - David Watson

London was indeed proud of Thompson's talents, and one of his career highlights was sharing the opening night billing at Ronnie Scott's club in October 1959. For a short time he was the house pianist at the club before realising the ambition that George Shearing had held over a decade earlier when he, too, moved to America. Unlike other émigrés such as Dizzy Reece, Thompson quickly made a practical home for himself, playing a lengthy residency at the famed Hickory House venue in New York City, but by the early 1970s he was back in the United Kingdom. A solo LP recorded live at Ronnie Scott's during this period is long over due for reissue. Indeed Thompson's career is in need of reappraisal, as, up until his death in 1986, he was one of the country's best loved and most assured jazzmen. - Simon Spillett

Dill Jones made a permanent move to New York in 1961, following a decade as one of London's most adaptable jazzmen. Jones' wide ranging abilities and enthusiasm are indicative of how the 'mainstream' of the music had a far more practical implication in Britain during this era. Before leaving Britain, Jones had kept pace with all the local bop-based talents - he had played in Tony Kinsey's Trio, played with Joe Harriott, and had also been a key member of the Tommy Whittle quintet - but he had also accompanied Louis Armstrong. In 1961, at the height of the trad boom, Jones cocked a snook at convention and led a band of 'modernists', including clarinettist Vic Ash and trombonist Keith Christie, and billed itself as the Dixieland All-Stars, which horrified audiences and critics alike when it played an all trad programme at London's Flamingo Club. Was this provocation, an extreme case of hitching a ride on a passing bandwagon, or merely an indication of Jones' dislike of pigeon holes? When the band made an LP for Columbia, Jones The Jazz (now as rare hen's teeth), few original copies were sold to an audience then deeply divided by the trad versus modern debacle. Jones made few other recordings as a leader while in Britain. Perhaps his finest was the 1959 EP recorded by the enterprising Denis Preston at Lansdowne studios, Dill Jones Plus Four. Original copies are rarities, but anyone lucky enough to own this record will hear not only Jones' urbane piano style (at the time somewhere between Teddy Wilson, John Lewis and Tommy Flanagan) exercised on themes by Duke Jordan and Sonny Rollins, but also the lyrical eloquence of tenor saxophonist Duncan Lamont.

The 1960s also saw the long awaited rise to prominence of Stan Tracey. Although Tracey had been a professional musician since 1943, it had taken him time to find his way inside the inner circle of the British modernists, something borne out of commercial necessity. His early career featured spells with such unlikely acts as the cod-gypsy Melfi Trio, for whom Stan obliging returned to his first instrument, the accordion (an instrument he would play on record with Kenny Baker in the mid-1950s) and by the late 1950s, despite having made valuable playing connections and recordings with Ronnie Scott, Jimmy Deuchar and Victor Feldman, Tracey was still having to earn a commercial crust with the Ted Heath band, wherein his mischievous sense of humour occasionally threatened to derail the temperate mood of blandness.

At a time when British jazz pianists were generally trying for the smooth fluidity of men like Tommy Flanagan, Wynton Kelly and Oscar Peterson, Tracey represented a distinctly knotty alternative, as can be heard on his first album as a leader, Showcase, made in 1958 with Heath band colleagues bassist Johnny Hawksworth and drummer Ronnie Verrell. The results are by no means mature Tracey, for there are still more than trace vestiges of his dance band apprenticeship, but the overall concept is a far different one from merely following a fashionable star and one can readily recognise the Stan Tracey of today in this early effort. Tracey had by then in his own words "boiled it down" to just two major influences, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, and the effect these influences had upon him was to make his style stark, rhythmically obtuse but assertive, harmonically dense and without any real recourse to empty technical displays. The iconic album Little Klunk is the perfect early example of Tracey's skills as they stood at the dawn of the 1960s, and features only his own compositions, a trend that the pianist was to follow with unexpected dividends within a few years.

Such an intractable and stubborn stylist might not have seemed the ideal choice for the position of house accompanist, but in 1961 Tracey fell into just such a role at Ronnie Scott's club and over the next seven years there followed an intense period of musical creativity for the pianist, alternating work and recordings with his own quartet and accompanying a bewildering array of visiting American soloists, an experience he once described as being "like Christmas every night." The reaction to Tracey was variable. Some, like Sonny Rollins, Roland Kirk, Jimmy Witherspoon and Zoot Sims were delighted to find a genuine musical personality at the keyboard and not some fawning non-entity; others were not. Saxophonists Lucky Thompson and Don Byas were openly hostile, and Stan Getz had the ego-fuelled nerve to criticise Tracey publicly over the microphone at the club one night; "bollocks," was Tracey's response.

Tracey had already found something far more useful to do with his hands than wipe the backsides of the visiting artists at Scott's, but when a sincere musical dialogue commenced he was ready to throw himself in with total commitment. "I don't like accompanying twinkling stars," he said later, and the same lack of unnecessary hype and fashion conscious pandering marked his own choice for regular musical partner when he began to work with tenor saxophonist Bobby Wellins, another genuine improviser with an unshowy gift. The Tracey-Wellins partnership was central to one of the greatest triumphs in British jazz, the 1965 recording Under Milk Wood, the story of which has been documented time and again elsewhere. The follow up album recorded in 1967, With Love From Jazz, has finally been released on CD after years of being an expensive collectors item on vinyl. If it lacks the legendary status of its predecessor, it certainly lacks nothing else. Tracey and Wellins are on peak form, revealing yet another facet of their hand-in-glove pairing on a loosely connected suite of songs about love.