Tubby Hayes Quartet - Grits, Beans and Greens review | John Fordham's jazz album of the month

The Guardian 80

(Decca)
He died in 1973 but British-born Hayes had astonishing fluidity and compositional skills that it is worth hearing

Rare alignments of the musical planets have often fine-tuned jazz’s turning points. Suppose a young Louis Armstrong had not been taught the cornet in a New Orleans reform school in 1913, while the port city’s creative multiculturalism was flowering all around him? Or if Benny Goodman’s 1930s orchestra hadn’t got rolling just as network radio was invented, to send the world the news? For Edward Brian “Tubby” Hayes, the brilliant London-born saxophonist, the planets didn’t quite line up in time to release his immense potential – British/European jazz was yet to find its liberating creative independence, and Hayes (with a heroin habit and a heart condition) died at 38 in 1973 before he could distil his skills into something as single-mindedly hefty as John Coltrane, or as capriciously flighty as Ornette Coleman. But Grits, Beans and Greens – made in 1969 just before Hayes’ health declined, long-lost and now finally mastered and released on vinyl and CD – captures his astonishing fluency as a tenor-sax improviser, and canny craftsmanship as a composer. Rugged modal themes unfold over hurtling bass-walks (from the excellent Ron Mathewson) that suggest Coltrane’s Impressions or Giant Steps but with chirpy Latin-ballroom countermelodies. There are fast blues, and smoky ballads.