Britain's master jazz pianist, who has died aged 86, sounded as fresh and vital in his latest work as he did 50 years ago
Not all jazz musicians make it to their ninth decade, and of those who do, few can claim that the freshness and substance of their last work matched that of their first. But with The Flying Pig, Stan Tracey – whose death at the age of 86 was announced yesterday – showed only a couple of months ago that the years had done nothing to dim his qualities. The last album to be released during his lifetime is likely to figure in anybody's considered assessment of his finest contributions to the recorded history of jazz.
Tracey was in the habit of choosing interesting themes for his compositions, and this group of pieces turned out to have been inspired by the experiences of his father as a teenage soldier with the East Kent regiment on the battlefields of Flanders during the first world war. Tracey's father was wounded and then captured, surviving imprisonment to return to his family upon the end of hostilities. Played by a fine quintet, the tunes are all given titles referring to soldiers' sayings: the Flying Pig itself was a type of gun used by the British.
It's a hard-bop record, harking back to the late 1950s and early 1960s, yet it sounds as fresh as tomorrow. You could play it next to any of the finest Blue Note albums by Horace Silver or Art Blakey and not feel that it suffered by comparison. And the leader's piano-playing sounds, to say the least, like that of a much younger man, prompting the soloists and keeping the rhythm section up to the mark.
If it lacks anything, it is the sort of single masterpiece that he produced early in his career with Starless and Bible Black, the track from his reimagining in music of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, recorded in 1965 with Bobby Wellins on tenor saxophone, Jeff Clyne on double bass and Jackie Dougan at the drums. Here is one of the great ballad performances in the whole of recorded jazz, one of those pieces in which, although everything but the skeleton of the tune is improvised, each note seems to have been weighed and measured to perfection.
Reading on mobile? Listen to Starless and Bible Black here
The last time I saw Tracey, at the Bull's Head in Barnes a year or so ago, leading with Andy Cleyndert on bass and his son Clark on drums, he played a version of I Cover the Waterfront, a much abused standard, that I'll never forget. Through the evening he sounded just as vigorous, just as intent on making every note seem new-minted, as he had when I first heard him in person 50 years earlier. Having worked his way through his early influences, he spent that half-century as one of the British jazz's genuinely original voices. His passing, like those of his contemporaries Tubby Hayes, Phil Seamen and Ronnie Scott, removes a landmark.