John Dankworth

[Freddie Freeloader]

A great musician...and the composer of the hippest TV theme this side of the

Atlantic.



[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERaF-h8UhvU"]YouTube- Tomorrow's World BBC Titles 1978[/ame]

[alan gowdy]

Freddie - I sincerely hope you've posted this in the wrong section by mistake. I've heard nothing elsewhere.

[Freddie Freeloader]

Sorry for the ambiguity, Alan.



John passed away today.

[smudge]

What? Today's news just gets worse...



I can't believe this - another legend taken away from us. Many a midnight motorway run has been helped along by my favourite John Dankworth tracks in the CD player - a great way to travel into the small hours.



I am really sorry to hear this news - how terrible for Cleo and his family.



Respect,



Smudge



http://www.jazzwisemagazine.com/comp...rth-dies-at-82

[scraller]

Ah bummer



I've been playing CD1 (soundtrack music) from the 'Let's Slip Away' compilation I got just over a week ago constantly in every open moment I've had since - & most of the tunes have been firmly affixed in my brain the entire time.



RIP Mr. Dankworth

[alan gowdy]

I went to see him and Cleo perform in Chichester about a year ago. Apart from the quality of the 'tunes' I was impressed by his patter. Very dry and Humphrey Lyttleton-ish.

[scenesixty]

Johnny composed the awfully dismal opening theme/music for this disturbing (1970) film-very memorable!

[Santonix]

Yet more terrible news. A lovely man and a truly great musician whose musical influence will be both heard and remembered for many years to come. So sad. R.I.P.

[theuofc]

name='smudge']What? Today's news just gets worse...



I can't believe this - another legend taken away from us. Many a midnight motorway run has been helped along by my favourite John Dankworth tracks in the CD player - a great way to travel into the small hours.



I am really sorry to hear this news - how terrible for Cleo and his family.



Respect,



Smudge



Jazz breaking news: Giant of British Jazz Sir John Dankworth Dies at 82

What a loss to the music and film world. I bought the same CD soundtrack music "Let's Slip Away" that Scraller did. Wonderful and for my own Bogarde interest, his music for The Servant, Modesty Blaise, Accident, and Darling are memorable.



Barbara

[Windthrop]

RIP John

[Mark O]

R.I.P. John.......

[Rick C]

To lose Ian Carmicheal and Johnnie Dankworth on the same day makes the past even more precious instantly.

[wadsy]

R.I.P. John!

[Freddy]

R.I.P. John

[ShirlGirl]

My first reaction when I saw this thread.... Oh, no, please, I don't want to hear this!







My sincere condolences to Cleo, Alec and Jacqui.

[didi-5]

Sad news indeed - RIP John.

[film1967]

Teriffic in concert. Very sad. R.I.P Johnny.

[Owlett]

A great altoist and gifted composer. RIP.

[julian_craster]

Sir John Dankworth obituary

Legendary British jazz musician who was a composer, arranger, bandleader and educationist





John Fordham

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 7 February 2010

Sir John Dankworth obituary | Music | The Guardian







Late 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 for him and his singer wife, Cleo Laine, at the South Bank. But the frail Dankworth emerged in a wheelchair just before the interval. Laine, his daughter Jacqui and son Alec, and a good many of the accompanying big band, looked as if they could hardly bear to watch the old star slowly bring the alto saxophone to his lips. Then the opening notes of the Duke Ellington ballad Tonight I Shall Sleep filled the hall, vibrating gently with Dankworth's famously delicate, richly clarinet-like ballad sound, and everybody breathed out.



Dankworth spent his astonishingly productive life bringing the world's music-lovers closer together and drawing the sometimes marginalised world of jazz into the mainstream. Though Laine (who dominated that November performance with her usual offhand elan) referred to them both as "two old codgers", the partnership – which took the pair from Soho jazz dives to Carnegie Hall and led to international tributes and prizes too numerous to list – never became a trip down nostalgia lane. Dankworth, also a composer, was still producing new music into his last years.



Dankworth not only loved jazz passionately, but believed it could play a catalytic 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 which 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. He once opined that symphonies were the great novels of Western music and jazz was the journalism – the one embracing the spirit of an era, the other catching its intense and characteristic moments on the wing. But he never lost a sense of the uniqueness of jazz, or a relish for its improvisational spirit.



"Jazz today," Dankworth's 1998 book concluded, "... can be spiritual, cerebral, motivating or moving. It can evoke tension, relaxation, laughter, tears. Surely jazz is truly the music of the era, combining stature, dignity and emotion with the highest musical ideals."



Like his contemporary, Ronnie Scott, Dankworth initially made his reputation as a saxophone soloist of a confidence, early maturity and distinctiveness of sound rare at the time on a 1950s British jazz scene overwhelmed by deference to the American pioneers. Dankworth was born in Woodford, Essex, and played the violin as a child. He attended the Monoux grammar school, in Loughton, Essex, and then went to the Royal Academy of Music to study clarinet – his highly musical mother taking the view that if he was going to consider something as eccentric as playing jazz for a living, he might as well learn in a way that would suit him for any kind of music. As a result, Dankworth was one of the few British jazz players of his generation to have had a formal musical education.



He had taken to the alto saxophone after hearing Charlie Parker's Cherokee on the BBC's Radio Rhythm Club. In May 1945, at 17, he led a quartet that won the North-West London Melody Maker contest, and, in 1949, he played alongside Parker at the Paris Jazz Festival, even lending Parker his sax.



As well as his own groups, "Johnny" Dankworth had already performed and recorded with Freddy Mirfield's Garbage Men, an association that continued throughout his year-long army service. But in the years that followed, Dankworth was to become an acknowledged leading campaigner for a bebop-influenced "modern jazz" in Britain.



At the time the young British enthusiasts for this music took to working with dance bands on transatlantic liners so that they could get to New York's 52nd Street to hear such originals as Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Dankworth worked on the Queen Mary in Bobby Kevin's Band from July 1947, and in London with Les Ayling (late 1947) and with Tito Burns until May 1948. That year, Dankworth became a founder member of the London boppers' rather down-at-heel tribute to a New York jazz club, the Soho basement they called Club Eleven. Dankworth and Scott led the two resident bands there, but Dankworth also continued to freelance extensively with the highly successful Ambrose dance band until the summer of 1949, and alongside a visiting Benny Goodman as a temporary member of the Skyrockets.



As a new decade began, the young saxophonist formed one of his and the British jazz scene's most celebrated groups, the Johnny Dankworth Seven, during which period he recruited the powerful, smoky-voiced, and as yet undiscovered singer-actress Cleo Laine. But Dankworth finally gave his composing side the upper hand when he created his big band – the most adaptable vehicle he had so far found for an increasingly ambitious vision. Though rock'n' roll had arrived to displace jazz from the pop charts, Dankworth also joined that exclusive group of jazz musicians who occasionally made it back there: Experiments with Mice (from 1956, a playful set of jazz variations on Three Blind Mice) and African Waltz, in 1960, both invaded the British Top 10.



In 1958, the movie director Karel Reisz hired Dankworth to write his first film score for We Are the Lambeth Boys – following which, he wrote memorable jazz charts for The Criminal (1960), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), The Servant (1963), Darling and Return from the Ashes (both 1965), Morgan and Modesty Blaise (both 1966) and Accident (1967). By now the most celebrated jazz musician in Britain, the adaptable Dankworth was also appointed musical director for the British visits of Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Sophie Tucker and Oscar Peterson.



In 1958, Dankworth married Laine in what was to become a professional as well as personal partnership, with Dankworth often sidelining his own activities to act as the increasingly popular vocalist's musical director from the 1970s onwards. Dankworth's career moved into composing for the theatre, too: he worked on Boots with Strawberry Jam (a musical life of George Bernard Shaw) in 1968 with Benny Green, and, in the 1970s, the musical Colette as a vehicle for Laine.



His high public profile, and the conviction that music apparently divided by historical, economic and class differences could be brought together, increasingly led him toward genre-crossing ventures. The London Philharmonic Society commissioned him to write Improvisations for Jazz Band and Symphony Orchestra, and the National Theatre requested a score for its production of Marlowe's Edward II. The Man of Mode for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Lady in Waiting for 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 such TV series as the Avengers and Tomorrow's World.



In 1985 Dankworth founded the London Symphony Orchestra's pops programme, and became its musical director. He toured and conducted such programmes with the world's leading orchestras, and he also served as Principal Guest Pops Conductor for the San Francisco Symphony, and Pops Conductor for the Rochester Philharmonic.



Though to some these programmes occasionally appeared to dumb down the greatest hits of classical music without adding the sharp edge of adventurous jazz improvisation, Dankworth and Laine's onstage ease and relaxed musicality made them theatrical, open and entertaining occasions, bringing previously distant musical worlds closer together, and anticipating much of the eclectic and crossover music that became so widespread as the 20th century ended.



The couple's desire to extend the appeal and audience for jazz also involved them in an absorbing educational and performance project. In 1970 they founded the Wavendon Allmusic Plan at the Allmusic Centre at their home near Milton Keynes, a development that became internationally famous. Wavendon's combination of studio and concert settings could encompass both performances and seminars devoted to Allmusic – Dankworth's pre-fashionable word for world music. It also involved a music camp for children, 150 or more concerts a year, and a travelling roadshow.



In 1988 Dankworth won a Grammy nomination for best instrumental arrangement of a version of Ellington and Juan Tizol's Caravan with the London Symphony Orchestra, recorded Gillespie's the Symphony Sessions and made Echoes of Harlem, a tribute to Ellington, with the Rochester Philharmonic. His recorded output in his later years ran from a vigorous retrospective of the Big Band's work from 1953 to 1959 (the Vintage Years) to the album Dankworth Big Band: Live at Ronnie Scott's, a collaboration with his bassist son Alec and a testament to how compelling his jazz work remained after more than half a century behind the microphone. If his instrumental skills were often sidelined by his many other achievements, Dankworth remained a performer with his own sound. His tone was delicate and poignant on alto and soprano saxophones, his sense of dynamics was subtle – and on clarinet the glow of a swing-era elan would often warm his more usually cool deliberation.



Like Ellington – and out of much the same unquenchable enthusiasm for music-making – advancing years didn't stop Dankworth and Laine being perpetually busy. Even when the saxophonist was well into his 70s, a journalist trying to catch up with him might find a hasty run-down on his availability left on the answering machine in the middle of the night, itemising an appearance on a breakfast radio show followed by a hop to New York for a Carnegie Hall concert, and an overnight return for a gig close on its heels.



In 2007, as part of the celebrations for their 80th birthdays, Laine and Dankworth triumphantly performed their famous Shakespeare and All That Jazz programme for the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. Dankworth reportedly partied and jammed on the saxophone until 3am on his birthday that year, and rose at dawn to continue work on Worldjazz – the new piece he later performed at LSO St Luke's in London. The pair also released a voluminous retrospective album, I Hear Music, Cleo Laine and John Dankworth: a Celebration of Their Life & Work.



Dankworth was presented with a fellowship of the Royal Academy in 1973, a doctor of music degree from Berklee College of Music in 1982, and a CBE in 1974. He was knighted in 2006, the first British jazz musician to receive this honour. He is survived by Laine, Alec and his singer-actress daughter Jacqui.



John Philip William Dankworth, musician, composer and bandleader, born 20 September 1927; died 6 February 2010

[julian_craster]

From Times Online

February 7, 2010

Sir John Dankworth: the Times obituary





Second only perhaps to his old associate, Ronnie Scott, Johnny Dankworth came to stand as an enduring symbol of British jazz in the eyes of the general public. A stylish alto saxophonist, he was a pioneer of the domestic modern jazz movement in the Fifties before establishing himself as a writer of film scores.



Though his jazz compositions generally placed refined good taste before emotional intensity — his work was once waggishly described as “. . .’couth, ’kempt and ’shevelled” — Dankworth’s big bands and small groups were an important training ground for many of the most promising British musicians of the past 40 years. With his wife, Cleo Laine, he was also a tireless promoter of jazz and the cause of musical education.



John Philip William Dankworth began his musical career playing clarinet in traditional jazz bands. The son of an insulating engineer, he had shown an interest in music from an early age, writing his first arrangement (of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze) when he was only 8. After taking piano and violin lessons, he took up the clarinet (inspired by the swing music of Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman) when he was in his mid-teens.



He made progress so quickly that, within a year and a half, he won a soloist’s prize in a 1944 national dance band championship organised by Melody Maker music magazine. He then studied it at the Royal Academy of Music, but as jazz was frowned upon by the faculty staff, it proved a less than inspiring experience.



Of much greater interest were the harmonic mysteries of bebop. Dankworth had become intrigued by this new form after hearing a recording of Charlie Parker’s version of Cherokee on the BBC. Hoping to emulate Parker’s frenetic style, Dankworth switched to the alto saxophone, and signed up with a dance band on the liner Queen Mary, a job which gave him and his colleagues — who included Ronnie Scott — the opportunity to travel to New York to hear the bop pioneers in the clubs of 52nd Street.



With Scott and a group of other musicians Dankworth was a founding member of Club Eleven, a cult venue which opened in Great Windmill Street, Soho, in December 1948. At a time of near civil war between modernists and trad jazz lovers, the club formed a refuge for the beleaguered minority of boppers in dark glasses and Billy Eckstine shirts.



After working for the bandleaders Tito Burns and Bert Ambrose, Dankworth formed his highly regarded Johnny Dankworth Seven in 1950, the band making its debt at the London Palladium with a line-up including the saxophonist Don Rendell, trombonist Eddie Harvey and pianist Bill Le Sage. Also influenced by Miles Davis and Gil Evans’s urbane Birth of the Cool recordings, the septet explored bobinfected improvisation within a more considered contrapuntal structure.



Dankworth also catered to the dance-hall market by including commercial numbers and by featuring guest vocalists. In 1951 he auditioned a talented but gauche singer, Clem Campbell, who immediately won him over with her rendition of Embraceable You. She was signed up and re-christened Cleo Laine after the band members pulled names from a hat.



By 1953 Dankworth was able to expand his operations by forming a 20-piece big band. His arrangements grew in scope and sophistication, though many critics — and musicians as well — found the settings over-written and lacking in the visceral drive of conventional big bands.



He addressed some of the criticisms in an interview with Les Tomkins in 1969: “The hardest thing to do is to swing quietly, with control and restraint. Lots of bands swing loudly. I refuse to let my band play loudly in order to try to swing when it isn’t swinging softly. For this reason, if it doesn’t swing when it’s played softly I have to admit that it does sound lacking somehow and a little bit anaemic. But this is a chance I have to take. I can’t bring myself to tell a band to play loud without any dynamics, or to bash away, and I can’t write the sort of music which will allow them to do that. Because I think that the best jazz in the long run is the jazz that is controlled and will swing on its own terms.”



Dankworth’s sense of humour shone through, however, in his best-selling record Experiments with Mice (1956) which toyed with the theme of Three Blind Mice in the styles of Glenn Miller and the portentous Stan Kenton.



While he had once been fêted as Britain’s answer to Charlie Parker, Dankworth increasingly came to think of himself as a composer rather than a soloist. As he later explained to his biographer, Graham Collier, he was aware of his limitations as a performer:



“I have never looked like being in that incredible virtuoso class like, say, Stan Getz. I think people made a mistake and put me in that embryonic class when I was very young and thought that I was going to branch out to be a big instrumentalist in some way or another. But I always find that I very, very seldom get anywhere near what I consider a satisfactory standard. I would much rather be judged for my writing because writing is a thing that you can have second thoughts about and if it isn’t right, you can’t blame somebody else but yourself.”



Dankworth and Cleo Laine were married in 1958 and soon afterwards the singer left the band to pursue an acting career. The following year the orchestra made history by being the first British band to appear at the prestigious Newport festival in Rhode Island.



Dankworth also made his first forays into writing cinema scores, contributing to two Karel Reisz films, We Are the Lambeth Boys and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, as well as Joseph Losey’s The Criminal. After the success of another Losey drama, The Servant, Dankworth was showered with commissions. He went on to score Darling, Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, Modesty Blaise, Accident and many other films, his jazz-flavoured themes becoming almost a compulsory feature of Sixties British cinema. He was also in demand in television, writing the signature tunes for such programmes as The Avengers and Tomorrow’s World. Film and television work brought Dankworth wealth, but he was proudest of his sequence of “concept” albums, beginning with What the Dickens in 1964. The Zodiac Variations wove themes around astrological signs, while the Million Dollar Collection contained pieces inspired by paintings. Some of his finest work was to be found on Cleo Laine’s 1965 album Shakespeare and All That Jazz, a hackneyed title for idiosyncratic settings of verse from the Bard.



Dankworth’s interest in “serious” music yielded a number of politely received string quartets, a piano concerto and so-called “third stream” compositions which attempted to fuse jazz and classical forms.



He returned to the Royal Academy of Music in 1969 as a teacher. In later years, he was also a “Pops” conductor with the London Symphony Orchestra, and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.



After so many years of intense productivity, he seemed happy to retreat from the limelight when he became Cleo Laine’s musical director in 1971. With Laine’s ascent to translantic stardom, beginning with her Lincoln Center debut in 1972, there began a new life on the international circuit. As well as appearing on Laine’s albums and concert tours. Dankworth composed a musical portrait of the French novelist Colette (1979) with his wife in the title role. A decade earlier he had also collaborated with Benny Green on Boots and Strawberry Jam, a musical inspired by the life of Bernard Shaw.



With Laine playing both Ellen Terry and Mrs Patrick Campbell, the piece was premiered at the Nottingham Playhouse and narrowly failed to transfer to the West End.



When not performing, Dankworth and Laine devoted much of their energy to their own venue, The Stables, built in the grounds of their home, a Victorian rectory at Wavendon, Buckinghamshire. The intimate auditorium was the setting for an unusually broad rang of performers from the world of classical music, jazz, folk, pop and cabaret. The couple were also regular guests at London soirées organised by their friend Princess Margaret. The Stables provided a base for workshops and other educational events run under the auspices of Dankworth and Laine’s Wavendon Allmusic Plan, an organisation dedicated to removing the barriers between different musical disciplines. In the summer months, with young aspiring musicians camping in the grounds and experimenting on any instrument that came to hand, the Dankworth home had the air of a boisterous scout camp. Both of Dankworth and Laine’s children pursued musical careers: Jacqui as a singer and dancer, Alec as a bass player. In the 1990s father and son co-led a big band which frequently appeared at Ronnie Scott’s.



Featuring many of Dankworth Sr’s longtime friends and his son’s younger colleagues, the band struck a balance between the old and new generations. Dankworth, in a characteristically self-deprecating aside, would often introduce the band as “a combination of doddering senility and youthful incompetence”.



Despite ill-health, he continued to perform in his twilight years. Viewers of Jools Holland’s Later programme witnessed a feisty studio performance from British jazz’s first couple last year, and at the London Jazz Festival concert at the Festival Hall, Dankworth gave a spirited display from a wheelchair. Earlier in the year, although strikingly frail, he shared droll memories of his old friend Dudley Moore during a guest appearance in a celebration of Moore’s career staged at Ronnie Scott’s.



Dankworth and Laine were the joint subjects of an exceptionally thoughtful and dispassionate biography, Cleo and John, written by the composer Graham Collier and published by Quartet in 1976. They were awarded honorary MAs from the Open University in 1975 and music doctorates from Berklee College of Music, Massachusetts, in 1982. Dankworth was appointed CBE in 1974 and knighted in 2006.



Sir John Dankworth, jazz composer, bandleader and saxophonist, was born on September 20, 1927. He died on February 6, 2010, aged 82