Commonwealth Blues

Tubby Hayes

Best known in the U.K. and Europe as a tenor saxophonist, Tubby Hayes also played flute and vibes, and was a composer/arranger as well. In his early years during the '50s, he was thoroughly grounded in the classic tenor sounds of Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins, playing with a swagger and vigor that was then rare in Britain, and later embracing the soulful hard bop of Horace Silver's band and fellow tenorists Hank Mobley and Johnny Griffin. Initially resistant to the `60s avant-garde, Hayes did tentatively embrace it along with jazz-rock fusion in 1969. Unfortunately, he died relatively young, at age 38 in 1973.