Harry Beckett RIP

Hi everyone.

Don’t get around much here anymore but this is sad news indeed:

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/news.php?id=61252

Of the Great and the Good of British/British-based jazz he was one of the greatest and the best. Worked with everyone from Patrick McGoohan to Weekend, from Mingus to Alexis Korner (he was in CCS and that’s him you hear leading the trumpet section in their famous TOTP version of “Whole Lotta Love”), always immediately identifiable by that fluttering, squeaking, inimitably warm tone he had.

I once worked with Harry in a free improv scratch band at the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow, back in 1980. John Stevens, Elton Dean and Trevor Watts were also in the line-up; I can’t remember who the bass player was except it definitely wasn’t Barry Guy. I turned up, introduced myself (at sixteen! The nerve!), sat in on piano and we got on fantastically. Thereafter I’d run into him from time to time at John Stevens’ workshops or just at gigs and he always made me welcome.

Practically everything he recorded is worth checking out, especially his Flare Up and Warm Smiles albums from the early seventies (which are now available again on CD), but as a starting point get yourself a copy of Mike Westbrook’s Metropolis (which too is on CD) and listen to his florid, humble and beautiful solo on the closing “Part IX.”

RIP big Barbadian trumpet man.

yes.
needless to say i heard this via the on-u mailing list given that one of his last albums was his excellent collaboration with adrian sherwood.
sad news indeed.