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a column by
Bill Shoemaker

Steve Beresford and Franz Koglmann on Tony Coe

Tony Coe was singular, the breadth and depth of his work irreducible to generalities. His idiosyncratic artistry is perhaps best suggested through the work of two colleagues who, in all probability, have never been mentioned in the same sentence – Steve Beresford and Franz Koglmann – and whose respect and admiration for the iconoclastic saxophonist and clarinetist is the salient intersection of their disparate sensibilities. That Coe sustained long, productive relationships with both is rather amazing.

Though Coe performed on an array of Beresford’s recordings, spanning the endearing Eleven Songs for Doris Day and his evocative music for films and television, it is their work with Lol Coxhill as The Melody Four that is emblematic of Coe’s capacity for infectiously daft humor, which is often overlooked in favor of his stunning virtuosity, fluency in multiple idioms, and ability to mesh with musicians ranging from Barney Bigard to Evan Parker. Increasingly over the course of a half-dozen 10” Chabada LPs during the 1980s, The Melody Four made merry with Latin music, TV themes, and music from the Marx Brothers films. Coe’s role was a bit like Mickey Katz’s with Spike Jones, going along with the outlandishness and, at key moments, letting the listener know there was serious musicianship behind it all.

Humor is not a quality usually associated with Koglmann’s work; but it is there, sly, subtle, and easy to miss. Much of it is embedded in his obscure, refracted references to jazz from the 1920s through the 1950s, and mid-century popular cultural touchstones like Marilyn Monroe and Lolita. Coe was able to coax Koglmann’s humor from his arch Viennese modernism, particularly with Monoblue Quartet, where he had more room to insinuate himself than in the brass instrumentalist’s large ensembles. Regardless of the setting, Koglmann’s intricate scores also played to Coe’s strong suit as a sight reader, the skill that gave him so much studio work over the years, and as a section player, blending with other distinctive Koglmann stalwarts like oboe player Mario Arcari.

Beresford and Koglmann present contrasting perspectives on Tony Coe that flesh out the outlines afforded by encyclopedia entries and obituaries. They reinforce how he was truly singular.

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Bill Shoemaker: Do you remember when you first heard Tony, presumably on disc?

Steve Beresford: That’s a very interesting question, because I have a very clear idea of when I first met Tony, but I have no idea when I first heard him. Absolutely no idea. I must have heard him when I was growing up because there were two programs, one on Saturday night and one on Sunday night, on BBC Radio. One had people playing records and a segment called “Hear Me Talking.” I remember hearing Steve Lacy playing “Johnny Come Lately” with Cecil Taylor, and I had never heard of Steve Lacy before. Very instructive. The Sunday program was mainly recordings of bands live in London. I must have heard Tony with one of those bands. He was with a lot of different bands then, maybe the Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland band.

Shoemaker: Was it early enough that you may have heard him with Humphrey Lyttelton?

Beresford: I don’t remember hearing him with Humphrey Lyttelton. I wasn’t really interested in him then. Looking back, I see his band was pretty great, actually; but at the time, I didn’t think they were super hip. They did have a lot of really good points. He was really quite broad minded, and he was a witty and charming man. He had some pretty good gigs on the BBC, and not just playing music, but also hosting [the long-running comedy panel game show I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue]. I may have heard them, but that didn’t really stick with me. When I started hearing Tony – knowing it was Tony – he was right there in the room.

I was working with Jean Rochard of Nato Records. He ran the Chantenay Festival, which I had already played with Lol [Coxhill]. Lol and I had arrived for the festival, and Jean said, I think you should do a trio with Tony Coe. I thought, Oh my God, Tony Coe? I knew Lol was very broad minded and had played with rock and roll bands, punk bands, and if I can’t play the piano properly, he’ll be perfectly happy. But Tony Coe is a very renowned, high-end expert saxophone player. He’ll think I’m a complete idiot. I was quite scared of him. One of the things that made me less scared was that he had these two brown marks under his nostrils because he was taking a lot of snuff in those days. It’s a very bad thing to do. Snuff is not good for you at all. He didn’t seem to realize that it left these brown marks. I kind of liked that. As soon as I started to work with him it was clear that he didn’t care if you knew Charlie Parker tunes backwards and forewords. He just didn’t care. He was just interested in you as a musician.

It became instantly obvious that he was very open to me and monsieur Yves Rochard, Jean Rochard’s father, who played in the local brass band, a fanfare band, and also played violin. He had a very unusual approach to how many beats you had in each bar, so we had to follow him – hold it for two extra beats, that sort of thing. So the whole thing moved around monsieur Rochard. I knew Lol would like that, and Tony liked it. It quickly became clear that Jean Rochard had made a good choice. I came up with the name The Melody Four, because originally monsieur Rochard was part of the band. He always did something on our records. It could be him just saying Bonjour, or something like that; but he would do something on every record, like Hitchcock would appear in all his movies.

So, it was quickly clear that Tony wasn’t typical. I had grown up around super macho, rather joyless jazz musicians who were just interested if you could play bebop tunes at 400bpm and in every conceivable key. That’s what they thought made a good musician. I didn’t do any of that. But, Tony didn’t know any bebop tunes, which really surprised me. He liked bebop, but he said he couldn’t be bothered to learn the tunes, which were very difficult.

Shoemaker: Interesting, given his immaculate reading skills, which were important in the session work he did, but also applicable with what he was doing with you and Lol.

Beresford: He was an immaculate reader. You’re completely right. But he also had this routine that he possibly devised just to make people worry. If he had a part for clarinet, he’d take out his saxophone. And then he’d look at the music as if he’d never seen music before. He once turned it upside down and scratched his head. It was fantastic. I don’t know how often he did it, but I used him on a lot of sessions when I was doing movie soundtracks and jingles and tv shows. Tony was fantastic to have on those sessions, which were generally all overdubs. We never had the whole band in the studio at the same time. We mainly worked at Dave Hunt’s studio where you could get maybe four people in his live room. It wasn’t a proper movie soundtrack studio, like the one down the road where Alan Hacker and Tony did movie soundtracks – Lansdowne. I don’t think I ever played there, but I would go in and see a couple of recordings, a beautiful studio big enough to record a symphony orchestra. They also recorded a lot of calypso there, records with guys like Joe Harriott and others – a lot of different stuff that Tony was in on, I’m sure.

Tony did so many sessions that he couldn’t remember them all. I don’t know if he filled out the forms when this new system for getting money for being on a record came out, he had such a vast backlog of things that he had done. The forms specified what instrument he had played, whether he was in the section, or had soloed. I once asked him if he had ever done anything with Quincy Jones, and he scratched his head and said, Quincy Jones? Maybe. It was like that with Tony.

Shoemaker: I only met him once, at Porgy and Bess in Vienna, when he was part of a mini-festival of different ensembles led by Franz Koglmann. He had a very self-effacing sense of humor with just the right touch. At the time, there was some mention of him in The Wire or elsewhere of him playing on Beatles sessions, so I asked him about that. He said Paul McCartney told him that he didn’t like jazz players on the sessions because they never played something the same way twice. He then got into something of a groove telling really funny stories, none of which I remember. I’m sure you experienced this, as well.

Beresford: When he and Lol got together, there was a lot of talk about old jazzers they knew. Slightly dodgy jokes would be told. I wasn’t so much part of that because I was so much younger than them. I knew the names, but never knew them.

Shoemaker: I recently stumbled upon a connection between Tony and Lol and an older player, whose name I saw in one of Tony’s obits – Bruce Turner – who played in Humphrey Lyttelton’s band and with Lol on Before My Time.

Beresford: Bruce Turner was interesting. He studied with Lennie Tristano. He had a very oblique way of playing. He was a very interesting alto player. Tony replaced Bruce Turner in the Humphrey Lyttelton band. I know Lol was very fond of Bruce and did a couple of things for Nato with Bruce. I think Bruce liked the idea that his initials were BT like British Telecom. And he ate a lot of sweets, even though he was a vegetarian a long time before it was at all fashionable.

Shoemaker: Apart from The Melody Four, was session work the main situation where you worked with Tony?

Beresford: I would say so. There is quite a lot of Tony on the two albums of my film and tv things called Cue Sheets. If I could get Tony for a session, I’d get him, because he was great on clarinet as well as tenor, and he could play really good alto, and he was an amazing soprano player. And he could read and he could improvise. It was always a good idea to have Tony on a session. Vic Reeves, who’s a strange English comedian who put out one album called I Will Cure You – on Virgin, Island, I can’t remember – they asked me to do some tracks and they gave me a proper budget, so I put a very good band together, including Tony and Evan Parker. I had both Tony and Evan play sopranos on one track. I think Evan lent Tony his soprano and was taken aback by the enormous sound Tony got out of it – just sheer loudness. He had a huge sound on those horns, which could be quite startling.

Shoemaker: I have this stereotype of session players being compliant and capable of replicating a part take after take. So, Tony’s story about McCartney suggested a degree of intentionality on Tony’s part, because he could play the same thing the same way many, many times, which suggested he pushed thing at least occasionally in those settings.

Beresford: I think he always pushed things. One of the stories I heard – I never saw this – centered on that amazing record he did with Derek [Bailey], Time. More conventional jazz musicians would give Tony a hard time for playing with Derek, who they considered to be a charlatan or something. It made Tony very, very angry. Tony was a sort of a spiritual anarchist, really. You know the film A Canterbury Tale by [Michael] Powell and [Emeric] Pressburger? It had for me something about Tony in it somehow, because Canterbury is very beautiful. The countryside around it is very beautiful. But this is a strange movie, made just after the second World War, and involves Americans soldiers being billeted outside Canterbury, somebody pouring glue into a woman’s hair – completely mad – and a lot of lying in the grass outside Canterbury. Finally, the characters arrive at Canterbury Cathedral, which played a role in Tony’s life. I met George Coe, Tony’s dad, who was a bandleader, and the thing he was most proud of was Tony playing the Mozart clarinet concerto in the cathedral at the age of 11 or 12. He told me this with great pride, which was really lovely. And that he was asked to join the Duke Ellington orchestra and the Count Basie orchestra. He had a lot of things going for him.

Shoemaker: Did he pass up opportunities like those because of his refusal to travel by airplane?

Beresford: Well, that was later, I’m told. There was certainly a time when he would travel by air if the plane had props, if it wasn’t a jet. There was no logic behind it. The reason he didn’t play the last Pink Panther was because he didn’t want to fly to America. You can hear it instantly – it’s not Tony. By that time, he didn’t want to fly at all. In fact, New Music America – and this was a long time ago, when it was in New York – asked The Melody Four to play, and they even looked up how they could get Tony on a boat to New York and back. They very much wanted The Melody Four, but it would have taken weeks for him to get there and back. So, I did it with two other people. Had a fantastic time, actually. He definitely limited his work because he wouldn’t take an airplane.

Shoemaker: When was the last time you saw Tony play or met up with him?

Beresford: I met up with him after Lol passed, at one of the tribute concerts to Lol. One was at Cecil Sharp House. My brother’s ska band played there and Maggie Nicols sang some ballads. It was pretty great, but I couldn’t be here. I was out of the country. I still really wanted to do something, and Café Oto allowed us to do a night there. There was a lot of great music that night, but what I was really happy about was that I managed to get Ray Davies down for it. Ray was a huge fan of Lol’s. He didn’t play, but he read a section of his book that was about Lol. He read it beautifully. The other thing was that I got Tony there. He was living out New Cross way, further out. He brought his soprano and we did a Billy Strayhorn ballad that Duke Ellington plays at the end of … And His Mother Called Him Bill, “Lotus Blossom.” We segued from that into a really daft tune I wrote for The Melody Four, “Margaret du Monk” from The Marx Brothers album – a really ridiculous tune – because “Lotus Blossom” is too sad. We couldn’t end with that. He played them both with great enthusiasm. I’m not even sure he was still playing tenor by then, but he certainly wasn’t schlepping it.

He always complained about schlepping so many instruments around. He hated bringing his bass clarinet to a session, but I’d always say, it’s a session, Tony, we can pay for a taxi. He liked complaining. He complained that there should be a resident pencil in the live room. Really, why isn’t there a resident pencil? Dave Hunt’s studio is in White City, which is not very far from anywhere. Tony would say, Why is he living in Tibet? Why is the studio in Tibet? Yeah, he was fantastic. While we are on this point, did I tell you about the special glasses he got? He had opaque lensed glasses with lots of very small holes in them. He bought them because he said it made your eyesight better. They looked like something Sun Ra would have worn. Lol was very excited about this. They were very expensive. It was just plastic with holes in it. They were insanely overpriced. Lol decided he could make them with matzah biscuits, which have little holes in them. He wrapped them around a frame and used gaffer tape to secure them. So he made an equivalent of Tony’s special glasses with matzah biscuits and gaffer tape, which I thought was magnificent. They were very funny to hang around, and maddening some time. There would be situations where someone wanted to take a picture of all three of us. So, I’d be there and Lol would show up, and I would say, Lol, where’s Tony? And Lol would go off, and then Tony would show up, and we then couldn’t find Lol. It was like that all the time.

It was fantastic, musically and also in day-to-day things. It was very, very funny and very nice, as well.

Shoemaker: In the time we have left, could you talk about the recordings by Tony that you liked best, and why?

Beresford: I like Mainly Mancini. It’s a 10” on Chabada, with Chris Laurence and Tony Hymas. It’s unpretentious. I love what he plays on that.

Shoemaker: I think he makes the most persuasive case for Mancini the composer removed from all the trappings of Hollywood.

Beresford: I think you’re right. I think that’s why it’s nice that they did it as a trio without a drummer. Tony had a thing about drummers, as well. They were all too loud. I think there was only one drummer who was quiet enough for Tony. I like the gentleness of that record as well as its high level of creativity. Someone posted my song about Doris Day with Tony, who plays obligatos and a solo, which I hadn’t listened to in a long time. He plays amazingly on that. I just took it for granted that he would play something amazing. I didn’t even bother to think about it at the time, but he made that recording really extraordinary. He has this beautiful phrase he plays at the end. We had a drum machine on the track – it was really cheesy – and he comes in and makes something extraordinary out of the cheesiness. I really love how he plays on that record.

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Bill Shoemaker: I assume you first heard Tony on recordings. What were they, and how did you react to his playing? How soon thereafter did you first hear Tony in person?

Franz Koglmann: In 1970, there was an international jazz festival at the Wiener Konzerthaus in Vienna. I was a student at the newly founded Jazz Department of Vienna’s Conservatory and a member of the student Big Band, who had a concert during the festival. The Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland Big Band also performed. It included Art Farmer, Dusko Goykovich, Ronnie Ross, and Tony Coe. I never had heard about him, unlike Farmer who had moved to Vienna - because he had married here – so I could have heard him in a club every week. Coe was new for me: immediately I felt in love with his fluid, flexible, subliminal melancholy. He also sometimes had a rousing way of playing. In these times, my passion was French art of the 20th century and Tony Coe’s style reminded me of drawings by Henri Matisse. He had this distinguished elegance as a person as well as in his music. It was such a great experience for me having heard him. I did not dare dream that I would ever play with this Giant.

Shoemaker: When did you first enlist Tony for a project? Was it A White Line? Why did you initially think his approach would be compatible with your aims?

Koglmann: 14 years later, Ingrid Karl, my current partner and founder of Wiener Musik Galerie, organized a 3-day Company event with Derek Bailey at Palais Liechtenstein, a section of Museum of Modern Art at that time. I had researched a little on Tony Coe and found the LP Time with Bailey and Coe. Later I found out the Vienna connection of both guys: Bailey’s favorite composer was Anton Webern and Coe’s first choice was Alban Berg. The pianist Roger Kellaway, who recorded British American Blue with Tony, noted: Time sounds like clarinet player Berg with guitar player Webern. This LP was the reason we asked Derek to bring Tony with him to Vienna’s Company. Derek was not really amused about this idea – I didn’t know why – but it worked and so to my surprise I stood on the stage with this unbelievable tenor saxophonist and clarinetist Tony Coe whom I had first heard with Clarke/Boland. Now it was clear: Tony was not only a big band player, he was a free player too. He was conservative and progressive at the same time and he also was a composer/arranger. Besides the Company concerts, he was working on an arrangement for a British band while he was in Vienna – for bread and butter as he said.

Shoemaker: Over the next 20 years, Tony performs, by my count, on nine of your recordings. Initially, he was a “guest artist” and then became a member of Monoblue Quartet and performed in various small groups and large ensembles. Can you talk about the evolution of your collaboration and why you think it lasted so long?

Koglmann: Yes, I asked Tony to be a part of my productions. He was interested, and I think it started with A White Line, where I had arranged for him the clarinet piece “For Max” (originally it was for a violin player named Max), which he liked very much because the line went a little in direction of Alban Berg. From Sudwest-Funk in Germany, I received the commission to premier two sets of music at the new music festival in Donaueschingen 1990. I did it with my 15-piece Pipetet, and Tony as a part of it. It was released as The Use of Memory on Hat Hut One year before, [Hat Hut’s] Werner Uehlinger invited me to a Yves Klein exhibition in Basel. Klein’s famous Blue Monochrome inspired me to write a Quartet piece as a part of the Donaueschingen program. All four musicians of this quartet loved it so much that I created Monoblue Quartet out of the Pipetet, which performed and recorded for quite a long time – L’Heure Bleue and others. I think there were more than nine recordings. We did rather a lot of work with Lee Konitz – We Thought About Duke for instance. Tony was part of my first opera, Feat Death By Water, as well as the Ezra Pound cantata O Moon My Pin Up, with Phil Minton as Ezra Pound.

Shoemaker: There is a wealth of funny stories about Tony, his idiosyncrasies, and his sense of humor. Do you have any?

Koglmann: Travelling with Tony was a problem because he didn’t fly, therefore a Canadian tour with Lee Konitz we had to do without him. On the other hand, to sit in a tour bus with Tony could be very interesting. For example, he worked on a film score and asked me “in this scene some houses are breaking down, what would you write for it?” Tony was a vegetarian, but in a special way, he didn’t eat mammals – only duck, goose and fish. And he loved Austrian wines. When we had been in London, he brought me special beers in his favorite pubs. An interesting point for me was that he loved Stan Getz but he hated Gerry Mulligan. One day I took my arrangement of Mulligan’s “Swing House” to a rehearsal. This was the only time Tony refused to play a tune I brought – but he played it very well.

In 1999, we had the so-called Strauss Year in Vienna because of Johann Strauss had died 100 years ago. So I received a commission to write and perform a Strauss and Vienna related program. I spoke with Tony about it, and he told me a funny story. During Clarke/Boland staying in Vienna 1970, he and Ronnie Ross strolled through nocturnal Vienna singing an old English pop song, “Good Night Vienna.” I had never heard this song. I asked Tony to arrange this piece for our up-coming production, which he did. To my surprise, he wrote a voice line for himself, and he sang the song on An Affair With Strauss.

Shoemaker: When was the last time you played with Tony?

Koglmann: For my 70th birthday, Vienna’s Jazz Club Porgy & Bess organized a three-day Koglmann Festival in 2017. Of course, Tony was a part of it. But he only came with his soprano saxophone. His instruments became smaller over the time. After playing tenor saxophone a long time, he changed to alto saxophone for Lo-lee-ta in 2009, and 2017 there was only a soprano saxophone. He played it very well of course. But there was a sad moment. From about 2010 he often said he was loosing his inspiration, but I couldn’t hear it. For me it was the same quality as ever. We could not take away his fear. His playing didn’t please him anymore. Sorry to say we didn’t play anymore. We phoned sometimes, but our relation has changed a little – very hard for me to explain.

At his funeral on the 14th of April, I followed the church ceremony in Canterbury via the internet. On that evening, I organized a Tony Coe Memorial for us and friends who knew Tony personally, to listen to a lot of our records – his Viennese connection – and to have good wine and a lamb curry. Sorry Tony, there would have been nothing for you, you were vegetarian.

Shoemaker: Do have a favorite recording by Tony?

Koglmann: No, I love them all.

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