Courtney Pine, the saxophonist who took British jazz into the charts and onto a Stones single

Courtney Pine

Photo: Richard Kaby / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 18, 1964 Greater London
Occupation	Clarinetist
Awards	Commander of the Order of the British Empire

This autumn Courtney Pine has been doing two things that pull in opposite directions. He is touring a retrospective of the records that made him the face of a British jazz revival, and he has played the saxophone solo on a new Rolling Stones single. Asked about Mick Jagger on BBC Radio 3, he praised him and then said the plain thing: “That whole pop world is completely different to anything that I know.” It is a modest line from a man who once put a jazz album into the UK pop chart and has been asked ever since which side of that line he stands on.

The story starts in north-west London on 18 March 1964, in a household of Jamaican immigrants: his father was a carpenter, his mother a housing manager, and the boy wanted to be an astronaut. The family lived in the Avenues area of Kensal Green before moving to Wembley, where at Kingsbury High School he studied classical clarinet. The saxophone he taught himself, from the age of 14.

His first paid work was in reggae. In 1981 he toured with the duo Clint Eastwood & General Saint, and he played in Britfunk bands while trying to find a way into jazz, which in early-1980s London was not a welcoming room. In the BBC documentary Jazz Britannia he remembered the reaction to his playing: “I would add different notes in the scale the way Sonny Rollins did and people would say, ‘No man, we don’t want that.’ They were saying to me, ‘If you’re black and you want to play jazz in this country, you’d better go and live somewhere else!’”

Pine answered by building the room himself. In 1985, through the community organisation The Abibi Jazz Arts, he founded the Jazz Warriors, a big band of young black British players that grew out of a community group playing the foyer of the Royal Festival Hall. In the same period he was guesting with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and sitting in the saxophone section of the big band that Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones drummer, took on the road in the mid-1980s.

Island Records signed him, and Journey to the Urge Within, recorded at Angel Studios in north London and produced by Michael Cuscuna and Roy Carter, reached No. 39 on the UK albums chart in October 1986, in the same listing as Miles Davis’s Tutu. A jazz debut by a 22-year-old Londoner in the Top 40 was the kind of event that gets called a revival, and that is the name it kept. The Jazz Warriors followed with Out of Many, One People on Island’s Antilles imprint in 1987. Pine crossed into pop as a guest on Mica Paris’s Like Dreamers Do, a UK No. 26 hit, and turned up as himself, playing in a jazz quartet, in the 1988 Doctor Who serial Silver Nemesis.

The revival narrative is tidier than the career. The 1986 chart entry is usually told as a door opening for British jazz; for Pine it opened onto a decade of side doors. By 1989 he was on stage at Wembley Arena with the Pet Shop Boys, playing the closing saxophone part on their single Nothing Has Been Proved, and through the 1990s he stopped asking jazz for permission. Modern Day Jazz Stories made the 1996 Mercury Prize shortlist beside Oasis and Pulp; Underground and Back in the Day brought in hip hop, drum and bass and UK garage, and Lady Day (& John Coltrane) put the soul singer Lynden David Hall on Gil Scott-Heron’s song about two jazz saints. The cost shows in how he is still introduced, as the young man who charted in 1986, a label that flattens the restless records that came after it. Heard now, those records sound like a musician scoring the London he actually lived in.

Recognition arrived in a form the industry could file. He won Best Jazz Act at the first MOBO Awards in 1996, his band took Best Band at the first BBC Jazz Awards, and he was made an OBE in 2000 and a CBE in the 2009 New Year Honours for services to jazz. He presented Jazz Crusade on BBC Radio 2, a show whose seventh series aired in 2007, launched his own label, Destin-E Records, and in 2007 revived the Jazz Warriors for Afropeans, an Arts Council commission marking the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act.

The later records quietly reverse the 1990s. Transition in Tradition, in 2009, was a homage to Sidney Bechet. On Europa, in 2011, he plays almost nothing but bass clarinet, and House of Legends turned to Caribbean forms and calypso. He recorded Song (The Ballad Book) in 2015 as a duo with the pianist Zoe Rahman, then returned to the tenor for Black Notes from the Deep in 2017, a soul-jazz record with the singer Omar. Spirituality, his 2022 reunion with Rahman, set his bass clarinet against piano and a string quartet on standards such as Smile and Blue Moon.

This year has been about the archive. Out of the Ghetto: A Modern-Day Jazz Story, released by UMC in April, gathers his years from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s across two CDs: the first compiled by the BBC jazz critic Kevin Le Gendre, the second chosen by Pine himself. It includes three recordings from May 1986, made before the debut and unreleased until now: Sophisticated Lady, Guidance and Song for Our Children. The live show built around it has played Ronnie Scott’s and Cheltenham Jazz Festival and reaches the Cork Jazz Festival on 25 October. The compilation stops before the bass-clarinet records, which leaves the most personal part of his catalogue outside its own retrospective.

The Stones session closed a loop that began in Charlie Watts’s big band. On Private Passions, broadcast on 11 October, Pine revealed that he had “just done another session a couple of weeks ago” with Jagger for the band, and recalled being asked to fly to Los Angeles at a day’s notice in 1993 to play on a second version of Jagger’s solo album Wandering Spirit, after the first had been thrown away: “Mick Jagger? Of course!” The result surfaced on 20 October as Who You Callin’ Crazy, with Pine’s horn taking the solo on a record built around guitars.

Pine lives in London with his wife and their four children. The song previews Foreign Tongues, Loose Lips, the expanded edition of the Stones’ latest album, due on 27 November, and it puts a 62-year-old jazz musician in front of a larger audience than his own retrospective can reach. Whether that audience follows the solo back to Journey to the Urge Within is the question his career has been posing since 1986.

Selected Discography

• Journey to the Urge Within (1986)
• Destiny's Song & The Image of Pursuance (1988)
• Closer to Home (1990)
• To the Eyes of Creation (1992)
• Modern Day Jazz Stories (1995)
• Devotion (2003)
• Transition in Tradition (En hommage á Sidney Bechet) (2009)
• Europa (2011)
• House of Legends (2012)
• Song (The Ballad Book) (2015)
• Black Notes From the Deep (2017)
• Spirituality (2022)

Tags: singers, jazz, The Rolling Stones, Courtney Pine, Jazz Warriors, Journey to the Urge Within

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