Stan tickles the ivories

Sep 19 2008 Jazz by Alan Cross

PIANIST Stan Tracey, who performs at Birmingham’s CBSO Centre tomorrow is an outstanding figure in the jazz world. His distinguished career has spanned six decades of flourishing creativity.

He has been a highly influential and stimulating musical voice to each successive generation of musicians with whom he has worked.

He was one of the original pioneer British musicians who took UK jazz to the USA in the 1950s, a move which enabled the great Americans to tour Britain in an exchange policy brokered by the Musicians Union.

He then spent many years as resident pianist at Ronnie Scott’s club.

Having celebrated his 80th birthday in 2006 he could be excused for winding down alongside old friends and playing the music in his vast back catalogue which stretches back to his first recording in 1951 with a 16-year-old Tubby Hayes and embraces almost all modern jazz genres and musicians.

That, however, is not the way of Stan Tracey who brings to Birmingham his latest project, Hexad, the title of an album he recorded in the 1980s featuring a line-up of some of the best young musicians around to breathe fresh life into his original compositions.

His recent award of the CBE is a fitting reflection on the huge contribution he has made to the British jazz scene over the last 60 years as pianist, composer, bandleader and source of inspiration to generations of musicians. Tomorrow’s concert at the Berkley Street venue is an opportunity to see one of the greatest ever British jazz musicians in action.