PROFILES

Sir John Dankworth plays his saxophone at Buckingham Palace, London, Thursday, March 2, 2006, after receiving a knighthood from the Queen British bandleader(THE ASSOCIATED PRESS/Andrew Parsons, Pool)

Sir John Dankworth

The gifted British Saxophonist, Jazz musician, composer and Band Leader (1927-2010)
 

By The Ambassadors Research Staff
 

 

 

 

 

Few musicians are awarded the honours and accolades that have been bestowed on John Dankworth. Born in Woodford, England, Dankworth played the violin as a child and went to the Royal Academy for Music to study the clarinet. However, his true passion and talent flourished when he took on the saxophone. He did so upon hearing Charlie Parker's Cherokee on the BBC which resonated with him. In 1945, at 17 years of age, he led a quartet that won the Northwest London Melodymaker Contest. Compared to most British Jazz musicians of his generation, he was the only one to have received a formal education. Three years later, he became a founding member of the London boppers' rather down-at-heel tribute to a New York jazz club, the Soho basement they called Club Eleven.

By 1949, Dankwork had played alongside Mr. Parker at the Paris Jazz Festival and in the following year became an acknowledged campaigner for a Beepop-influenced modern jazz group in Britain. As a new decade began, he created an influential band, and as he became more and more renowned, he joined that exclusive group of jazz musicians.

In 1958, the film director Karel Reisz hired Dankworth to write his first film score for We are the Lambeth Boys following which he provided memorable jazz scores for movies including Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Darlings (1965). By then, he was the most celebrated jazz musician in Britain and was also appointed Musical Director for the British visits of Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Oscar Peterson.

In 1958 he married jazz vocalist Cleo Laine. From 1970 onwards, he became the popular vocalists' musical director

The London Philharmonic Society commissioned him to write Improvisations for Jazz Band and Symphony Orchestra, and the National Theater requested a score for its production of Marlowe's Edward II. In the 1960s he wrote such TV series as The Avengers and Tomorrow's World

To watch a clip of Dankworth and Cleo Laine performing "Oh Lady Be Good" in 1965, click here.

By the mid-1970s, Dankworth had an incredible reputation and became a revered figure in the British and international jazz scenes. In 1973, he was presented with the fellowship of the Royal Academy and the following year was appointed CBE.

His achievements and innovations in music as well as his unique ability to please audiences were awarded the highest honour for a civilian in the United Kingdom. In 2006, Dankworth was Knighted, the first British Jazz Musician to receive this honour in Buckingham Palace from Queen Elizabeth II. 

He not only loved jazz passionately but believed it could play a major role in the evolution of music in the world. In his 1998 autobiography Jazz In Revolution, he argued that the position of music had become an ideal one.

In 2007, as part of celebrations for their 80s birthdays he performed with his wife their famous Shakespeare and all that jazz  program for the BBC Proms at Sir Albert Hall. He jammed on the saxophone until 3 am on his birthday that year. As saxophonist, clarinetist, band leader, arranger and composer he devoted much of his career to putting jazz and classical music on the same stage. He once opined that symphonies were the great novel of Western music and jazz was the journalism; the one embracing the spirit of an era, and the other catching its intense and characteristic moments on the wing. But he never lost his sense of jazz's uniqueness and it improvisational spirit. His book Jazz today he says jazz "can be spiritual, cerebral, motivating or moving. He can evoke tension, relaxation, tears. Surely jazz is the music of the era, combining stature dignity and emotion with the highest musical ideals." Like Ronnie Scott he initially made his reputation as a sax soloist of a confidence, early maturity and distinctive of a sound rare in the 1950s. One could say with confidence that Dankworth put British jazz on the map at a time when the scene was overwhelmed by deference to the American pioneers. His ability to break through into the elite class of innovators and heavyweights in jazz during the genre's most formative period signals the mark of a genius.