50 YEARS ago I was living in Blackwall, east London and teaching in the local comprehensive school. Our street was a part of the Aberfeldy Estate, where all the streets and council blocks had Scottish names: Oban, Portree, Nairn, Currie. The local pub was the Aberfeldy and the primary school down the road was named … Culloden.

I remember thinking then, how could such a cursed name, signifying such atrocious English royalist slaughter and no-quarter-given bloodshed of April 1746, ordered directly by the King’s son, the Duke of Cumberland, be attached to a school? 

Strange how now, in 2024, such ancestral voices call out from the heartsblood of the tenor saxophone sound of the late Glaswegian, Bobby Wellins (1936-2016) from his Culloden Moor Suite, first recorded in 1979, duetting with the Portsmouth-born, insurgent soprano saxophonist Lol Coxhill (1932-2012), accompanied by the blind Newcastle pianist Pete Jacobsen (1950-2002), bassist Adrian Kendon, Spike Wells on drumset, and Bryan Spring on military percussion.

Wellins’s haunting introduction begins Gathering, the First Movement, while Jacobsen’s rolling keys move into March, with the Wellins and Coxhill horns palavering. The Battle interactions are expressed starkly, with Spring’s martial snares and Kendon’s bass ascending and descending menacingly. The final episode, Aftermath, is solemn, almost hymnal, as Jacobsen’s ice-cold notes accompany the horns locked in mourning for the slain, and Wellins’s final coda holds fast in listeners’ memories.

I asked Kendon, now 81, how he first came to play with Wellins. The son of a poet and a Froebel schoolteacher, he had begun on tea chest bass in skiffle days and trumpet. He went to university in Brighton, where he became involved in the jazz scene and established a club where Spike Wells would often play. He heard that Wellins was living nearby in Bognor Regis, recovering from drug addiction and working in a refrigerator factory.

“When Bobby came to play with us it was soon obvious he was in a different league,” he told me. “One day I called Spike and told him that Bobby would guest with us, bringing with him a pianist, Pete Jacobsen. So that was how our quartet came together.

“Our first album was cut by a friend who operated a recording machine; the second was made in a studio in Eltham. The Culloden Moor Suite was introduced to us by Bobby as a project for an Arts Council tour, with Bobby proposing that we create a sextet with the addition of Lol Coxhill on soprano sax and Bryan Spring on Scottish snare drum which he was very skilled at playing — and also the madingum, a west African hand drum.

“Bobby told us about the battle and later I went to visit the site when I went on holiday to Scotland. He made us aware of the brutal nature of English colonialism, which he was also trying to tell us through the suite.

“Its central part was Pete’s improvised piano solo segment. Being blind from birth he was extremely sensitive to sound. I remember a gig in Basildon where there was a fruit machine at the back of the hall and somebody started playing it while we were playing. Pete immediately incorporated its sounds into his solo, much to our amusement.”

What about the two drummers? “Bryan was extremely talented, a fairly eccentric individual who practised his snares insistently with a pair of sticks, on his knees or on a table. Spike is a wonderful and thoroughly musical drummer with a prime sense of time, always listening to his fellow musicians, providing the complementary conversational response to what everyone in the band is doing. I’ve never heard or played with a better drummer.”

The Homage to Caledonia album, although centred around the Culloden suite, begins and ends with other powerful tracks, with the reed partnership of Bobby and the maverick Lol, playing with real comradeship and aplomb.

Right after the suite and changing the mood completely is Dizzy’s Blues, full of the saxophone pair’s exultation of improvised sound and scintillating duetting. It is a finale of joyous relief for all members. The album is a brilliant “find” by Jazz in Britain and a prime example of how jazz can be the chronicler of sustained and truly eloquent history.

Homage to Caledonia by the Bobby Wellins Sextet, Live 1979 is released by Jazz in Britain Records