“With Tony there was no dividing line between any genre of music. He loved jazz, he loved the classics. He proved in The Buds of Time that the twain could always meet.”

These words, about the unique artistry of saxophonist, clarinetist and composer, Canterbury-born Tony Coe (1934-2023), are those of his longtime bandmate Chris Laurence — himself an eminent jazz and classical music bassist, who played with Coe on the 1979 recording of The Buds of Time (co-written by Robert Cornford who had been taught by Vaughan Williams and collaborated with Benjamin Britten), now at last released on the Jazz in Britain label.

Coe was an astonishingly protean musician who had been a featured soloist with post-war British jazz maestros like Johnny Dankworth and Humphrey Lyttelton, played in the Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland Orchestra, and blew the tenor sax theme melody of Henry Mancini’s The Pink Panther.

Laurence remembers Coe playing snatches of Debussy and Ravel on his clarinet as they drove between gigs in Germany. “He was fanatical about the clarinet and would only
play clarinets made of boxwood. He was always experimenting and drilled extra holes in them and drove the repairers mad!”

The Buds of Time features his brilliant improvising clarinet in a seven-piece ensemble. “It’s a prime example of mixing and blending jazz and the classics,” said Laurence. “With Tony and Bob Cornford it seemed like an easy fit. It worked a treat.”

With The Buds’ theme of growth and potential its sound radiates the future: “Listening to it now, it’s full of optimism, like a gradual, developing growth — you can see and feel the buds eventually blossoming, becoming flowers, coming to fruition, lifting people up. That was how Tony saw music.”

Laurence also played on a startling Coe album of 1990, Les Voix d’Itxassou, named after a Basque village in the French Pyrenees, one of the true glories of internationalist jazz. Coe brought together outstanding instrumentalists like Australian altoist Ray Warleigh, British trombonist Malcolm Griffiths and Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure with singers Dominic Behan, Maggie Bell and Marianne Faithfull, along with Aura Msang-Lewis and Violeta Ferrer to perform songs of freedom from Palestine, the Spanish civil war, South Africa, the Irish struggle and Cuba; to sing Bella Ciao, Nkosi Sikelel’i Afrika, The Patriot Game, Hasta Siempre Comandante, Wounded Knee and Buenaventuri Durruti: it was like the whole struggling world on one single record.

Coe’s orchestrations, the soloists’ eloquence and the singers’ multilingual words are beautifully and cogently wrapped in cosmopolitanism and freedom, very close to the spirit of the Charlie Haden/Carla Bley albums of the Liberation Music Orchestra.

Laurence remembers Coe telling him: “Music frees people! I want people to be free!” He said that Coe had rented a flat in Paris, near the Bastille, and the album’s opening and closing tune is a song of the Paris Commune, Le Temps des Cerises. For Laurence, making the recording in the now demolished London Lansdowne studios was “exciting and beautiful. Anything Tony did had meaning. He found the right musicians to play and sing together all through the album.”

Laurence remembered well Buenaventura Durruti when I asked him about particular tracks. “Beautiful, it’s beautiful! Full of excitement!” he exclaimed.

And what was his summation of Coe’s artistry?

“As a musician he was a total individual, a one-off. A great saxophonist, of course, but on clarinet he was a master, the greatest clarinetist I ever played with. He was never a clone of anyone. He only had to play a few notes and almost straight away you recognised his sound, you knew for certain it was him. He had all the musical skills while being free as a bird.”

The Buds Of Time is released by Jazz in Britain Records