AS I listened to Art Themen, the octogenarian tenor and soprano saxophonist with his organ trio in the warm basement of Soho's Pizza Express, I marvelled that here was a man who is a lifetime musician, but also spent his working life as an NHS orthopaedic surgeon. Two lives! “I love them both — the surgery and the music!” he exclaims. “They grew together in me, almost subconsciously. I express them both as I'm playing. If I lived my life over again, I wouldn’t change a thing!”

Born in Oldham in 1939, his mother was the daughter of an Irish lodging house keeper, and his father an immigrant doctor from Surinam. “My father died when I was four, and we had very little money. We lived over a fish and chip shop in Salford. My council school headteacher saw something in me, and managed to get me into Manchester Grammar School.”

An aunt had given him tin whistles as a child, then he learned the recorder, and then the clarinet at school, and eventually tenor sax. “I loved traditional jazz and was inspired by clarinetist Monty Sunshine playing ‘Bobby Shaftoe’ with Chris Barber’s band.” 

He studied Medicine at Cambridge from 1958, carried on with his music with the university’s jazz band, and learned more modern sounds listening to records of Sonny Rollins and Dexter Gordon, and hearing John Coltrane playing with Dizzy Gillespie at a concert in the Gaumont State, Kilburn. “I was learning from the masters in a form of educational plagiarism.”

In 1964 he qualified as a surgeon, and also found himself playing with Alexis Korner and Jack Bruce in Blues Incorporated. It seemed that every step he took in medicine, he took another in music. By 1968 he was a recognised studio session musician, playing on Joe Cocker’s No. 1 hit, With A Little Help From My Friends. In 1974 he began a two-decade musical relationship with pianist Stan Tracey, after playing with prime British maestros Ian Carr, Graham Collier and Michael Garrick.

“Stan was the source, the real thing. Playing with him was an amazing experience. I loved the camaraderie I found with fellow musicians like Barbadian trumpeter Harry Beckett and Jamaican bassist Coleridge Goode. All the British Council tours to Hong Kong, Beirut, Australia — on the same bill with brilliant Americans like McCoy Tyner in Melbourne or Stanley Turrentine in New York. It was all like a jazz family. I loved it!”

But how had he managed his time, also working as a surgeon in a distict general hospital? “I had wonderful, understanding colleagues. We swapped shifts and I worked by day, not often at nights and I paid them all back with my time. And as a musician I wasn’t a composer, arranger or bandleader, so all my musical time was spent playing. I was a sideman for 50 years. Playing at nights, then in the mornings I was ready to work expeditiously on my operations.”

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His organ trio album, Live in Soho, was recorded at the Pizza Express with organist Pete Whittaker and drummer George Double. “Pete swings, he’s sensitive — a wonderful player, so strong, uniting the bass with the keyboard. George is the real bandleader. I’m just titular! He’s a human dynamo and very versatile. He’s resurrected me!”

The album has some beautiful tracks. Abdullah Ibrahim’s African Market Place and Keith Jarrett’s Country are jewels, and exemplify Art’s eclecticism, along with Horace Silver’s Cape Verdean Blues and Zoot Sims’ Brahms.... I Think. Another tune the trio played live and very movingly was Ballad of the Sad Young Men. When I told Art that as a lifelong school teacher it brought to mind the loss and grief of the families of predominantly black working-class young victims of knife crime, he told me: “I’m touched by your interpretation. As we played it, the venue was silent, respectful, and I wondered what the listeners were thinking.”

I asked him, as a fellow octogenarian, did playing his saxophone with such optimism and energy keep him keeping on, now in his mid-80s? “It’s profoundly important to be doing what you love doing at any time of life,” he replied in a warm bedside manner. “As for me, it’s great to be here, but then it’s great to be anywhere at my age!”
   
Live in Soho is released by Ubuntu Records