“I don’t rate myself,” asserts saxophonist Art Themen. “I’m just a jobbing musician who’s been very, very lucky.” It’s an astounding statement, for Themen, whose career began in the early 60s, is a luminary of British jazz. Live In Soho, his current CD with the Art Themen Organ Trio, which also features Pete Whittaker (organ) and George Double (drums), is reviewed here. “I wouldn’t say ‘What fantastic saxophone playing!’” says Themen of the album. “But we’ve been together seven years so [the album’s] the culmination of a fair bit of graft and touring and I think it’s appropriate that it’s getting reasonable reviews.”
Themen explains what he enjoys about the organ trio format. “There’s George and I not doing very much”, he jokes, “and then Pete who plays 10 notes at a time – and covers the bass as well! It’s life-enhancing being able to create a quartet sound with three people.” Themen doesn’t think of himself as the trio’s leader. “I am the titular head but George got it together and not only does he play fantastic drums but he does all the admin. He’s the leader, the driving force.” Double, who is sitting in on the interview, offers his insight into how the trio works. “Art usually suggests the tunes but if a chart needs to be written then Pete does it. He does all the MD bit.”
Themen’s solos on the album are scintillating. “You’re talking to someone who flies by the seat of his pants. It’s indefinable, it’s intuitive,” he says, when I ask about his soloing. “The rhythmical pattern is supplied by George, admirably, the harmonic pattern is supplied by Pete, equally admirably, and I just tootle along in the middle. I can’t intellectualise it.”
Themen plays a stunning solo version of Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Lady on the album. “If you play for long enough you develop a sound and the rest is just building bricks that have been added to over the years,” says Themen with characteristic self-effacement. “I wish I could eventually end up with the Taj Mahal – but so far I’ve only got a sort of 1935 English semi-detached!”
‘You can’t replicate in modern jazz the feeling of the last chorus of a trad band when they pull out the stops and it takes off and they levitate!’
Themen, who in his teens played clarinet before switching to sax, reflects on his influences: “When I started, my big hero was Monty Sunshine, who played clarinet in Chris Barber’s Jazz Band. I used to copy his Bobby Shafto solo even down to the mistake! And then – no disrespect to Monty, who was a very good trad clarinet player – I moved on to the greats like Edmond Hall. I wouldn’t say there was any one stage where there was an epiphany but you hear Dexter Gordon for the first time and ‘I’ll try a bit of that,’ and then Sonny Rollins…”
Themen actually met Rollins. “Ah, namedrop opportunity!” he laughs. “I was in Stan Tracey’s Quartet in Bombay and Sonny Rollins was on the bill and I met him. Two years later I went to see him play in London and went backstage. And he opened the dressing room door, and this man who was my absolute idol said ‘Hello, Art.’ And my heart stopped. That he remembered the name of some insignificant sideman after two years… I’m welling up now, actually.”
Nonetheless, Themen never lost his admiration for his earlier hero. “You can’t replicate in modern jazz the feeling of the last chorus of a trad band when they pull out the stops and it takes off and they levitate! Monty Sunshine can do that. And it still affects me equally as anything that Sonny Rollins did.”
In the 60s Themen gigged with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated. “The band played a bit of blues but it was [more like] Charlie Mingus, with strange bedfellows like [saxophonist] Dick Heckstall-Smith and [drummer] Phil Seamen, who was a big junkie and a loose cannon. And strange people like Graham Bond.
“Alexis was not technically a great guitar player but he could really play the blues and he had a gruff voice and he was a great leader.”
‘There’s this indefinable star quality that some people have, that Jagger had, but Long John didn’t. Although I don’t think I really recognised it in Rod Stewart’
Young wannabes like Mick Jagger followed Alexis’s band hoping to be allowed to sit in and Themen subsequently played with another future rock star, Rod Stewart, in Long John Baldry and The Hoochie Coochie Men. “Long John was great. But there’s this indefinable star quality that some people have, that Jagger had, but Long John didn’t. Although I don’t think I really recognised it in Rod Stewart.”
Themen is respectful of musicians like Jagger and Stewart who subsequently made their fortunes playing commercial music. “You can’t knock different sorts of music. We’re all here to try and do what we do. But I wouldn’t be interested in being a backing musician for Adele. I don’t know much about her music but it’s not what I do. I couldn’t do it.”
One of Themen’s great partnerships has been with Stan Tracey, in many of whose bands he played. “Stan was introverted. But there was an indefinable ‘I know where I’m going’ about him. And as soon as he sat at the piano there was a kind of authority. He had a way about him, doubtless helped by his wife Jackie. She was an A&R person and knew how to get on. I think that partly defines Stan’s success: as well as his musicality there was a great business brain behind him.”
Of Stan Tracey’s Tentacles band: ‘At one gig Stan played God Save The Queen through the entire last set – and nobody noticed!”
Themen played in Tracey’s 1973 avant-garde band Tentacles. “It was a time when Stan was experimenting. There were 10 people and it was mayhem. From the first crotchet to the last crotchet it was like a zoo burning down. And [at one] gig Stan played God Save The Queen through the entire last set – and nobody noticed!”
Did Themen himself not notice? “No, because there was so much going on – the saxophonist next to me who shall be nameless was wittering away at a thousand miles an hour and I was thinking ‘This isn’t quite Edmond Hall, it’s not what I was sent on this earth to do. There’s got to be something a bit more accessible.’”
Famously, Themen combined his musical career with a career as a consultant orthopaedic surgeon until his retirement from medicine in the noughties. But if playing jazz had been as lucrative as surgery would he have given up the operating theatre and become a full-time player? “The money had nothing to do with it. OK, I’ve got a healthy NHS pension and all that, but – I’m getting all emotional now – I really loved both jobs. At aged 18 the thought was I could become a professional musician but I knew I wanted to do surgery. It wasn’t a burning desire to do good and cure the world, although there was a bit of that. What interested me was the use of my hands and I was driven to do operative surgery.”
Could he have been an even greater musician if he had been a full-time pro? “Technically I would have been better but I don’t think my playing would have been that much different,” he muses.
During Themen’s early career in particular, various of his bandmates, like Phil Seamen, destroyed themselves with hard drugs and pretty well all of the others were surely at least recreational dope smokers. As a doctor, did he ever point out to his more self-destructive colleagues the risks they were taking? Or, indeed, was he ever tempted to join in the fun and get high with the dope smokers?
“My only venture into drugs was when I was 21. I’d had a gig in Manchester and had to drive back to London and I remember taking half an amphetamine tablet. But that was it. I was never tempted – because you couldn’t get busted.” He was, presumably, alluding to the consequences for his medical career. “Did I ever lecture them about what they were doing to themselves? No. You can’t.
‘The most horrible story is Phil Seamen. Half way down the M1 he was writhing in agony with a boil on the back of his wrist and I opened the boil on the hard shoulder with a razor blade’
“The most horrible story is Phil Seamen. Half way down the M1 he was writhing in agony with a boil on the back of his wrist and I opened the boil on the hard shoulder with a razor blade. But even then I couldn’t say ‘Phil, you’re destroying yourself.’ You can’t preach. But I sometimes hint about alcohol to people who I think are drinking too much because it inevitably affects your playing. I’ve been known to say ‘Take it easy, because I don’t think you played as well as you should have done last night.’”
Late in their lives Themen toured with both pianist Al Haig and trumpeter Red Rodney, who had played with Charlie Parker. “You realised you were fortunate to be playing close to God!” he says of the experience. “I’d sometimes divorce myself from my body and look from above and think ‘What the hell are you doing with these people who are in the pantheon of the greats?’”
Well-attested stories abound of Haig being a domestic abuser and some have even accused him of having murdered his wife, Bonnie, who died suspiciously in 1968. “One did hear the stories. He stayed with me and I wouldn’t say I locked my bedroom door when he was in my house but he was a complicated, introverted chap. But a fantastic player.
“Red Rodney was different. He was very outward-going but I’m not sure how successful he was in later life. I think hanging on to the coat-tails of Charlie Parker is quite a tricky thing to have done as you get older.”
During the pandemic Themen played on his doorstep for his neighbours for 15 minutes every evening. “I would give them five minutes of jazz – a bit of Ellington, like In A Mellotone; then I’d perhaps jazz up a Beatles tune, like Here, There And Everywhere, so I got to know a bit of the Beatles’ canon which is no bad thing; then there’d possibly be some jokey thing – on VE Day I played Dam Busters March.”
Last year Themen featured with synth player Greg Foate on the atmospheric Off-Piste. “As a jobbing musician you make the most of what’s offered. And that was something quite different. He plays a figure and then you improvise on that. It’s very free. It’s not my repertoire, I’m more mainstream, but I think he’s got something and I hope he continues to hire me.”
Themen is now 85. How does he survive the terrible grind of playing one-night stands? “It’s not a terrible grind,” he insists. “I quite like driving and I use my time profitably, listening to music or languages – I wouldn’t say I’m a linguist but languages interest me and I’m not bad at French and I’ve a bit of Spanish.”
Themen reflects on how his playing has evolved. “I’m getting slower. I’m not so rapid-fire anymore. Maybe I’m just an old fogey now. But I think it’s not a failing of the body but a realisation that it’s not all about playing funny notes and playing them very fast. So I’m perhaps a little bit more romantic now. But I still love playing. And I’m busier now than I’ve ever been.”
