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Dick Morrissey

Dick Morrissey
Background information
Birth name Richard Edwin Morrissey
Born May 9, 1940
Died November 8, 2000
Genre(s) Hard bop, jazz-rock, fusion
Occupation(s) Musician and composer
Years active c. 1960 - 2000
Label(s) Various
Associated
acts		 The Dick Morrissey Quartet, If, Morrissey Mullen

Richard Edwin "Dick" Morrissey (May 9, 1940, Horley, Surrey - November 8, 2000, Deal, Kent) was a British jazz musician and composer. He played tenor sax, soprano sax and flute.

Contents

  • 1 Background
  • 2 If
  • 3 Morrissey-Mullen
  • 4 Other collaborations
  • 5 The Yessirrom Kid - a horn player with a mission
  • 6 Death
  • 7 Selected discography
  • 8 Sources
  • 9 External links

Background

Dick Morrissey emerged in the early 1960s in the wake of Tubby Hayes, Britain’s pre-eminent sax player at the time. He recorded his first solo album at the age of 21, It’s Morrissey, Man! (1961, Fontana), which featured Stan Jones on piano, Colin Barnes on drums, and Malcolm Cecil on bass. He spent most of 1962 in Calcutta, India as part of the Ashley Kozac Quartet, playing three 2-hour sessions seven days a week, before returning to the UK and forming his quartet with Harry South - who had also been in the quartet in Calcutta - on piano, Phil Seamen on drums and Phil Bates on bass. The Dick Morrissey Quartet recorded three LPs, Have You Heard? (1963); the live recording Storm Warning! (1965, Mercury); and Here and Now and Sounding Good (1966), with Bill Eyden on drums. The band, which also featured Jackie Dougan on drums, played regular London gigs at the Bull's Head, Barnes and at Ronnie Scott's, whose manager Pete King once said that Ronnie's was kept going in those days due to the crowds Dick Morrissey pulled in.

He also played briefly in Ted Heath's Big Band, which featured many name jazz musicians over the years, as well as with Johnny Dankworth and his Orchestra and the Harry South Big Band. Likewise, together with fellow tenors Stan Robinson and Al Gay, baritone sax Paul Carroll, and trumpets Mike Carr, Kenny Wheeler and Greg Brown, Dick Morrissey formed part of (Eric Burdon and) The Animals' Big Band that made its one-and-only public appearance at the 5th Annual British Jazz & Blues Festival in Richmond (1965).

Many US musicians touring Britain at the time, notably Brother Jack McDuff, Jimmy Witherspoon (live recording), J.J. Jackson (2 LPs), and Sonny Stitt together with guitarist Ernest Ranglin (live) recorded with him during the Sixties and early Seventies.

Dick Morrissey performed regularly at the National Jazz Festival in the 1960s; his last appearance under his own name was at the 6th festival held at Windsor (1967), although he would return to the festival with if in 1972 for their only appearance.

If

In 1969, Dick Morrissey, by then many-time winner and runner-up of the Melody Maker Jazz Poll, teamed up with another Melody Maker award-winner, guitarist Terry Smith, with whom he had worked in J.J. Jackson’s Band, to form an early jazz-rock group, if.

Encouraged by the success of the then recently-formed US bands Blood, Sweat and Tears and Chicago, both of which featured heavy brass sections, the time seemed right for them. Although the original band consisted of a different line up, if's first five records featured J.W. Hodkinson on lead vocals, John Mealing on keyboards, Jim Richardson on electric bass, Dennis Eliott on drums, Dave Quincy on alto and tenor saxes, Terry Smith on guitars and Dick Morrissey on tenor, soprano saxes and flute.

Essentially a live band, and true to its jazz influences, if was the only jazz-rock group, both then and now, to feature solos by all the band members, not just by the lead instruments. They recorded five albums under the above line up plus another two albums featuring Geoff Whitehorn on guitar and vocals, Gabriel Magno on keyboards and Walt Monaghan on bass and vocals, Cliff Davies on drums and Dick Morrissey. For full line-ups see under if.

Morrissey-Mullen

When if disbanded in 1975, Dick Morrissey went to Germany on a tour with Alexis Korner and then to the United States to tour and record with the Average White Band, and met up with Glaswegian guitarist, Jim Mullen, who had played with Brian Auger's Oblivion Express with some of the members of AWB, and together they formed Morrissey - Mullen (aka M&M), recording their first album, UP (1976) in New York. On returning to Great Britain, Morrissey - Mullen formed a band which rapidly became Britain’s most highly acclaimed jazz-fusion band of the day, initially including two top session musicians from New Zealand, Frank Gibson Jr. and Bruce Lynch.

M&M recorded seven albums over the 16 years they were together, with Morrissey and Mullen collaborating on each other’s solo albums, notably After Dark (1983) with John Critchinson, Ron Mathewson, Martin Drew, Barry Whitworth. The line-up for later gigs also featured John Burch on piano, with whom Dick Morrissey would also form an informal group called "Our Band".

During that period, Dick Morrissey also recorded Souliloquy (1986), featuring Max Middleton, Kuma Harada, Robert Ahwai (all three of whom had also appeared on Morrissey - Mullen's first UK-recorded album, Cape Wrath, in 1979), Steve Ferrone, Danny Cummings, Bob Weston and Lenny Zakatek.

Other collaborations

As well as leading his own jazz combos, Dick Morrissey was in continuous demand as a guest artist with other British jazz musicians, most especially with trios and quartets. Thus he often appeared with established British names such as Tubby Hayes, Roy Budd, Ian Hamer, Ian Carr, Tony Lee, Tony Archer, Michael Garrick, etc.

In between regular M&M gigs, Dick Morrissey would also meet up with old friends Ian "Stu" Stewart, Charlie Watts, Alexis Korner, Jack Bruce, Colin Hodgkinson, Don Weller, Zoot Money, John Picard and Colin Smith, to play boogie-woogie/jazz/rock with the back-to-the-roots fun band, Rocket 88, that Stu Stewart put together with Bob Hall.

Apart from the early recordings with visiting US performers mentioned above, Dick Morrissey also toured and/or recorded with Charly Antolini, Alexis Korner (several albums), Mike Carr, Georgie Fame, Brian Auger, Dusty Springfield, Pete York, Paul McCartney, Gary Numan, Phil Carmen, Herbie Mann, Shakatak, Peter Gabriel, Jon Anderson, Jon & Vangelis and Vangelis as well as playing the haunting saxophone solo on the Vangelis composition "Love Theme" for the 1982 film Blade Runner.

Other musicians and performers Dick Morrissey shared the stage with include David "Fathead" Newman, Tommy Körberg, Boz Scaggs, David Sanborn, Steve Gadd, Richard Tee, Michael Brecker, Randy Brecker and Teddy Edwards (with whom he jammed a "duel" at London's 100 Club in the early 1980s).

The Yessirrom Kid - a horn player with a mission

Whatever the style of music he was playing, be it pop, rock, hard bop or straight ahead jazz, Dick Morrissey showed that music could be appreciated at many different levels, and that even the most simplistic pop or rock song could be embellished with an authentic jazz groove. In this way he was able to reach new audiences and albeit indirectly, introduce people to jazz. When at different stages of his career, journalists asked him to define his style, he would refer to Duke Ellington's definition: "It's all music".

Death

Dick Morrissey died on November 8, 2000, aged 60, after many years fighting various forms of cancer. To the end of his life, he could been seen and heard, seated in his wheelchair, playing to a full house at his local pub. Following his death, the UK national press published the following obituaries (excerpts):

In the obituary published in The Times, British music critic Chris Welch wrote that Dick Morrissey was a "fiery musician who straddled the worlds of jazz and rock, but with a style built firmly on bebop and widely regarded as the most brilliant British saxophonist to emerge in the wake of Tubby Hayes. His advocacy of jazz-rock fusion successfully brought jazz to a rock audience and rock to a jazz audience".

Steve Voce writing an obituary for The Independent added: "The key to Dick Morrissey's talent, in a career that spanned four decades, was his ability to get through to an audience. He was one of the great communicators of jazz and ... able to communicate with his listeners and quickly to establish a bond with them ... [l]ike Charlie Parker before him, he was somehow able to lift audiences that knew little or nothing about his music".

Although one could from time to time imagine a feel of the American players Sonny Rollins or Johnny Griffin in Morrissey's work, he was outstanding among British players for his originality. Despite the sophistication of his ideas there was often a down-home quality to his punchy and hard swinging solos, and this was a reflection of one of his idols, the tenorist Stanley Turrentine. He was a lightning improviser and the flood of his inventions flew through his fingers with ease, for he was a masterful player.”

Ronald Atkins, writing in The Guardian, put it thus: "John Coltrane's approach to the tenor had yet to make much of an impact in Britain, and Morrissey came up with a startling and warmly appreciated blend of Stan Getz and Sonny Rollins, the phrasing of one allied to the abrasive tones of the other. He was also influenced by the example of Tubby Hayes, whose lightening-quick [sic] forays through complex harmonies he was probably the first to emulate".

The obituary in The Daily Telegraph read: "Dick Morrissey, who has died aged 60, was among the finest European jazz musicians of his generation. His command of the tenor saxophone was masterly, but it was the unforced fluency of his playing, expressed in a characteristically broad and sweeping tone, that attracted the greatest admiration.

Stylistically, Morrissey was so flexible that he was able to fit happily into many contexts, from straightforward hard-bop, through jazz-rock and jazz-funk to soul-inflected pop music. He possessed the remarkable knack of making everything he played sound not only exciting but happy."

Selected discography

Although Dick Morrissey famously disliked recording studios, preferring to play in front of live audiences, he nevertheless appears on over 100 recordings, albeit many of them live. Some have since become collectors’ items. The following list excludes compilation albums unless the track had not previously been released.

Sources

External links


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