As well as the “refinement and wisdom” that characterised his playing, Howard Riley also had a generous soul. On one occasion, struggling to remember the name of a classic played by a band I was reviewing, I put in an early-morning call to him and sang its melody down the line.
He identified it straight away (it was Clifford Brown’s Joy Spring), thus enabling me to appear much more knowledgable than I in fact was. He didn’t even complain about me waking him up.
