The break-up of the Joseph Holbrooke Trio did not happen shortly after accompanying Lee Konitz on tour in March 1966, as the very good obituary of my friend Tony Oxley had it originally. In fact it came in November that year when we performed three times on the same Saturday: lunchtime, as usual, in Sheffield; in a Northampton art gallery in the afternoon; and at the Little Theatre Club in central London. That night I put my bass in its case and didn’t play it again for 17 years.
I didn’t see Tony again for 32 years, until we were reunited in Germany for his 60th birthday concerts. Even with no rehearsal, or even conversation about the music, our performance was strangely uncomfortable but enjoyable, and after that we played more – at the Barbican memorial concert for the guitarist Derek Bailey, the other member of the original trio, organised by John Zorn for example – and Tony and his wife, Tutta, would come to performances of my operas in Germany.
In the earlier days of the trio, before we moved into free playing, Tony and I spent hours in my living room practising playing time: I played endless walking bass lines while he experimented with the complex subdivisions of the beat that Richard Williams mentions.
But Tony was always open to experimentation. For example, we listened together to my copy of the 25-year retrospective concert of music by John Cage at the Town Hall of New York city. He tried to recreate on his cymbals the extraordinary changes of pitch that are a feature of the tam-tams in Cage’s First Construction in Metal, and succeeded to a degree. It was only later, when I obtained the score, that we learned that the effect had been made (much more easily) by dipping the gongs in water…
