The jazz drummer and composer Tony Kinsey, who has died aged 97, was a major figure in the transformation of the postwar modern jazz landscape in Britain.
Kinsey and contemporaries such as John Dankworth and Ronnie Scott were intent on creating their own versions of jazz modernism from the late 1940s onwards. Inspired as they were by the bebop innovators Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and in Kinsey’s case by the drummer Max Roach, they went on to create original music of genuine validity.
Scott and Dankworth had already tasted bebop success with the Club Eleven consortium in London, whereas Kinsey was based in the Midlands, training to be an industrial metallurgist with music as a sideline.
He knew that London was the focus for meaningful jazz activity and that he would eventually have to make for the metropolis. Once there he immersed himself in a teeming generation of putative beboppers, many of whom became friends and bandstand associates. He outlived them all.
Kinsey first achieved prominence as a bandleader, then as a session player and soundtrack composer. Once the heyday of modern jazz as a popular pursuit for young audiences was over, he focused mainly on work as a composer, conductor or musical director, although he took little persuading to unpack the drums and play.
He was born in Sutton Coldfield, where his father, Harry, ran the family jewellery business, and his mother, Ivy (nee Spencer), was a homemaker. Having fallen for the drums at the age of six, Tony was bought a toy kit a year later. Shown the rudiments by his sister’s drummer boyfriend and with lessons from a local percussionist, Tommy Webster, he practised with enthusiasm until he and the Birmingham-based pianist Ronnie Ball got under way with a series of local gigs.
They worked professionally with Jackson Cox’s band for a summer season in Newquay, Cornwall, before playing with dance bands in Southsea in Hampshire and at Wigan Pier in Lancashire.
He and Ball moved to London in 1948 and made for Archer Street, then the informal open-air labour exchange for freelance musicians. “We arrived in London with 30 quid in our pockets, which we thought would last us for a month,” he said. “Archer Street was key then. That’s where I met people such as Ronnie Scott, Tony Crombie and the jazz guys. People would say, ‘I need a drummer’ and I got some night-club work with Art Thompson’s Band.”
Following a friend’s introduction, Kinsey soon joined the classy seven-piece Ivor Noone Band aboard the liner Queen Mary.
He made 17 transatlantic crossings to New York with Noone, relishing the chance to observe his heroes on 52nd Street, then in its prime. Still awestruck years later, he recalled hearing Bud Powell with Fats Navarro, seeing Gillespie’s big band, plus Parker, Miles Davis and Roach. He also fitted in serious instruction from drummers Bill West and Cozy Cole. Thus prepared for anything, he found work in bands led by Leon Roy and Victor Feldman, before accepting Dankworth’s offer in 1950 to join the John Dankworth Seven, a kind of modernist dream band.
Kinsey toured with the Seven for the next two years, recording alongside other bright sparks such as the trumpeter Jimmy Deuchar, the tenorist Don Rendell and the pianist Bill LeSage.
Eventually tiring of the road, he accepted Ball’s suggestion that he join his trio at the 51 Club, London’s first modern jazz venue. When Ball emigrated to the US in 1952, Kinsey took over his slot and embarked on a period of continuous success. The trio became a quartet and then a quintet, as the certainty of regular work attracted the best modernists of the day, including LeSage and saxophonists such as Tommy Whittle, Ronnie Ross, Peter King and the Jamaican innovator Joe Harriott.
Invited to cross over to the Flamingo Club in Wardour Street for three nights a week every week, Kinsey’s group were resident there for the next eight years, breaking off only to appear at the 1954 Paris jazz festival and to spend a month in 1956 playing at British Army locations abroad. Kinsey was also busy in the studios, recording with the visiting pianist Mary Lou Williams in 1954 and the singer Lita Roza, while accompanying Oscar Peterson and Ella Fitzgerald on tour in 1955.
Around that time he also began to compose for short films and cartoons, created more than 100 commercial jingles, for Babycham among them, and wrote library music. His group was resident at singer Annie Ross’s short-lived London club, Annie’s Room, from 1964-65, backing all her visiting stars, and he collaborated with the poet Christopher Logue for a jazz-and-poetry radio broadcast on the BBC Third programme in 1959.
Among a plethora of compositional assignments were the music for a Marty Feldman revue, a weekly song for the BBC’s That’s Life TV programme (for the first 104 shows, starting in 1973), the theme tunes for two TV series, Wimpole Village and The Castle of Adventure, and a score for the 1987 movie Souvenir, starring Christopher Plummer.
The presence of the American orchestral arranger Bill Russo in London from 1961 until 1965 offered Kinsey the chance to study advanced compositional techniques with him, and also to play in Russo’s orchestra, which encouraged Kinsey to write many longer-form pieces, including Pictures (1984), an orchestral suite, and the eight-part Embroidery Suite (2016), an evocative portrait of his long-time place of residence, Sunbury-on-Thames in Surrey. His concerto for harmonica and string quartet was premiered at St John’s Smith Square in 2012.
Musicians everywhere, Buddy Rich among them, appreciated Kinsey’s approach to the drums, lauding his crisp attack and boppish elan; he never tired of playing, even after a stroke limited his chances to perform.
Recently he had joined the Way Out West collective of younger jazz musicians and the group conceived and staged a celebratory concert tribute to him at the Hampton Hub Club in 2024. An all-star big band presented a programme of his highly varied jazz compositions to an enthusiastic crowd, with a delighted Kinsey watching happily from a special table at the front of the audience.
He married Pat Dawes in 1951; she died in 2019. He is survived by their daughter, Sian, three granddaughters, Sophie, Olivia and Lara, and four great-grandchildren.
• Tony (Cyril Anthony) Kinsey, musician and composer, born 11 October 1927; died 9 February 2025
