Mike Westbrook 1936 - 2026
Tribute
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A Tribute to Mike Westbrook - The Blake Society
If William Blake were a contemporary musician, he would certainly be so in the likeness of Mike Westbrook, who, as many might know, started off as a painter. Like Blake, Mike abhorred paltry rhymes and paltry harmonies, as he declares in his epic Milton. He also shared Blake’s deep understanding that poetry, painting, and music are elevated into their "own proper sphere of invention and visionary conception", existing and exulting "in immortal thoughts". Blake refused the constraints of convention and pursued a form that remained faithful to his own imaginative and spiritual imperatives. That is another resemblance to Mike, who never bent to the demands of the market, and held to a music that answered only to its own inner necessity.
Mike Westbrook - Pesaro
Mike had the musical and poetic sensibility to recreate the melodies that Blake did not leave encoded in bars and crotchets. And he could do so with both short lines, which he called Fairies, and long lines, called Giants. For Blake, they were all equally musical. And Mike understood this like no other composer. He was extremely attentive to the inward measure of the poems, attending to the minutest particulars of every line, extracting their meaning and intentionality, and making them sound exactly as they should.
Blake was omnivorous, and he appreciated both what we call high and popular culture. The arias sung in the 18th-century pleasure gardens, as well as the folk ballads were incorporated into his poetry as if they had always belonged together. Mike was no less so, and he moved easily between the concert hall and the street, merging jazz, classical music, theatre, folk and rock without hierarchies.
Apropos of hierarchies, both Mike Westbrook and William Blake fiercely opposed all forms of social division and the notion that some lives matter more than others. Mike found in Blake a like-minded soul who could not remain indifferent to exploitation, bigotry, poverty, and violence. Although Mike esteemed Blake for his striking clarity in perceiving both good and evil in the world, he admired him even more for consistently taking the side of those oppressed by that very evil.
The relationship of creative affiliation between Mike and Blake recalls that of Blake and Milton, where the work of the successor becomes a continuation, or even a refinement, of the predecessor. Through Mike’s settings, Blake sounds as he should sound today, and moves us as he should move us today. It could not be more faithful to Blake in form and spirit, at the same time it couldn't be more distinctly Westbrookian.
His enduring admiration for, and commitment to, Blake’s legacy will always be remembered, and The Blake Society is more than honoured to have him and his wife Kate as patrons. May he and Blake meet in eternity, and improvise some new songs of innocence and experience with a heavenly band.
Mike Westbrook obituary
Richard Williams - The Guardian
Acclaimed musician, composer and bandleader who was one of the most significant figures in the history of British jazz
‘Being a jazz musician is for life,” Mike Westbrook once said. ‘There’s no retirement, no pension. And there’s always the lure of the next gig, the next project, which is going to be your best yet.’
Photograph: Nick White
As Ronnie Scott’s Old Place – the original basement club on Gerrard Street in London’s Chinatown – prepared to close its doors for the final time on 25 May 1968, the last musicians to take the stand were the 10 young members of Mike Westbrook’s Concert Band.
Recruited from a variety of backgrounds, they formed the vehicle with which their leader had begun to demonstrate his gift for slotting together elements of jazz from various periods and styles, filtering them all through his own sensibility to produce something thoroughly stirring, definitely contemporary and highly original. A capacity audience had queued all the way from the club’s entrance to Shaftesbury Avenue, and stayed on at the end to applaud the work of a musician on his way to becoming one of the most significant and productive figures in the history of British jazz.
That was just one of the countless memorable moments in the long career of Mike Westbrook, who has died aged 90. While studying in Plymouth in the 1950s, he had begun by assembling a band that called itself a workshop, a designation used by other jazz musicians of the era, particularly those keen to find new ways of negotiating the relationship between composition and improvisation.
The Mike Westbrook Orchestra in Catania, Sicily.
Photograph: Guy Le Querrec
And that, in a sense, became the permanent condition of Westbrook’s music, whether he was performing his settings of William Blake’s poetry, adapting the compositions of Duke Ellington – his first and forever hero – or the songs from the Beatles’ Abbey Road. He collaborated on theatre pieces with John Fox and the Welfare State, led his brass band through the streets of French villages, worked with his second wife, the singer and librettist Kate Westbrook, and performed his arrangements of Rossini’s arias and overtures at the Albert Hall in 1992, in the first jazz concert to be incorporated into the main programme of the BBC Proms.
Although he was English, and it was on British stages that he first came to prominence, there was a feeling that Westbrook was more profoundly appreciated elsewhere.
In 1984 two French jazz festivals, in Amiens and Angoulême, jointly commissioned the suite On Duke’s Birthday, his celebration of Ellingtonia. In the summer of 1992, the local jazz association of Catania in Sicily organised a Mike Westbrook music festival, flying in a 25-piece ensemble to perform his music over three days on the terrace of a baroque palazzo. The Rossini arrangements would receive a kind of homecoming in 2022, when performed by his last big band, the Uncommon Orchestra, at the 18th-century Teatro Rossini in Lugo, in the province of Ravenna.
Mike Westbrook and the Uncommon Orchestra in Catania in 2018
In his final years he occasionally gave intimate solo piano recitals in which, for an unbroken hour, sometimes two, he would range through gospel tunes, folk songs, pop ballads and jazz standards, revealing his inclusive and humanistic view of music.
Mike Westbrook