Obituary: Allan Ganley (original) (raw)

The old jazz joke goes: "Mummy, mummy, when I grow up I want to be a drummer." Mummy answers: "Don't be daft, you can't do both." "When did we last play together?" a distractingly loud drummer asks the legendary swing saxophonist Lester Young during an interval. "Tonight," comes the reply. Allan Ganley, the great British drummer, composer and arranger, who has died aged 77 after an operation to fit a pacemaker, was the diametric opposite of the bull-in-a-china-shop percussion stereotype behind all those gags.

He was certainly a modernist, entering the business when the 1940s bebop revolution - driven by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach - had already been in full flight for a decade. But bop drumming could be hyper-active, its pulse peppered with hard-struck offbeats and jolting bass-drum accents. In his unobtrusive elegance and sensitivity, Ganley could sometimes suggest a performer from an earlier era, of the kind who wanted to unroll a luxurious carpet beneath soloists, rather than sustain a challenging stream of personal consciousness. John Dankworth (with whom Ganley worked for 55 years, up until the missed Gateshead festival gig scheduled for the day before he died) was a lifelong Ganley fan, and the list has included Georgie Fame, singers Marian Montgomery and Carol Kidd, and American swing sax virtuoso Scott Hamilton.

Ganley was born in Tolworth, Surrey. He taught himself drums from his early teens, and joined the dance bands of Jack Parnell and Bert Ambrose in 1953, after RAF service. But this music was about to be superseded by rock'n'roll. Few of the British jazz musicians who had earned their living on the Mecca ballrooms circuit were to find commercial success after that. Dankworth, a composer who could splice musical substance with a catchy accessibility, was one of the exceptions.

Ganley and Dankworth had become friends when they and Ronnie Scott heard Parker in Paris in 1949. The connection was cemented for life when Ganley began playing with 26-year-old Dankworth's newly founded orchestra in Nottingham in 1953. The band (Dudley Moore was one of its early pianists), was to become a big international success, even playing America's legendary Newport festival. But Ganley and pianist Derek Smith left in 1955 to form the bop-inspired New Jazz Group with Jamaican trumpeter Dizzy Reece.

Ganley's friendship with Dankworth had helped nourish an interest in composition and arrangement. In 1955, he began playing regularly with the trumpet virtuoso Kenny Baker's popular Dozen, and also worked with Cleo Laine, Scott and trombonist George Chisholm. He also regularly travelled to the US and, in 1957, had an unexpected opportunity to tour there with Scott - as a last-minute replacement for drummer Phil Seamen, who had been busted for drugs at Southampton docks. The tour was purely a formality (Eddie Condon's American group was coming to Britain, and union rules demanded a British swap), Scott opining that, "America needs a tour by British jazz musicians like Damascus needs a synagogue." The group recalled spending the entire boat trip back unsuccessfully looking for the cannabis they had hidden in a ship cistern on the way out.

In 1958, Ganley formed the briskly lyrical and hard-swinging Jazzmakers group with baritone saxophonist Ronnie Ross, and appeared at Newport with it. By 1962 he was working with the young saxophonist Tubby Hayes, one of the fastest players in jazz, but Ganley's relaxed drive and creative shading was unfazed, and the drummer's subtle handling of slow music (he was one of the world's great exponents of the whispering art of brushes-playing) also made him the ideal foil for Hayes' lesser known talent for romantic balladeering.

By now also a skilled composer/arranger, Ganley was becoming indispensable as a studio professional. He worked regularly as a session player through the 1960s, was the house drummer behind some of the biggest stars in jazz at Ronnie Scott's Club from 1964 to 1967, and appeared with saxophonist Joe Harriott and violinist John Mayer in the pioneering Indo-Jazz Fusions cross-genre group. In the early 1970s, Ganley often worked in Bermuda, and deepened his understanding of musical theory and structure by studying at the Berklee School of Music in Boston.

Back in the UK from 1976 on, Ganley played sessions with Nelson Riddle and Henry Mancini, continued to back visiting stars (Gillespie and Peggy Lee among them), formed his own big band, and developed as a large-ensemble composer. He played in the Soho Pizza Express's amiably swinging All Stars group, and the mainstream-oriented Great British Jazz Band. Ganley also had a long Sunday-lunchtime association with his local jazz club, the Jagz in Ascot. In 2003 his group's Live at the Station album was recorded there, a deliciously subtle testament to Ganley's talents; this writer observing at the time that, as ever, "his coolly ticking cymbal beat and excitable high-hat clap is devoted to driving the band rather than advertising himself".

Active to the end, he was at work on a commission for the Norwich festival, to be performed next month by a band including Dankworth, longtime bass associate Dave Green, and Americans Ken Peplowski and Scott Hamilton. He leaves his second wife and their daughter.

· Allan Anthony Ganley, drummer and arranger, born March 11 1931; died March 29 2008