Obituary: Basil Kirchin (original) (raw)

Basil Kirchin, who has died of cancer aged 77, started life as a drummer on the London jazz scene, but his true instrument turned out to be the world around him. More than 30 years ago, Kirchin was taping the cries of birds, animals and children and blending them with the sound of conventional instruments played in unconventional ways to create a visionary music whose value is only now coming to be appreciated.

As the son of the well-known bandleader Ivor Kirchin, the precocious young drummer appeared to have his future mapped out. At 13, with the second world war a year old and the craze for swing music at its height, he made his debut with his father's band at the Paramount in Tottenham Court Road in central London.

At the end of the war he had a spell with Harry Roy's band. It was still the era of the British big band, and after Roy came work with the ensembles of Teddy Foster, Jack Nathan and Ted Heath. The exposure also won him wide recognition. It meant that the readers of the Melody Maker - then the leading British music paper - voted him the top drummer in the United Kingdom.

In the early 1950s he and his father teamed up again at the head of a band which was to record for the Decca and Parlophone labels under the aegis of the young producer George Martin. At a time when the Ted Heath band was dominant on the British popular music landscape, the Kirchin band was also a significant crowd-puller. And it toured the country with the American singers Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstine. Then his father was hurt in a serious car crash, and while he was recuperating from his injuries, Basil assumed the duties of sole leadership during lengthy residencies by the band at the Ritz in Manchester and at the Palais in Edinburgh.

For Kirchin, however, the well travelled road was never the most interesting one. Towards the end of the decade, at a time when the era of the big band was drawing to a close in Britain, he was inspired by his studies of Indian mysticism. As a consequence, he travelled to a temple on the banks of the River Ganges, where he visited the swami of the Ramakrishna movement.

The best part of a decade ahead of the love generation, he had discovered the value of tuning in and dropping out. The next two years were spent in Australia, where he earned a living as musical director of the Pigalle in Sydney.

Back in England in 1961, he briefly led an octet before beginning a career writing theme and incidental film music. Often these were thrillers or horror films, including The Shuttered Room (1967), The Strange Affair (1968), I Start Counting (1969), The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971) and The Mutations (1973). Paradoxically, these low-budget affairs allowed him to flex his imagination and use the talents of some of London's most gifted young jazz musicians, including the saxophonist Tubby Hayes, the vibraharpist Alan Branscombe and the trumpeter Kenny Wheeler.

Jimmy Page, the young session guitarist who later went on to form Led Zeppelin, was among the players when Kirchin began to contribute to the De Wolfe music library, which supplied the film and television industries with "cues", or short pieces ready for ad hoc use. Today, some of them sound like perfect vignettes of swinging London.

It was in 1967 that Kirchin began to explore the possibilities of "found" sounds, employing a Nagra tape recorder, bought with an Arts Council grant, to record animals in London Zoo and elsewhere. Sometimes he would slow the sounds down, rendering them virtually unrecognisable, before combining them with the work of improvisers who were developing new vocabularies for their instruments, placing Evan Parker's high-velocity saxophone improvisations and Derek Bailey's unique guitar inventions in a series of striking contexts.

Kirchin emphasised the distinction between what he was up to and the work of the musique concrète composers. Their sources, he said, were mostly "non-organic". His were decidedly organic, never more strikingly so than when he recorded the speech-song of a group of autistic children taught by his wife, Esther, and added it to the mix.

These developments formed the basis of two albums, both titled Worlds Within Worlds. The first, on EMI's Columbia label, was released in 1971, followed three years later by a second volume on the Island label, with an admiring sleeve note by Brian Eno. Neither release sold more than a handful of copies, and Kirchin fell silent, moving with his wife to Switzerland before returning to settle in east Yorkshire. In the last couple of years, however, some of his work has been reissued on the independent Trunk label, bringing the legacy of this highly original figure to the attention of a new generation of inquisitive listeners.

· Basil Kirchin, musician, born August 8 1927; died June 18 2005