Laurie Morgan obituary

Laurie Morgan, who has died aged 93, was an influential member of the coterie of British jazz experimenters of the 1940s and 50s that most famously included the saxophonists Ronnie Scott and John Dankworth. A drummer, bandleader, theatre musician and teacher, Morgan was a smart, creative and idealistic man who contributed significantly to British jazz’s emancipation from dutiful mimicry of its US models.

As a co-founder of the Club Eleven collective that lit the way toward the establishment of Scott’s London club in 1959, he devoted much of his life to finding an authentically homegrown sound, collaborating with British composers such as the pianist Stan Tracey and the saxophonist Bobby Wellins – as well as the British beat poets Michael Horovitz and Pete Brown as part of the 60s poetry-and-jazz movement.

He was also assistant musical director at the fledgling National Theatre in the 60s and 70s, and, with the Jamaican bassist Coleridge Goode, was part of a highly regarded 70s trio at the Dingwalls club in Camden, north London. Led by the Guyanese pianist Iggy Quail, the trio hosted a weekly allcomers jam that embraced drop-in artists from the saxophonist David Murray to the classical violinist Nigel Kennedy.

In the second half of a seven-decade career, and well into his 80s, he went on extending the jamming “family” around residencies in north London, celebrating the fact that “talented people who [can’t] find a way of getting into professional playing can come in with their instrument”. A rare, broadminded bird in a sometimes closeted jazz world, his focus was primarily on the social function of music, and he was an artist who believed in finding oneself rather than borrowing the mannerisms of others.

Born in Stoke Newington, north London, Laurie had Jewish parents – Dudley Morgan, a gownmaker, and his wife, Rachel (nee Aaronson). Morgan Sr presented his son with a drum kit when he was 10, and the boy progressed fast enough to be released from his first job as a tea boy at the De Havilland aircraft factory to play professionally with a fledgling vaudeville group, the Rhythm Racketeers.

The young drummer’s accuracy and vivacity with the shortlived band soon brought him cabaret work, including a 1944 tour around US military bases in Britain that sometimes involved accompanying the Hollywood star Jimmy Cagney, who was returning to his vaudeville and tap-dancing origins to entertain US troops stationed in Britain.

On London’s wartime nightclub scene Morgan met Scott, the drummer Tony Crombie and an up-and-coming jazz generation at the Fullado Club in New Compton Street. He first heard Charlie Parker’s alto sax in full flight on the Fullado’s gramophone in early 1947, and immediately travelled to New York to see Parker in the flesh. Moving around the US, he, Scott, Crombie and a host of other London musicians soaked up the American jazz experience. When they returned, as Morgan said to me in 1985, they were “boiling with music”, looking for somewhere to let the steam off.

They found their outlet in 1948 in a tatty, bare-bulbs basement in Great Windmill Street called Mac’s Rehearsal Rooms – first as a place to jam in, then as a paying proposition they called Club Eleven (there were 11 founder members). It was Britain’s first jazz club to present an all-modern repertoire, programmed by a cooperative of professional players, often featuring Dankworth’s band (with Morgan on drums) opposite a Ronnie Scott group. Morgan met Betty Briddon, an insurance clerk, at Club Eleven in 1949, and they married five years later.

In 1949 Morgan also worked in Leon Roy’s big band, toured France and Belgium the following year with his own Elevated Music group (including a young Tracey), played in the jazzy dance bands of Bert Ambrose and Harry Hayes, and briefly in the skilful bebop group of the Jamaican trumpeter Dizzy Reece in 1954. By 1960 underground art forms – progressive jazz, poetry, new folk music, the jazz-influenced R&B of Alexis Korner and Ginger Baker – were increasingly cross-fertilising, and Morgan, searching for ways out of the jazz-only bubble, was drawn to those possibilities.

He became involved with a rising young generation of poets including Horovitz (creator of the New Departures poetry magazine) who from 1960 were holding sessions at venues including Chelsea’s Cafe des Artistes. The New Departures Quartet, a jazz group formed to improvise with Horovitz and Brown, emerged in 1961 with Morgan on drums, Wellins on tenor sax, Tracey on piano and Jeff Clyne on bass.

Morgan joined the new National Theatre in 1964 as a resident percussionist and eventually became assistant musical director, staying until 1976 and working on productions by directors such as Laurence Olivier and Franco Zeffirelli. In the 80s he taught music in north London schools and began his long trio partnership with Quail and Goode, which extended beyond Dingwalls to the Stapleton Tavern in Finsbury Park and the King’s Head in Crouch End.

In the 80s he rented a bowling club pavilion in Crouch End for a Sunday afternoon residency that evolved into summertime mini-festivals on the lawns, attracting musicians of all generations and persuasions. He continued playing and hosting gigs until 2012, when he and Betty retired to Sussex.

In 2013, Gearbox Records reissued a live 1962 New Departures concert featuring Morgan (Blues for the Hitchhiking Dead), with liner notes by Horovitz and Brown. Early recordings with Dankworth, Alan Dean’s Beboppers and others are preserved in archive material on the Jasmine and Proper Records labels.

He is survived by Betty, their sons, Simon and Paul, and daughter, Dinah.

• Lawrence Morgan, musician, born 4 September 1926; died 5 February 2020