The paper's first obit this week was the country songwriter David Allan Coe at eighty-six on the day his quitting anthem circulated as labor music. The second is the English jazz pianist and composer Mike Westbrook OBE, who died at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital on April 11, twenty-one days after his ninetieth birthday. [1] The Times, in its obituary, called him "one of Britain's most creative, experimental and daring jazz composers." [2] Jazz Journal carried the death notice on April 12 with a full discographical retrospective. [4]

Westbrook's discography spans seventy years and most British jazz of the post-Tubby Hayes period. The Mike Westbrook Concert Band's "Marching Song" cycle, recorded in 1969, ran two LPs of antiwar music for big band and voice — Vietnam in tempo. [3] "Citadel/Room 315," recorded with John Surman in 1975, is the score most British conservatories teach. The Brass Band, which he founded with the singer Phil Minton and his wife Kate Westbrook, played pubs and town squares for forty years; the Westbrook-Rossini, recorded for hatART in 1986, married Italian opera to free improvisation in a way no other ensemble did. [3]

He was a painter before he was a pianist. He came to jazz through Plymouth Arts College in the late 1950s, taught painting at his own school in Devon, and never lost the visual frame — the music had a face on every cover, usually his wife's. [3]

Kate survives him, with their son Guy, daughter Joanna, and three step-children. [1]

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York