Tolkien’s Biographer Was Also a Pro Jazz Bassist

The joy of digging through thrift store vinyl crates is the prospect of discovering new arrangements, new songs, even new bands or composers which had previously escaped my attention. The main draw is what’s on the disc, although the liner notes can be equally fascinating. Very often the brief bio on a sleeve prompts further research about the players and tracks therein—but a recent buy took me down a different kind of rabbit hole, thanks to some handwritten notes on the back.

The record was The Ellington Era 1927-1940: Volume One, Part Two, which I bagged at a hospice shop in a little village not far from Oxford. I don’t normally go for the multi-volume discs, as I don’t see much point in owning one out of umpteen, but I was learning “Drop Me Off In Harlem” at the time and its inclusion prompted me to pick this one up. Perusing the sleeve as I listened that night, I spotted some pencil scribblings by a previous owner.

While many collectors will asterisk favorite tracks or mark those too damaged to play, this person had gone through [English jazz writer] Stanley Dance’s liner notes with a fine-toothed comb and amended them as he saw fit. Where Dance noted that “HARLEM SPEAKS was written in London,” they had inserted, “and recorded.” Where Dance listed Fred Guy as playing “guitar,” this vinyl vandal had crossed out the instrument and written “banjo” in its place.

At times, our pedantic pencil-wielder had noted in parentheses where a track had been waxed—London or Chicago—in defiance of Dance’s insistence that these were “all recordings made in New York City.” Who was this upstart, who presumed to know more about the work of Duke Ellington than the composer’s own friend and biographer? At the top of the sleeve, helpfully added in neat fountain pen cursive, was written the name “Humphrey Carpenter” and the year 1963.

That name rang a bell, so I popped it into Google and up came many references to the English author, BBC national broadcaster, and J. R. R. Tolkien biographer Humphrey William Bouverie Carpenter. (My wife is a Tolkien fan and must have Carpenter’s bio in her library, hence the glimmer of recognition.) Born in Oxford during 1946, he would have been just 17 when he marked Dance’s homework—assuming he’s our man. Could this famous bookworm really be an expert on jazz as well?

Well, it turns out that Carpenter was also a professional jazz bassist and sousaphonist, whose band had a residency at The Ritz Hotel, London during the 1980s. Aptly, this band was named after a book: Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. Finding this out took some digging, as almost every online mention of Carpenter—whose death in 2005 received obits in national newspapers The Guardian and The Telegraph, scholarly journal Tolkien Studies, and even international broadsheet The New York Times—concerned his work as a literary biographer.

But he was also mentioned on a page about drummer Tony Augarde, hosted on a website dedicated to Scottish clarinetist Sandy Brown. There I learned that Vile Bodies (including Augarde) played at the Ritz two nights a week for “several years,” undergoing several lineup changes until Carpenter exited, leaving the band in the hands of saxophonist Jim Tomlinson. Said page named many other members of the outfit, all of whom I tried to reach over the course of a week. Of those yet living, one was kind enough to make time for a chat.

Tomlinson now lives in the US with his wife, the Grammy-nominated jazz singer Stacey Kent. He has since worked with Michael Garrick, Bryan Ferry, Roberto Menescal, and other global stars. Growing up in Northumberland, in England’s North East, Tomlinson played classical clarinet at school and sang in the Hexham Abbey choir. “I was an OK clarinet player, probably a bit lazy,” he told me. “There was no jazz education in schools—my dad had a couple of records like the soundtrack to The Glenn Miller Story and The Atomic Mr Basie so I was familiar with the sound, but it wasn’t part of my musical life until the age of 14 or 15.”

As a teen, Tomlinson joined the county wind band on sax. (They didn’t need a clarinetist.) “I found my voice on the sax and that led me to jazz,” he said. “I picked up a couple of Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon and Coleman Hawkins albums—I heard that music and had found my home.” With friends he formed the Riccarton Junction Jazz Band, which played the likes of “Tiger Rag” and “Basin Street Blues” around the local pubs.

Tomlinson was at Oxford University from 1986 to 1989, where he played sax and clarinet in the OU big band. “By then I was getting my hooks into the local jazz scene,” he said, “and that’s where I met Humphrey.” The pair crossed paths at the intersection of a British trad jazz revival which began in the 1960s and a renewed interest in swing which took hold in the 1980s. “It was an interesting time,” said Tomlinson. “You had spin-off bands like the Pasadena Roof Orchestra and Midnite Follies Orchestra—Humphrey was part of that movement, a revisitation of the pre-war dance bands.”

Beginning as a dep (or sub, for our US audience), Tomlinson ended up playing first tenor chair with Vile Bodies. “At weekends we would pack the van with our gear and go to the Ritz to play our shows,” he reminisced. “They were three-set shows in a dinner dance format, with tables around the dancefloor where people would get up and shuffle between courses.” In a forum post made following Carpenter’s death in 2005, singer Lizzie Jackson also recalled doing a Vile Bodies gig at Blenheim Palace for the Duke of Marlborough and a bar mitzvah at waxwork museum Madame Tussaud’s, allegedly for an adult film producer.

The crew included trumpeters Tommy McQuater and Duncan Campbell, alongside clarinetist Al Baum: old hands formerly of the Benny Carter, Ted Heath, and Paul Whiteman bands, respectively. Remember that Carpenter and Tomlinson were mere undergraduates at this time—barely in their twenties—and they were gigging with veterans of the Swing Era. Other colleagues were already semi-pro and many, including a young singer named Stacey Kent, went on to successful musical careers of their own.

Vile Bodies mostly played Carpenter’s takes on British dance band classics, as well as arrangements of US swing bandleaders supplied by their pianist, Colin Good. “The band had two faces, British and American-facing,” Tomlinson explained. “This meant we could tailor our sets to whatever the venue was. We’d play more of the American stuff for the jive dance scene, which was big then.”

So, how did these upstart students end up with a residency at one of the world’s most famous hotels? “I would guess that Humphrey pitched the Ritz gig to the hotel,” Tomlinson said. “It would seem entirely plausible to me that he knew someone important there. He had that force of personality that if he wanted something to happen it would happen—either by enlisting or convincing other people.”

I recognized this caricature of Carpenter, a posh kid whose father would become Bishop of Oxford: someone who just assumes that doors will open for him, if he pushes on them. Not malicious or entitled—just a little naive to the perks of being middle-class. There were many such boy at my red-brick university, too. But no one could call Carpenter a slacker. “Humphrey had this blustering energy, like Boris Johnson but far more productive,” said Tomlinson. “He always had a project, always had more to do than should be humanly possible.”

So our man was a hard worker and a charismatic go-getter. How was he as a bassist, though? “He never let perfection be the enemy of the good,” Tomlinson said, with a chuckle. “He never perfected his technique, but it didn’t matter. You never thought, ‘Oh I wish we had a better bass player.’ Sure there were better bass players who sometimes depped, but none did it better because Humphrey did what needed to be done.” He added: “The same was true of Humphrey’s arrangements. There were inaccuracies, not necessarily a sophistication or finesse—but he wrote well for the instruments and the players in the band. We made a good noise, and that’s most of the battle in music.”

Eventually, Carpenter’s many other endeavours crowded out music and he handed off the band to Tomlinson. “In 1989 I moved to London,” the sax man said. “I’m not quite sure when the Ritz residency ended. After that we continued doing concerts and gigs at venues like The 100 Club, but eventually no one had the time to put in. So the gigs got fewer and further between and it petered out eventually.”

Fortunately for us, Vile Bodies did make one record while Carpenter was involved. Produced in 1989, Sandy Forbes Presents A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square and Other Hits from World War II is precisely what it sounds like. “This was a time when people would make facsimile records of bands like Abba and sell them at petrol stations et cetera,” said Tomlinson, as if to excuse it. But it’s a great album packed with competent renditions of floor-fillers like “Flying Home,” “Begin the Beguine,” and “Cherokee”—three of my favorites.

And so it seems that the award-winning literary biographer, national broadcaster, playwright (he penned a two-hour musical about Judy Garland which aired on BBC R4, and another about Hollywood child stars) and children’s author (of the Mr Majeika series) Humphrey Carpenter ought to be remembered as a musician and bandleader, too. “He was really quite a remarkable character,” Tomlinson said of his late friend.

Did my new Duke Ellington LP belong to this modern polymath? Tomlinson doesn’t know, but he did point out that “Solitude” and “Drop Me Off In Harlem” were both in the Vile Bodies repertoire. At this point, I don’t think it really matters—I’m just delighted to have discovered Carpenter and Vile Bodies at all.