One of the most important figures in British contemporary music, particularly blues and jazz, since the Second World War, singer, guitarist and keyboard player John Mayall died at his home in California, age 90 on 22 July. Without Mayall’s influence and advocacy, where the sobriquet, ‘The Godfather Of British Blues’, stuck like glue, a number of widely influential, improvising blues and jazz-rock bands such as Cream, Fleetwood Mac, Colosseum, Keef Hartley Band and Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation, all formed from his Bluesbreakers, would perhaps have not existed. And when the Rolling Stones grabbed his third guitar wonderkid, Mick Taylor in 1969, they embarked on an imperial stage of their career.
Crucially Mayall gave many 1960s UK jazz players much wider exposure, including Alan Skidmore, Johnny Almond, Dick Heckstall-Smith, Chris Mercer, Henry Lowther, Tony Reeves and Jon Hiseman, as he pivoted towards a jazz-blues fusion in late 1968 before relocating to California, where among those he enlisted for his bands included Blue Mitchell, Victor Gaskin, Don ‘Sugarcane’ Harris and Red Holloway.
Born in Macclesfield in 1933, his first exposure to music was his guitarist father’s collection of jazz 78s, particularly Louis Armstrong, Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt, before he discovered Big Bill Broonzy, Leadbelly and started learning guitar. As a teenager, boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis lead to him learning piano and a growing interest in late 1940s revivalist jazz before he joined a trad-jazz band while at Manchester Art College. He formed his first blues band John Mayall’s Powerhouse Four in 1955, well ahead of similar groundbreaking ventures by Alexis Korner and the Rolling Stones, and then The Blues Syndicate in 1962, which included the late Jazzwise writer Jack Massarik.
Relocating to London in 1963 he fell in with Korner just as rhythm & blues was starting to erupt on the London jazz scene. He formed the first Bluesbreakers line-up, attracting a book full of dates and a debut album for Decca, John Mayall Plays John Mayall, recorded live at Klooks Kleek, with him playing guitar, organ, piano and harmonica and writing most of the material. They backed T-Bone Walker on his UK tour and very soon lured blues purist, ex-Yardbird Eric Clapton. The die was cast, the album John Mayall Eric Clapton Blues Breakers became a colossal, totemic recording, leading to the formation of hundreds of blues bands in the UK, firing a massive interest in the blues amongst audiences in the USA, and establishing both Mayall and Clapton internationally. Michael Brecker told me that he was deeply inspired, when he’d just started on alto, by hearing Alan Skidmore’s stunning tenor solo on album centrepiece, ‘Have You Heard’.
In rapid succession followed A Hard Road with new guitar god Peter Green and future Zappa drum giant Anysley Dunbar: Crusade featuring Mick Taylor and a jazz horn section; and 1968’s Bare Wires, Mayall’s first jazz/blues-rock album with Lowther, Heckstall-Smith, Hiseman and Reeves, which established them as a major touring force in America, attracting the attention of Miles Davis and playing numerous jazz, rock and blues festivals. Permanently located in California since 1970 and still touring and recording with countless different Bluesbreakers’ line-ups, plus reunions with Clapton, Green, and Taylor, I last saw him at Ronnie Scott’s in April 2014 where he still harnessed the same life-long vigour and enthusiasm for the music as he did 60 years before. He released over 75 albums, many compilations and a monster 35 CD and book archival box set, and was made an OBE in 2005. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame and finally selected for a place at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame due this October… Not before time!