Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Rupert Theophilus Nurse was born the only child in Port of Spain, Trinidad on December 26, 1910. He spent some of his childhood in Venezuela before returning to the island to complete his education. He absorbed local calypso music traditions, and started working as a teacher in Tobago.

He taught himself piano, and learned arranging skills from a mail order Glenn Miller book, before returning around 1936 to Trinidad where he worked in an electronics business. He also learned to play the tenor saxophone and with Guyanese saxophonist Wally Stewart, formed the Moderneers or Modernaires, the first American-style big band in Trinidad. During the Second World War he played with visiting Americans on the island, and began writing jazz arrangements of calypsos.

Travelling to London, England in 1945, he began playing double bass with guitarist Fitzroy Coleman and pianist Cyril Jones in the Antilles jazz club near Leicester Square. He joined trumpeter Leslie “Jiver” Hutchinson’s mostly-black band, with whom he played on radio and toured in Europe, before working with entertainer Cab Kaye in the Netherlands. He also increasingly worked with musicians newly arriving in Britain from the West Indies, including popular pianist Winifred Atwell, and Lord Kitchener and his band. He began experimenting with electronic instruments along with Lauderic Caton.

By 1953, Nurse was appointed as musical director of the Melodisc record label, which increasingly sought to release records to appeal to Britain’s growing Afro-Caribbean community. He led the label’s house band, arranged and produced Kitchener’s recordings, and recorded many other musicians of Caribbean origin, including jazz saxophonist Joe Harriott. He continued to perform as a pianist, and became bandleader at the Sunset Club in Carnaby Street and then at the more upscale Sugar Hill club in St James’s, where he met and later recorded with pianist Mary Lou Williams.

He increasingly used an electric piano and organ, and worked widely in clubs and restaurants in London as a solo performer and with other musicians including steel pan player Hugo Gunning, bassist Coleridge Goode, and pianists Iggy Quail and Russ Henderson. He taught, devised arrangements for other musicians, and worked as a library cataloguer in London until 1976.

Retiring to Arima, Trinidad he continued to mentor musicians and write arrangements for them. Pianist, tenor saxophonist and double bassist Rupert Nurse, who was influential in developing jazz and Caribbean music in Britain, particularly in the 1950s,  transitioned there on March 18, 2001 at the age of 90.

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