Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Arthur Edward George Themen was born November 26, 1939 in Manchester, England, where he was involved with the traditional jazz scene in the late 1950s as a self-taught musician, having started playing clarinet as a schoolboy at Manchester Grammar School.

In 1958 he began his medical studies at the University of Cambridge. While there he started playing jazz with the Cambridge University Jazz Band bandmates including Lionel Grigson, Dave Gelly, Jonathan Lynn, and John Hart. Under pianist Grigson’s leadership they achieved near professional standard with a swinging hard-bop style that swept the board in the fiercely contested Inter-University Jazz Band Competitions.

By 1964 he was an orthopaedic consultant playing blues with Jack Bruce and Alexis Korner and was a member of Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated. In 1965, Themen played with the Peter Stuyvesant Jazz Orchestra in Zürich, Switzerland going on to play with Michael Garrick, Ian Carr, and Graham Collier’s Music.

The Seventies saw him playing with Stan Tracey, touring with him all over the world as well as around the UK. Art has played and toured with visiting US musicians Charlie Rouse, Nat Adderley, Red Rodney, George Coleman, and Al Haig.

In 1995 he formed a quartet with pianist John Critchinson. Themen’s style originally owed much to the influence of Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins, but later influences included such disparate saxophonists as Coleman Hawkins, Evan Parker and John Coltrane. He was inspired to play saxophone after he attended a gig by the Dankworth Seven, at the local Palais, at the age of 16, with a female cousin and his future was set.

Following his retirement as a consultant orthopaedic surgery consultant, saxophonist Art Themen has focused on his jazz career.

More Posts: bandleader,history,instrumental,jazz,music,saxophone