KEEPER OF THE FLAME - by Spike Wells

Being slightly too young to have witnessed the battle of Culloden Moor, I first heard Bobby Wellins by chance one night at Ronnie Scott's in Gerrard Street where Johnny Griffin was topping the bill. Bobby only played the first set, a casual and impromptu affair in front of a sparse early evening audience, but at the end of the night there was no doubt in my mind that Scotland had coasted to victory over America in the "little giant" stakes.

A few months later in October 1965, I first had the privilege of playing with Wellins when he visited the
university jazz club at Oxford. Our guest soloist arrived a little late, made his way through the crowd, unpacked his horn and without any warm-up or even a word launched into what has remained for me the definitive ver-sion of Exactly Like You ten choruses, each one somehow surpassing the one before, no hesitations, no anti-climaxes, an exquisite demonstration of the art of impro-visation. This surely was what it must have been like to hear Lester Young jamming at the Cherry Blossom in '34.

As things were to turn out, I did not see Bobby again for 12 years, but the impression he made that evening had not dimmed and was powerfully renewed when we finally met again last autumn. He is playing better than ever
(if that is possible) and the purpose of this short appreciation is to broadcast the fact, together with a little biographical detail, since many people still fail to realise that we have among us a tenor saxophonist whom Victor Schonfield once, with some justification, described as "probably the most original and creative jazz musician to appear outside America since the war".