Ruby Braff

Jazz cornettist with a foul mouth but an eloquent, uncopyable sound

Reuben Braff, cornettist: born Boston, Massachusetts 16 March 1927; died North Chatham, Massachusetts 9 February 2003.

When Ruby Braff played the cornet it was, to paraphrase Eddie Condon, like a girl saying "yes".

Braff came in a direct line from Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke and Bobby Hackett and his playing had all the beauty and eloquence that goes with such a hallmark. His fat sound on the instrument and delicate showers of notes were instantly recognisable and he was one of the most melodic improvisers in the history of jazz. Unlike the other three he spawned no imitators, for his sound and the method of creating it were unique and largely uncopyable. Unimpressed by high notes for their own sake, he opened up new depths in the bottom registers of the instrument that others could not reach.

The beauty ended abruptly when he took the horn from his mouth. He was usually abrasive, insensitive, cruel, insulting, and he was one of my best friends. Over the years he drove most of his friends and other musicians away from him as they gave him up in exasperation. At the end of his life the remaining handful included Dave Bennett, his English manager, and Mat Domber, president of Arbors, the recording company that released all of Braff's elegant albums of the Nineties.

The final album just issued, Watch What Happens, was recorded when the musicians who could get there struggled through the centre of New York on the day after 11 September 2001. Typically it has a version of "Over the Rainbow" looked at from a new perspective and, in the Braff manner, filled with improvised melodies that improve on the composer's original.

Like most cornet players he was physically small. The elfin frame was often driven by one of the most surreal senses of humour one could imagine and his spontaneous introductions from the stage invariably had his audiences contorted with helpless laughter. He loved audiences and his happiest moments over the last decade were when he appeared, as he did four or five times a year, on the radio programme that I present for BBC local radio in the North.

Here he revealed that he was romantically pursued by the Queen Mother. "Every time I see her on the television at the races or somewhere she is looking directly into my eyes and I can see that she is singing 'If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight'." He mulled over his potential as a member of the Royal Family. He kept us up to date with the affair over the years, as he did with the frequent occasions when Scotland Yard called him in to advise on how to solve the most impenetrable crimes. Would they ask him to be Chief of Police? He claimed also to have secret underwater rendezvous in their nuclear submarines with another friend, Humphrey Lyttelton, where the two discussed the best actions they should take in directing world affairs.

Braff was one of the last people alive who had rubbed shoulders with the jazz masters in the classic era. As a young boy he had played informally with Fats Waller, and Duke Ellington had taken him under his wing at a dance when Braff was 11.

The mellow sound of his cornet came from the fact that he had always wanted a saxophone. When his father finally bought a cornet for him, he tried to play it as though it was a reed instrument and this accounted for the softness of his tone. Self-taught, he began playing at jam sessions and clubs in Boston during the Forties. His friends at the time were the pianists George Wein, who became an entrepreneur and founded and ran the Newport Jazz Festival, and Nat Pierce, later to be the backbone for many years of the Woody Herman band.

The cosmopolitan issue of a 1949 recording Braff made in a club with the clarinettist Edmond Hall's band first alerted Americans and Europeans to the presence of a new stylist on the horn. Much younger than those he worked with, he brought a freshness to the music that immediately made him stand out.

In 1953 he and Pierce took an apartment in New York, expecting great things. Braff was irritated by his parents' habit of sending him tins of sardines and threw them down the building's airshaft when they arrived. Weeks later, as they starved, he and Pierce were desperately salvaging the tins that hadn't been eaten by their also ravenous neighbours. In December that year he made the classic and still selling recordings of "Russian Lullaby" and "Jeepers Creepers" with the Vic Dickenson Septet. But one record date, no matter how successful, didn't constitute a living and he and Pierce were trying to stay alive on a diet of tinned plum tomatoes, the cheapest food to be found.

Braff's talent, however, was as a pillar of fire in the night, and within months he was recording with such giants as Buck Clayton, Benny Goodman and Bud Freeman, and his career took off. He toured Europe first in 1961 and then came back regularly each year in his own right. He became a jazz master himself and had his own jazz chamber-music salon. With a particular affinity for cornet and piano duets, over the years he created wonderful partnerships on albums with the cream of the jazz pianists – Mel Powell, Ralph Sutton, Dick Hyman, Ellis Larkins and Roger Kellaway.

The quartet that he formed with the guitarist George Barnes in 1973 played sublime music. It had years of life left in it when Braff had a corrosive falling-out with Barnes in 1975.

"Why don't you make another album with George Barnes?" an English fan asked plaintively.

"Why don't you make a fucking album with George Barnes?" Braff snarled with typical venom.

From 1974 onwards he became a regular attraction at the Nice Jazz Festival and in subsequent years led bands for seasons at Eddie Condon's Club in New York. He came regularly to Britain to appear at the Pizza Express and to make ever-successful tours with the Alex Welsh band.

As the older musicians succumbed, Braff became the leading light of Mainstream jazz. He embarked on a series of albums during the Seventies for the Concord label and these supercharged his career as they spread across the world.

He fostered young jazz musicians such as the guitarist Howard Alden and Scott Hamilton as they too grew to be stars in the jazz firmament. He worked with both of them over a number of years.

But success was tempered by his ill-health. Troubled with emphysema, glaucoma and a bad heart, he had difficulties in aircraft and had to be pushed in a wheelchair across air terminals. He could not play where people smoked, and he had to have lighting lowered. On one occasion last year, when Dave Bennett was up a ladder adjusting the lighting under Braff's scornful direction, Bennett asked, "Would you like me to paint the ceiling while I'm up here?"

Paradoxically, as Braff's health fell away his playing continued to improve. It was the rigour of his British tour last autumn that led to his death, but the music that he played as he travelled around got better and better until it concluded with what was to be his last and best performance at the Nairn Festival in northern Scotland.

After it he returned to his lonely life in Cape Cod.

Steve Voce