" data-original-title="" title="">Tubby Hayes in 2022 stands among the tallest. Hayes, too, is one of a handful of British musicians of his generation who have been practically deified by some of the emergent young players who are currently invigorating the British scene.

Hayes died tragically young, aged thirty-eight, in 1973, from heart disease exacerbated by heroin use. So his discography, though a decent size, is not massive. Previously unknown recordings continue to be unearthed, however, and The Complete Hopbine '69 is the latest. It is not, strictly speaking, unknown: much of the material has already surfaced, spread over around half a dozen different albums. But this is the first time all of it—recorded at a December 1969 one-nighter at the Hopbine jazz club, in actuality the back room of a pub in northwest London—has been collected and presented complete and in the order in which it was performed that night by the Tubby Hayes Quartet.

It is also the first time the material has been made available in such pristine audio—the sound is really, really great; it could have been recorded in a London studio last week rather than on a Revox reel-to-reel by the Hopbine's soundman some five decades ago. The first-generation tape was found in late 2020 among the possessions of the Hayes Quartet's bassist,