Jon Hiseman
Prog pays tribute to the greatly missed drummer, composer, producer and bandleader.
Friends and colleagues pay tribute to the drummer, producer and bandleader who died last month.
“What makes it all the more shocking is we were working together as normal and looking forward to the future, making lots of plans,” says Clem Clempson. By his own reckoning, the Colosseum and Humble Pie guitarist has spent the best part of 50 years working with Jon Hiseman, who died in June this year following his diagnosis of a brain tumour.
Clempson’s voice frequently chokes with emotion as he recalls the man he was proud to call his friend. The pair had kept in touch after Colosseum played their farewell concert in 2015, and it was Hiseman who came up with the idea of forming JCM with Clempson and Colosseum’s bassist and vocalist Mark Clarke, with the aim of recording an album that would pay tribute to some of the players they had all worked with over the years, but who had since passed away.
It was the sudden deaths of Larry Coryell and Allan Holdsworth in 2017 that spurred Hiseman into honouring their memories, as well as those of Jack Bruce, Steve Marriott, Gary Moore, Ollie Halsall, Graham Bond and Dick Heckstall-Smith.
“Because Mark Clarke lives in New York, Jon and myself were doing most of the production and planning for the album,” Clempson says. “We were working together almost every day really from the middle of October last year to the middle of February. We worked very hard, remixing things over and over until we were both completely happy, and I’m so glad that we did that.”
With tracks touching upon material Hiseman had played during his time with Graham Bond, Colosseum, Jack Bruce, Tempest, Colosseum II and beyond, the album can be seen as a kind of selected highlights of a busy, diverse and productive career spent in the pursuit of musical excellence. Clempson is especially pleased with the results.
“It would have been quite easy to have knocked the songs out. They were all great songs anyway and we could have done them very quickly in the studio, but we really put a lot into it and as it’s turned out to be Jon’s last ever recording, I’m glad it’s something we can be proud of.”
Although it wasn’t their intention to form a full-on band, interest in
JCM, particularly in Germany, meant that what had been intended as one or two gigs to launch the album quickly became an extensive European tour. However, it was early into the tour that alarm bells about Hiseman’s health sounded for Clempson and Clarke, when they noticed an uncharacteristic drop in his energy levels.
“Suddenly he didn’t seem to have much power or enthusiasm, which was very strange… It was obvious on the second gig he was struggling with that, and it got worse and worse as the gigs went on,” sighs Clempson.
Hiseman’s passing robbed music of an internationally respected player and bandleader. Best known as the animating force behind Colosseum, who emerged onto the burgeoning progressive rock scene with albums such as Those Who Are About To Die Salute You and Valentyne Suite, both from 1969, and 1970’s Daughter Of Time, the band did much to define the era with a vibrant blend of jazz, blues and rock.
“He was a relentless driving force behind the band and although he was very rarely credited as a composer of any of the music, somehow he was always directing it,” says Clempson. “Sometimes it could drive me crazy, to be honest!
“We could spend days or even weeks in rehearsals developing a piece of music and Jon would constantly be trying to achieve something more with it, pushing the composers forward all the time, which is really how something like Valentyne Suite came into being. That would never have existed without Jon, even though he actually didn’t write any of the music. It was him directing it in the background all the time. When we thought it was done, he would say,
‘Yes but what about some backing vocals?’ or, ‘What could we do there?’ He was always pushing the rest of the band to surpass ourselves.”
If you talk about Hiseman with those who knew him well, they’ll
“He was a relentless driving force behind the band and although he was very rarely credited as a composer of any of the music, somehow he was always directing it.”
Clem Clempson
“He was a true leader that we all looked up to and someone we all turned to for lots of reasons outside of music.”
Clem Clempson
inevitably mention just how driven he was as a player and as an individual.
“I first met him in 1962 and he was playing drums in the house band of a club I was co-managing,” recalls Colin Richardson, who would later become Colosseum’s manager. “He was 19 or 20 and working at Unilever and gigging at the same time. He wasn’t getting a lot of sleep: he’d go off and play two gigs on a Friday night, an all-nighter on Saturday and a gig on Sunday. So on Monday morning he’d be knackered!”
Finally quitting his day job in order to join Graham Bond’s group, he eventually worked with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, recording the acclaimed Bare Wires in 1968, alongside saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith and bassist Tony Reeves. At the end of his time with Mayall, he knew his days as an itinerant jazz player were finished. Speaking to Nucleus trumpeter Ian Carr, he admitted: “I couldn’t really face going back to playing in dreadful pubs to 40 people and doing a day job.”
His solution was to form Colosseum – in his words, “To do all the things that a rock group does, but to play music that was as complex as anything that anybody was playing. And I proved to my own satisfaction that it could be done.”
Richardson also recalls Hiseman’s exacting standards when it came to delivering what the drummer called ‘the goods’. “The band was made up of people who had a very high regard and respect for each other. I often went backstage after watching the show from the audience to pick up the vibe and instead of finding them all in high spirits, often they’d be arguing about things going wrong. The audience loved it and while I’m not going to say audience reaction didn’t matter to Jon, because of course it did, for him it was about playing well. It wasn’t enough for the audience to love them: if they didn’t feel they played well then there’d be an inquest about it afterwards.”
Hiseman’s restless personality and ferocious work ethic ensured he was never idle when Colosseum juddered to a halt in 1971. He was always coming up with lyrics for songs that had yet to be written and he developed his skills as a record producer of merit early on in his career. He told this writer that when it came to the mixing of Dick Heckstall-Smith’s criminally underrated 1972 solo release, A Story Ended, he took to producing like a duck to water.
His production on the muchrevered Ian Carr album Belladonna, from the same year, similarly benefits from the clarity and muscularity of the sound Hiseman brought to the studio. Paying attention to the likes of Tom Newman and Geoff Emerick had paid off, he revealed.
More recently, one of the very last productions he worked on was the forthcoming new Soft Machine album, Hidden Details, recorded in December 2017 at his Temple Music studio in Sutton and due for release later this year.
I count myself lucky to have been able to talk to Jon after being asked to write liner notes for 1973’s self-titled Tempest debut, featuring
Allan Holdsworth, and
1974’s Living In Fear, with the equally mercurial Ollie Halsall replacing Holdsworth, who had departed for Soft Machine. Tempest were an audaciously powerful outfit and Hiseman proudly recalled just how effective they could be.
“We did some great gigs, including a support gig to Yes
in a 10,000-seater in Germany and we went on and we killed them! We had several shows like that where we went on as support to bigger groups and we blew them off as they were watching us from the wings. You could often hear them saying that they didn’t feel like going on after us. But that’s no good if you can’t make a living, and we weren’t selling the records.”
An ability to read a balance sheet as fluently as he felt where the beat should go in a song gave Hiseman a practical and completely unsentimental approach to running a band. Richardson recalls that after every gig, while others may be relaxing, Hiseman would, without fail, get the computer out, open a spreadsheet and do the band’s accounts. “He was the one who took care of the business, paying the royalties and doing the VAT returns.”
As a drummer, composer, producer or bandleader, Jon Hiseman was obviously passionate about his chosen career, but the real love of his life was always his wife, sax player Barbara Thompson, whom he married in
1967 and with whom he collaborated in Paraphernalia, the United Jazz + Rock Ensemble and numerous other projects. Following her diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease in the late 90s, it was thought she’d never work live again, but her appearances in the reformed Colosseum in 2004 and their farewell concert in 2015 were a source of great pride and unstinting admiration from Hiseman. It’s no accident that his favourite track,
Foyers Of Fun, from Tempest’s debut, was written with Barbara in mind: ‘There’s no place I’ve not left in great haste/For the journey back home.’
Colin Richardson remarks that their lifelong partnership was a symbiotic relationship that worked on every level. “There were times in their married life where they didn’t see much of each other. Barbara was playing in Paraphernalia, Jon was in Colosseum II or Tempest. Then they were together in the United Jazz + Rock Ensemble. The best period was when Jon joined Paraphernalia and they had a system worked out where Barbara would record an album and then tour it.
Then the next year, the UJ+RE would record and tour and then back to Paraphernalia, so it meant they were always available for each other.
“The fact is that for the last 20 years he’s also been caring for Barbara, whose Parkinson’s disease has gradually been getting worse. One of the things he said in his last email to me was, ‘I can’t go anywhere. I’ve got to take care of Barbara.’ That sums up Jon in a nutshell.”
Richardson, now aged 81, like others in Hiseman’s immediate circle of friends and family, is simply stunned at his passing. “I can’t stop thinking about him and I’m gutted that I will never ever be able to have another conversation with Jon.”
In 2010, Martyn Hanson’s biography of Hiseman, Playing The Band, was published. Coming in at nearly
500 pages, it was a weighty tome, but given the musical connections accrued over 60 years, it needed to be. In it, Hiseman said: “I… got the bug when I was in my teens and just went for it – seldom looking left or right, never looking down and just ‘playing the band’. Life seemed pretty simple to me, in that every decision was made with the sole purpose of getting the current project brought home to a successful conclusion… then moving on to the next idea which was already taking shape.”
Inspired by John Coltrane drummer Elvin Jones, mad about Mozart, an avid reader whose favourite books included Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Jon Hiseman was a proud dad, devoted husband and beloved by fans who appreciated the time he would spend after a gig, signing albums and chatting.
Clem Clempson sums him up in this way: “Jon was one of the kindest and most gentle people you could ever wish to meet. I think a lot of people who worked with him stayed in touch with him after their working relationship ended, often calling him to seek his advice. Gary Moore did on many occasions, I know. He was a true leader that we all looked up to and someone that we all turned to for lots of reasons outside of music. It’s been wonderful to have been so closely associated with him for most of my career and he will continue to be a good influence on me for the rest of it.”