Drummer, improvisor, composer Tony Oxley died on Boxing Day, 2023. I didn’t know him, but I’ve grown up with his music and been fortunate to watch and listen to him play many times. A brilliant, innovative drummer, composer, improvisor. Much of his earlier music remains hard to find (though in recent years labels like Confront, and Discus in Sheffield, have released more of it, old and new). Here I select and reflect on just a few of his many recordings, as a way in, for some, to what he did.

The Baptised Traveller was Oxley’s debut LP as leader, from 1969, its cover features a photo of the lichen-encrusted stones of a dry stone wall. As the first Oxley record that I knew and listened to, this image of lichens/stone/stuff has always hovered somewhere in the back of my mind in association with his sound(s). Revisiting it (inevitably) this last month I’m struck that the wall stones feel connotative of two things: a specific landscape/place – Oxley was from Sheffield, one of the Northern English industrial cities on the edge of the beautiful, angular, expanse of the Peak District (with its 26,000 miles of these dry-stone walls); the second is the idea of walls as boundaries or edges (to be crossed, knocked down, or not). And the luminous green lichens on these stones connote a third thing – symbiotic, cooperative association and mutual interdependence. Oxley’s work feels symbiotic in its collapsing of binaries/boundaries – electronic and acoustic sounds; improvisation and composition; pitches and rhythm; ‘jazz’ and new experimental musics; America and Europe; sound and silence; ‘time-’ and ‘free-’drumming – into integrated, whole interdependencies. I think these ideas of edges collapsed, in the service of each other to create a seamless holistic, continuum, are helpful and important in thinking about his work.

The Tony Oxley Quintet “Stone Garden”
From The Baptised Traveller (CBS, 1969)

Oxley’s technique was forged in the soundworlds of mid-century professional drumming practices: military bands (Black Watch); cabaret bands (Chesterfield); dance bands (on the Queen Mary ocean liner sailing to and from New York); jazz (in the later 1960s he was the house drummer at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club); and also the spaces of collaborative creative networks of experimentation in first Sheffield and then London.

The Baptised Traveller and Oxley’s second and third records – Four Compositions For Sextet (1970) also on CBS, and Ichnos (1971) on RCA Victor – were all on ‘major’ labels. They en-sound the growing associations between a community of musicians – Barry Guy, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Jeff Clyne, Kenny Wheeler and Paul Rutherford – whose ideas have shaped so much music since.

On The Baptised Traveller Charlie Mariano’s composition “Stone Garden” appears alongside three Oxley compositions that all blend structure and improvisation. Saxophonist Mariano was one of the visiting American musicians Oxley worked with at Ronnie Scott’s, night after night in the late 1960s; Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, and pianist Bill Evans were others. The graceful, slow, almost static version of the tune here is an especially salient engagement with American jazz, practically and professionally connected to, but moving (away from) it. Oxley’s hovering-shimmering spacious drumming feels incredibly current, pre-emptive (by half a century) of a lot of the nu jazz ‘timekeeping’ of now.

Even as these remarkable, groundbreaking records emerged, in 1970, along with Derek Bailey, Evan Parker and Michael Walters, Oxley co-founded Incus Records. An archetypical independent label, that would give them control, space and time to publish their radical music, their way.

Tony Oxley “South East Of Sheffield”
From Tony Oxley (Incus, 1975)

Tony Oxley “Combination”
From February Papers (Incus, 1977, and Discus, 2020)

Throughout the 1970s Oxley evolved and extended his drum kit, still based around a Hayman jazz kit (by 1974 the snare for example had been replaced by bongos), into a complex and beautiful, electroacoustic system – the acoustic parts: multiple drums, wooden surfaces, different sized cymbals and cowbells; and the electronic parts: amplification controlled by volume pedals integrated seamlessly into the frame, fused, symbiotically, one in the service of the other.

Oxley made two 1970s records on Incus: Tony Oxley (1975) – which has never been re-issued – featuring a cover by the Scottish painter Alan Davie (who he also collaborated and recorded with in the 1970s), and February Papers (1977, finally re-issued in 2020 by Discus). Both LPs mix group and solo music, structure and improvisation. The latter, beautifully recorded at Vangelis’s London studio, is an earthy, bryological music of filaments and hyphae. Strings and surfaces amplified, hummed and scraped into velvet mosses of micro sounds and brittle clays. The title of a trio track (with guitarist Ian Brighton and violinist Philipp Wachsmann) on side one spells it out: “Sounds Of The Soil 2” (bringing us back to rocks, and lichens).

Oxley’s solos on these two records feel particularly remarkable. “East of Sheffield” and “South East of Sheffield” on side two of Tony Oxley couldn’t be more explicitly located. And the title “Combination” from February Papers reenforces the idea of synthesis, or symbiosis, of percussion and electronics. This solo music offers one blueprint for a kind of electroacoustic improvisation and rhythm study. Maybe too, it’s tempting and interesting to hear (or listen for) a speculative continuum here from the tech/time place (and momentum) of Oxley’s 1970s solo music into the music of snd, Rian Trenor, Paul Abbott, or Autechre, even.

Derek Bailey & Tony Oxley “Beak”
Derek Bailey & Tony Oxley “Rivington”
From Soho Suites (Recordings From 1977 & 1995) (Incus, 1997)

Oxley’s longest collaborative thread was with fellow Sheffielder, master guitarist, and great philosopher of improvisation, Derek Bailey. Their music is an aggregate wealth of rational invention, sonic resources, traditions broached, instrumental control, and dry, tender, wry play. Listen to the mix of acoustic and amplified sounds, and almost infinite attacks, combinations and decays of sounds across the Soho Suites recorded in the Sohos of London in 1977 and New York City in 1995. There’s a zooming-in-and-out-of sonic proportion, tempers, physicalities, and unfolding of time at play that is remarkable and typical of Oxley and Bailey’s work. By the 1995 recordings the electronics are (all?) gone from Oxley’s kit, the humming, ringing, lofting aspects they afforded are now present in the resonances of the acoustic components of his kit.

Howard Riley Trio “Sirens”
From Synopsis (Incus, 1974, and Emanem, 2000)

In 1963 Oxley and Bailey had begun working together in Sheffield as part of a trio – Joseph Holdbrooke – with composer/bassist Gavin Bryars. And this trio context of drums, bass and some form of chordophone – Bailey’s guitar, or piano, especially with Bill Evans, Howard Riley, Paul Bley and later Cecil Taylor – seem a core chord through Oxley’s work.

Riley’s trio with Oxley on percussion and live electronics and bassist Barry Guy (also using amplification) made a series of recordings in the first half of the 1970s – Flight (1971), Synposis (1973) and Overground (1974-5). The latter two discs are available on the late Martin Davidson’s label Emanem and this is music that could (and should) be much better known, I think. A unique trio sound, wide ranging in its balance of lines, smears, pacings, swells flowing between ‘extended’ techniques and more orthodox, classic stuff. Listen, for example, to the opening exchanges of Sirens. Or look at this film from French TV, 3 September 1972. It’s saliently to do with jazz, ‘new music’, and electroacoustic, concréte-y stuff – but very much its own survey (and synthesis) of these various elements. And fresh, still.

Bill Evans Trio “Nardis”
From The 1972 Ljubljana Concert (Balcan Records, 2002)

Four months earlier than the Riley trio footage, on 10 June 1972 Oxley was playing in Ljubljana with Bill Evans’s trio. As a pianist on Miles Davis’s Kind Of Blue, Evans is one of the most celebrated stylists in jazz. Oxley had worked with him previously at Ronnie Scott’s and hearing his drumming in this very ‘proper’ jazz context – on this version of Miles Davis’s “Nardis” – is fascinating. Oxley’s solo and Evans’s and bassist Eddie Gomez’s re-entry is really a powerful thing – hearable as a synecdochic transfusion of radical London ideas back into New York jazz. The seamless continuum again. And, it sounds amazing.

Anthony Braxton Trio “All The Things You Are/Angular Apron/Composition 6a”
From Seven Compositions (Trio) 1989 (hatART, 1990)

By the 1980s Oxley was using less (if any) electronics. Playing, beautifully, a beautiful kit: a particular, varied synthesis of surfaces, drum traditions and proportions. Multiple-sized cymbals, variously taut-skinned snapping-to-thudding drums, a tiny hi-hat, nod-to-Baby-Dodds wood blocks, a giantly distended cowbell of extreme weld, (mostly) no snare, sizzlers-as-sticks: an angular and undulating curation of bespoke surfaces, substances struck and shuddered, steel(s) scraped, whetted.

There is a compelling, ambiguously evocative aspect to many of the sounds he makes. In particular it’s the variety of scale that gives such breadth, scope and space. The ‘classic’ elements of the jazz drum kit are all (conceptually) present and accounted for, but in a uniquely varied way. After a second you know it’s Oxley – precise, powerful and patient.

And this kit seems entirely suited for action in the wave of music he made from the 1980s onwards with American composers looking at composition, improvisation and ‘jazz’ tradition in radical ways. The 1989 Braxton trio’s tri-part medley here – a jazz standard, an Oxley composition written for Braxton, and an (early) Braxton composition – seems an excellent way in. His various collaborations with Bill Dixon, and perhaps most significantly of all Cecil Taylor, are also other examples.

The Feel Trio “Tayassus Pecari”
From 2 Ts For A Lovely (Codanza Records, 2002)

“In the first place, and when all is said and done, The Feel Trio is Cecil Taylor, piano, William Parker, bass, and Tony Oxley, drums" as Fred Moten puts it in his celebrated book The Feel Trio, named after the group. And this trio feels a particular ultimate synthesis of traditions, technologies and tastes, with a huge, wide, swinging scope and spectrum of sonic complexity to its music. Its three releases – Looking (Berlin Version), Celebrated Blazons and 2 Ts For a Lovely T (as well as a film Burning Poles) – are all brilliantly rich documents. Parker’s full, often arco pulsing bass, knots and keeps time the way a tree might, seasonally, hold a year together. Around this bass trunk Taylor and Oxley build systems of multiple frequencies, interactions and dialogic entrainments. Oxley is able to use rolls, ticks, clops, sonic whiskings (-away), whippings-up and loftings to punctuate, bridge and frame the flow or growth of the music. Often the sonic points of this multi-limbed punctuation combine in one metal-wood-skin-(and-implied-space) sound. On “Tayassus Pecari” – the penultimate set from the 10 CD box set 2 Ts For A Lovely T documenting five nights at Ronnie Scott’s in the late summer of 1990 – Oxley’s precise, super fast, filigree ornaments and attacks, (th)whack, rattle and shudder the music forward, into space.

Seeing The Feel Trio play on 26 August 1990 had a shaping impact on me doing music (and imagining what Jimmy Lyons, on saxophone, might do in there). Their heavy, haptic, elegant, wholly-committed, ideas-rich, mind-body music is irresistible. There’s much, much more other great Oxley with Cecil Taylor, from their first 1988 duet encounter Leaf/Palm/Hand, to a 1990 quartet with Barry Guy and Evan Parker called Nailed, or the late(r) 2011 duet, Birdland. Theirs was a remarkable, and profound affinity.

The Tony Oxley Quartet “Quartet 1”
From The Tony Oxley Quartet (Incus, 1993)

Alongside his work with these ‘American greats’ Oxley maintained involvement with musicians at the experimental margins of UK and European improvised music: bands of bristle and pith involving Hugh Metcalfe and Philipp Wachsmann, for example 1981s “Frame”, or the great out of print 1987 The Glider And The Grinder on Bead.

The Tony Oxley Quartet is another example, recorded in Cologne on 2 April 1992. Alongside Oxley and Bailey, Pat Thomas and Matt Wand bring very different amplified and electronic worlds into play: Thomas with Korg Poly-800s, Yamaha sampler and a cheap portable cassette player; Wand with an Akai Sampler, drum machine and tape switchboard. Differently and multiply semantic, multiple cultures, language(s), sounds and technologies flow through, elide, blend, ring, resound, crash into and clamber against crags of musical tradition. Oxley’s Trychel-donk, tack-head-tom-pop, and steel-scrapes, almost slapstick, evoke dramatic, intrepid (or perilous) close shaves. To me, this is a masterpiece of varied, spacious and complex improvisation.

The final time I saw Oxley play he did not drum, but played only electronics (as he does on his two later solo releases Beaming and The New World). The concert was also with Cecil Taylor, in New York, at what turned out to be Taylor’s final public performance on 23 April 2016 in the Whitney Museum’s vast open plan space. A fragile quintet of Taylor, Oxley, drummer Jackson Krall, saxophonist Harri Sjörstörm and cellist Okkyung Lee (her playing was the rhythmic kernel of the 80 minute set – a little like Parker in The Feel Trio). At the end, after minutes and minutes of applause, after the introductions of the band, and more applause, Taylor stood, looked at us all, and added, “…and Mr Oxley”, before thanking us all one very final time, and leaving the stage.

Taylor’s saying this, in this context, at that moment, struck me then, and still does now, as a very powerful acknowledgement of the reach and importance of Tony Oxley’s work. An indication and reminder of how what he did reached across and collapsed boundaries in a seamless, interconnected creative continuum.

Read Ben Watson's 1999 interview with Tony Oxley in The Wire 186 via the online library of back issues.