In 1960, Coe was fined £5 for assaulting a policeman and £10 for possessing an offensive weapon (an air pistol). “Within a few months of his joining,” Lyttelton recalled, “Tony Coe was regularly stopping the show with assured and wildly extrovert alto solos.”īut he was clearly not the easiest band member to manage. Coe’s early work had mainly been on the clarinet, but it was his saxophone playing with Lyttelton that established his reputation. His breakthrough came in 1957 when Humphrey Lyttelton invited him to replace Bruce Turner as the alto saxophonist in his eight-piece band. After time spent in France with the Micky Bryan Band, he rejoined Joe Daniels. At the Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys, he played in the school’s trad jazz band and after leaving aged 17 joined Joe Daniels’s jazz band.ĭuring National Service in the Army he played clarinet in a military band and saxophone with his unit’s dance band. Young Tony learnt the clarinet but taught himself tenor sax.

George also had his own small dance band which played at local events.

As Ronald Atkins observed in The Guardian, Coe’s reputation had suffered because he was so versatile: “A sweepingly extravagant tenor saxophonist in the tradition of Duke Ellington’s Paul Gonsalves, he complicates matters by mixing with free-blowers and by writing pieces in which abstract improvising meets the sharp end of straight music.”Īnthony George Coe was born on Novemin Canterbury, where his father George ran a silk screen printing business with his brother after the Second World War.

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