During the war Bobby was evacuated to stay with relatives at Ferryden, Montrose on Scotland’s east coast a locality which still holds a place in Bobby’s affections.
Bobby’s father started him on lessons on alto saxophone at 12 years of age, teaching him not only music notation and saxophone technique but introducing him to harmony, teaching him chord progressions at the piano.
Bobby then moved south, taking a three year course at Chichester College of Further Education studying keyboard harmony. He then spent a spell at the RAF School of Music in Uxbridge, studying clarinet.
On leaving the RAF, Bobby entered the world of the Palais bands, including spells with Malcolm Mitchell and Vic Lewis. His tenure with Lewis included a trip on the liners to New York where Bobby, emerging one afternoon from his hotel recognised a passing Lester Young. Bobby picked up enough courage to approach his idol and spent the next two hours in a bar introducing his fellow band members to the great man.
Bobby’s recording career started in 1956 when he joined the legendary Buddy Featherstonhaugh’s piano-less quintet, the line-up of which featured Kenny Wheeler on trumpet. Bobby was by now playing tenor saxophone, the instrument to which he has devoted himself to the present day.
In the early 1960′s Bobby was recruited by Tony Crombie for his latest band, in the ranks of which Bobby began a long association with the great British pianist Stan Tracey.
Along with Bobby and Stan, drummer Laurie Morgan was a member of a loose co-operative of musicians and poets, including Michael Horowitz, who presented jazz and poetry concerts under the title of New Departures. In a bedsit with Laurie Morgan and using an old tape recorder, Bobby began work on his famous Culloden Moor Suite which culminated in its performance by the New Departures Quartet and a 14 piece orchestra. That quartet recorded an album of the same name in 1964.
This was followed in 1965 by the Stan Tracey Quartet’s recording of an suite of pieces inspired by Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood. In a 1998 poll by Jazz UK magazine, readers chose this record as their all-time favourite British jazz album.
It is testament to the musical creativity of Bobby and Stan and the strength of the latter’s compositions that despite the thousands of records made in the intervening 33 years, this record was chosen.
He was a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral Choir School, then became interested in jazz after coming across a recording by Dizzy Gillespie, which he found 'very exciting'.[2]
He took up drums in his early teens: 'I suppose the thing that really knocked me out about jazz was the rhythm, so I thought if I'm going to be in a jazz band I want to be the drummer.' [3] He later had lessons from former Miles Davis drummer Philly Joe Jones, who lived in London in 1967–9, and he was also very influenced by another of Davis's drummers, Tony Williams.[4]
He read Greats at Oxford, where he put together a quartet with tenor player Pat Crumly and pianist Brian Priestley which played with visitors including saxophonists Bobby Wellins, Tony Coe and Joe Harriott, and blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon.[5]
In 1968 he began a PhD course in philosophy at London University, living in a house which was also home to bass player Ron Mathewson, alto sax player Ray Warleigh, trombonist Chris Pyne and pianist Mick Pyne. Mathewson was then playing in the quartet of tenor player Tubby Hayes, and asked Wells if he'd being interested in joining the group. He arranged an audition with Hayes and guitarist Louis Stewart, at which 'We played a blues, and Tubby looked at Ron and Louis and then said, "Do you want the job?” Want the job. With the greatest jazz quartet in England?'[6] He abandoned his PhD and became a professional musician.
The pianist Gordon Beck has stated that in his opinion 'The union of Ron Mathewson and Spike Wells in Tubby's quartet with Stewart is the single greatest rhythm section in all of British jazz.'
In 2004 Wells reflected on his hiring by Hayes:
It was an intuitive thing, a bit like people say about Miles Davis. He hired you because he heard something about your playing that he wanted, and as long as you provided it, he let you do what you wanted … There were new freedoms opened up in the concept of how to play together rather than just accompanying. We were all spinning ideas off each other in a rather more democratic way and that was what Tubby liked to get into at that point. I think he was intent of freeing up the overall concept. And he found that inspired his own playing.[7]As well as playing with Hayes, in both his quartet and his big band, until the saxophonist's death in 1973,[8] he spent a year in Humphrey Lyttelton's band, and also worked with many visiting soloists at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club, including Stan Getz (with whom he also toured Scandinavia), Roland Kirk, Art Farmer, Johnny Griffin and James Moody.[9]
After five years' study he also qualified as a solicitor, and then practised law for 22 years, eventually working as in-house legal adviser for Lloyds Bank. He had drifted away from his faith in his teens, but in his early forties he had a 'reconversion experience' and then developed a strong sense of vocation which led him to become a deacon in the Church of England when he was 49 and a year later to take early retirement from the bank and become a stipendiary curate at St Peter's church, Brighton. As his music-making was still important to him, he later went into non-stipendiary ministry, and now works as both a priest and a musician.[10]
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