Tony Haynes (English composer)

Did You Know?

• Haynes began his musical career in 1954 as a 13-year-old piano and trombone player in dance bands earning £2–3 per show.
• In the late 1960s he visited Portugal as a working musician and heard Fado and Bossa nova from Lisbon students and a Brazilian musician.
• He taught music degree students at Trinity College London and made several programmes on jazz for the BBC.

Theatrical work

After working as musical director at Nottingham Playhouse and Liverpool's Everyman Theatre, Haynes went on to create music for every major regional repertory theatre and touring company in the UK, among them the Royal Shakespeare Company. He produced complete scores for plays by politically minded writers like John Arden, Christopher Bond, and Adrian Mitchell, blending music with challenging subject matter and a clear political stance. His work also included music for Bertolt Brecht productions at Newcastle Playhouse and Leicester Haymarket Theatre, and he helped found the Belt & Braces theatre company.

In 1981, he composed the original score for Mourning Pictures at the Tricycle theatre, a play by Honor Moore staged by Monstrous Regiment Theatre Company. The Observer called the music a haunting and leavening backdrop to the purposeful detailing of disease. BBC Radio 4 broadcast the play in May 1982.

RedBrass

In the autumn of 1975, Tony Haynes launched RedBrass, a ten-piece British jazz rock group that grew out of the left-wing theatre company Belt & Braces Roadshow. Haynes's songwriting, known for its social and political themes, made the band a familiar fixture on the jazz circuit, drawing acclaim from both Melody Maker and The Times. The lineup featured trumpeter Dick Pearce, saxophonists Pete Hurt and Chris Biscoe, and vocalists Heather Jones and Annie Lennox.

RedBrass put out a single album, Silence Is Consent, in 1976 on the Riverside Recordings label, followed by extensive touring before the group disbanded in 1979. Their track 'Sunspots' later appeared on the 2018 compilation A New Life Vol II: Independent and regional jazz in Great Britain 1968–1988. The band's signature sound came from Haynes's inventive vocal arrangements for three female singers, blending Latin percussion, jazz-influenced brass, a rock rhythm section, a cappella harmonies, and unusual instruments like glockenspiel, tubular bells, timbales, and spoons.

Grand Union Orchestra

Grand Union Orchestra began as The Grand Union, a touring music theatre company launched in 1982 by Tony Haynes, John Cumming, Julie Eaglen, and David Bradford. Right from the start, the orchestra was multicultural, drawing musicians from across the globe, many of them first-generation migrants living in London. The group was created to mirror the UK’s shifting cultural makeup and to give young musicians from varied backgrounds a chance to work alongside top-tier jazz players. Its concerts and albums feature black, white, and Asian jazz musicians and singers, representing a wide cross-section of communities.

As artistic director, Haynes had a talent for mixing different genres and styles, and he adapted the big band format for community education projects, cultural exchanges, large-scale commissions, and collaborations. He wrote and arranged most of the orchestra’s music, earning praise for creating work that bridged ethnic divides, especially in exploring the connections between traditional West African music, Latin sounds, and jazz. His approach combined classical training, jazz improvisation, songwriting, and lyric theatre. Recurring themes in his compositions included exile, migration, the civil rights movement, the silk trade, and the slave trade. The Guardian compared his 1989 piece Freedom Calls to a song-cycle.

Haynes described his work as a kind of dialogue between historical and contemporary ideas. He pointed to the Battle of Cable Street as an example, noting it carries modern echoes of rising fascism, anti-Jewish sentiment, and anti-Muslim intolerance, while ensuring those events are remembered and dramatized in a way that feels current. For many years, he collaborated with Bengali communities in Tower Hamlets, east London, and with Bangladeshi musicians in Dhaka.

Several of his compositions have been broadcast in full on BBC Radio 3, including The Rhythm Of Tides (1997), Now Comes The Dragon’s Hour (1999), Where The Rivers Meet (2000), If Paradise (2003), and The Golden Road, The Unforgiving Sea (2011). In 2007, as Grand Union marked its 25th anniversary, Haynes was featured on BBC Radio 3’s Jazz File programme.

Campaigning work

Tony Haynes authored the report Music In Between, published in 1988 by the Gulbenkian Foundation. The report examined the training, rehearsal, performance, and promotional opportunities available to creative performing musicians, with a focus on popular and commercial genres like rock, jazz, theatre music, film and television music, songwriting, and folk music. Haynes contended that these musical fields receive insufficient recognition and support from UK arts bodies such as the Arts Council of Great Britain.

A key finding was that funding bodies tend to finance the creation of specific works, whereas popular musicians need help not at the point of creation but in reaching audiences. Haynes was a longtime advocate for community-centred arts organisations. In a 1985 letter to The Guardian, he criticised then-Arts Council chairman William Rees-Mogg, arguing that government arts funding should not favour major national institutions at the expense of small, artist-led groups.

From 1984 to 1988, Haynes served on the National Executive Committee of the Musicians' Union, where he pushed for the Union to offer its members extensive professional services and practical support. He also held the view that, given Britain's changing demographics, migrant and migrant-descended musicians can and should exert a profound artistic and educational influence on British culture. He called for greater recognition of work created for locally diverse communities.