Writing this, I’m listening to Kath Meets Humph – side one, track one, “In a Mellotone”, several sorts of nice synchronicity there – the 1957 album which marked the arrival of tenor saxophonist Kathy Stobart, who has died at the age of 89, into the Humphrey Lyttelton band – a musical relationship that would continue on and off, until she formally retired in 2004.
When she wasn’t filling the tenor chair for Humph, Kathy led and played in a number of other groups, often leaning towards a somewhat more modern sound than her full-toned, freebooting work with Lyttelton suggested. In later years, she was a passionate advocate for young musicians, young female musicians in particular, and she was a much-favoured teacher at City Lit in central London.
Most of her obituaries mention that she was responsible for teaching Judi Dench to play saxophone – well, to mime playing saxophone – in Alan Plater’s 2000 television film The Last of The Blond Bombshells. Unremarked is the fact that in 1988, along with fell0w City Lit tutor Joan Cunningham, she provided the soundtrack to my own first ever radio play, Ivy Who. The Ivy in question, was, of course, Ivy Benson, leader of the most famous of all-women bands, and although, radio being radio, we could have used musicians of any gender, my producer, Caroline Raphael, needed no persuasion to go along with my suggestion of approaching Kathy, who, in turn, suggested Joan.
Coming from a musical family, Kathy’s own professional career had begun at the age of 14 in Don Rico’s Ladies Swing Band (in which, as well as playing saxophone, she sang, danced and did impressions of Gracie Fields) although, firmly of the belief that woman should take on men on equal terms, she was keen to point out it was the only all-women outfit she ever belonged to.
