Harry Gold: The Dublin-born bandleader and saxophonist Harry Gold, one of the most popular figures of the post-war Dixieland revival and still touring well into his 90s, has died aged 98.
He had a passion for the bass saxophone, an instrument that has mostly belonged to jazz's jauntiest age - when a brass band feel still clung to much of the music and the double-bass had not yet come into its own. He was also a musician of considerable sophistication who played several saxophones and had a grasp of theory rare for Dixielanders.
Gold was a skilled arranger and a tenacious campaigner for jazz recognition, inside and outside the music business. In the 1940s, he was one of a small group of jazz musicians to shift the Musicians Union policy over pay rates away from its classical bias.
He was born Harry Goldberg, to a Romanian mother, Hetty Schulman, and a German father, Sam Goldberg. The family had first emigrated to England, but lived briefly in Dundrum, where Harry was born, the eldest of six children. His father was a tailor who loved music.
Shortly before the first World War, the family moved to the East End of London. Gold was fascinated by music by his early teens. When he was 14 - then out of school and working all the overtime he could in his father's business - he bought an alto saxophone.
He persuaded his father to take him to hear the Original Dixieland Jazz Band during its residency at the Hammersmith Palais in 1919. Gold recalled that the music's energy had such an effect on him it made up his mind to become a musician there and then.
He learned the saxophone, the clarinet and the oboe under Louis Kimmel at the London College of Music. He responded to an advertisement in the local paper, placed by a then unknown violinist called Joe Loss. Their relationship continued down the years.
He joined a co-operative band that came to be called the Metronomes, spending almost three years with it and marrying his first wife, Annie, during this period.
He later toured with American bandleader Roy Fox, but they parted company in a dispute over contracts and pay. The experience led Gold to become an active trade unionist.
In 1938, he met his second wife, Peggy. He played with the Latvian-born bandleader Oscar Rabin from 1939 to 1942. Gold offered Rabin a band within a band which became Harry Gold's Pieces of Eight and worked in a broadly Dixieland jazz style.
During the latter stages of the second World War, Gold worked for two popular British dance bands, Geraldo's and Bert Ambrose's. Pieces of Eight in 1945 recorded for the first time and regularly appeared on BBC's Music While You Work radio show.
In 1955, Gold turned the band over to his brother Laurie and concentrated on session jobs and office work for a Soho music publisher. He played in a classical saxophone quartet and worked at EMI as a staff arranger, with his son David. When EMI retired an indignant Gold on age grounds in the 1970s, he was ready to start performing all over again. In 1977, he re-formed Pieces of Eight with a new line-up and they toured again into the 1980s, often in eastern Europe.
Though he wound it up again after arguments, he regularly returned to performing, live work helping to fill the gap left by Peggy's death. He is survived by Morton and Leslie, twin sons from his first marriage, and Andrew and David, from his second marriage.
Harry Gold: born February 26th, 1907; died November 13th, 2005