The jazz drummer and composer Tony Kinsey, who has died aged 97, was a major figure in the transformation of the postwar modern jazz landscape in Britain.
Kinsey and contemporaries such as John Dankworth and Ronnie Scott were intent on creating their own versions of jazz modernism from the late 1940s onwards. Inspired as they were by the bebop innovators Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and in Kinsey’s case by the drummer Max Roach, they went on to create original music of genuine validity.
