Two of the grand old men of the English anti-establishment first met when Mike Horovitz and Jeff Nuttall stumbled from a poetry forum – the Commonwealth Poets’ Conference – in Cardiff in the early 1960s. Heading for a summer evening party, Nuttall broke into a improvised mouth trumpet rendition of Louis Armstrong’s “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue” and Horovitz, recognising this informal extemporisation, returned an off the cuff vocal solo of his own. In that moment a long and fertile friendship was born.

Nuttall’s widely mourned death, back in February, finally brought a close to that enduring association but Horovitz, as active a poet, musician, mover and shaker as his late friend, was never likely to let the man’s passing go unrecorded or his body of work unremembered. Back on May Day 2004, a wake was staged at St John’s Church, Waterloo, London but that ephemeral moment is not the only means by which the author of that oft-quoted classic Bomb Culture has been recalled.

Horovitz’s long-running and versatile imprint, New Departures, has produced a double tribute to Nuttall in the form of a slim anthology and also a compilation of recorded fragments, reminding the listener that this Renaissance man of the home-grown underground, this Falstaffian roisterer of the counterculture, was not merely a distinctive versifier and a richly voiced reader but also a wide-ranging commentator on matters artistic and musical, a skilful artist and vivid raconteur plus a more than competent cornet-blower in the trad jazz mode.

The Wake on Paper dedicated to “a polymath extraordinaire” has been overseen by Horovitz and features a short yet warm-hearted memoir of Nuttall then gathers an entertaining pot pourri of pictures, poems, photographs which etch, if sketchily, a fully and energetically lived life. For those who are aware of Nuttall, this picaresque study is appealing; for those who have only a slight idea of his achievement, the obituaries that appeared on his death – including Horovitz’s own splendid account in the Guardian – might be a more useful starting point than this.

The CD I like more as this brings together some sixteen cuts from a remarkable range of sources most, I’m sure, unavailable elsewhere. On the opening track, he joins a galaxy of key players in the transforming pleasures of the Sixties, re-united at a Jazz Poetry Superjam convened in the capital in the mid-1990s.
Nuttall’s horn intermingles with Lol Coxhill’s soprano sax, Horovitz’s Anglo-saxophone and Pete Brown’s drums, on an earthy rendition of Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’”.

After that we have a couple of forays with another Nuttall combo, Brenda’s Boyfriends, a reference to an Edinburgh pub landlady, by the way, a number of poems including the Dylan Thomas-like “Return Trip” and the more politically charged “Conservative Blues” and part of a conversation that saw the writer re-visit aspects of Bomb Culture in a live 1984 interview at Chelsea Arts Club.

The pleasing thing about this dual valediction is that there is a useful link made between the two – poems which Nuttall’s recites on disc are also presented on paper while, for instance, a splendid piece of cartooning caricature captures several of the musicians who joined him on his jazz adventures over several decades.

But these items can only be a starting point to understand the promiscuous Nuttall oeuvre and Horovitz recognises this, recommending also Jeff Nuttall: A Celebration, published by Arc in Todmorden, Lancashire, and Selected Poems, issued by Salt Publishing of Cambridge, not to mention, the out-of-print, but still available via web book search sites, Bomb Culture which condenses so many of the hopes and highs of the times when this writer was at the forefront of an era of changing consciousness.

Note: The book (£5+£1 p&p)) and the CD (£10+£2 p&p) are available from New Departures, PO Box 9819, London W11 2GQ. Enquiries: brocolage92@hotmail.com or visit www.connectotel.com/PoetryOlympics