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The trumpeter Eddie “Tan Tan” Thornton, who has died aged 94, made the melodies and cadences of his native Jamaica a subtle undercurrent of London’s swinging 60s music scene. As a member of Georgie Fame’s Blue Flames, Thornton contributed to the brass section’s bright and forceful fanfares that helped Getaway top the British charts in June 1967, a year after his furious trumpet was part of the driving counter-melody on the Beatles’ Got to Get You into My Life.
Widely admired for his musical adaptability and for his dependable and easygoing personality, Thornton collaborated with some of the era’s greatest talents, including the Animals, Sandie Shaw and Jimi Hendrix (who lodged with him in London for a time). He played on the Rolling Stones’ She’s a Rainbow and on the Small Faces’ eponymous second album, whose bittersweet closing number, Eddie’s Dreaming, was inspired by Thornton’s longing for Jamaica. He subsequently became an important part of the British reggae scene, notably in the horn section that helped Aswad to achieve greater fame.
One of five children born to William Thornton, a butcher, and his wife, Maude, Eddie was raised in a devout Catholic household in Spanish Town, one of Jamaica’s largest cities. After his father’s early death, Eddie was admitted to the Alpha boys’ school, a Catholic charitable institution run by the Sisters of Mercy in downtown Kingston, where many of Jamaica’s greatest musicians learned their craft. He joined the school band on tuba, switching to trumpet a few weeks later.
At Alpha, Thornton’s contemporaries included the trombonist Don Drummond, his protege, Rico Rodriguez, and the saxophonist Ruben Alexander. Thornton began his training with the scores of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, and was later schooled in the big-band swing of Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Alpha was notoriously disciplinarian, but Thornton found an ally in the jazz-loving nun Sister Ignatius, who made him a school captain; they remained in contact long after he left and Thornton often described Alpha as his salvation.
When he graduated at the age of 16, Sister Ignatius helped him land a placement in Roy Coburn’s weekly residency at the beachside Bournemouth Club, and the guitarist Ernest Ranglin later drafted him into the Eric Deans Orchestra, which played at the upmarket Colony Club six nights a week. After an extended engagement with the group in Nassau, Thornton returned to Jamaica with the intention of travelling to the US, but President Harry S Truman’s immigration policies curtailed the plan. Instead, he headed to London in 1954 to join his girlfriend, Dorothy Coleman, who had settled in Brixton and whom he later married.
Soon after his arrival, the saxophonist Ossie Scott, who knew Thornton from Alpha, drafted him into the Caribbean Swing Band, which toured extensively in Germany; back in London, a jam session at the Flamingo brought him into the Blue Flames.
Thornton was an ensemble player at heart, rather than a flashy soloist, and in the mid-1970s, he broadened his musical palette. After touring with the disco supergroup Boney M, playing on albums by Andy Fairweather-Low and on Peter King’s debut Afrobeat album Miliki Sound (1975), Thornton became a top reggae session player, appearing on Delroy Washington’s albums I Sus (1976) and Rasta (1977), and on Rodriguez’s instrumental LP Man From Wareika.
Thornton was part of the 4th Street Orchestra, the house band employed by the inventive producer Dennis Bovell, and after playing on the Sons of Jah’s 1979 album Burning Black and the Cimarons’ Freedom Street in 1980, Thornton joined Aswad in time for their debut album for CBS, New Chapter.
During the 1980s Thornton also often played in King Sounds’ backing band, the Israelites. He was part of Pere Ubu’s LP Song of the Bailing Man and General Public’s album All The Rage, but reggae was his main focus and some of the biggest names in the genre benefited from his input, including Dennis Brown, Horace Andy, Mikey Dread, Desmond Dekker, Owen Gray and Benjamin Zephaniah, as well as the producer Mad Professor and the singer-songwriter Floyd Lloyd Seivright.
In the early 90s Thornton became a founding member of Jazz Jamaica, the hybrid project initiated by Ranglin’s nephew Gary Crosby, and in the early 2000s he joined Ska Cubano, which mixed Cuban and Jamaican styles. He played on sessions for Super Furry Animals, Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen, and became a part of the touring band for Kitty, Daisy & Lewis.
For many years Thornton also fronted a lively weekly session at the Effra pub in Brixton.
He is survived by his second wife, May, whom he married in 1973, and their sons, Jason, Peter and Ross; three daughters, Corolyn, Janet and Theresa, from his marriage to Dorothy, which ended in divorce; and a daughter, Angela, from a previous relationship.
