Davie Webster and John Rangecroft

With the re-release of my first Talisker album, Dreaming of Glenisla – and there are more from the vaults on the way – I feel it's time to pay tribute to two horn players who played a big part in the development of that music.

They brought an urgency to the blend of Scottish traditional music and jazz we were forging.

I first met Davie at the Phun City festival a very, very long time ago. I was playing with the Amazing Band, and afterwards I was wandering about and came across a huge inflatable dome with some wailing saxes inside. It was Davie and Davey Payne who later went on to play with Ian Dury and the Blockheads.

We had a wee jam, and Davie and I began playing together in London. He was well into spirit music, especially Albert Ayler's music, but he also turned me on to Hank Williams. Or should that be "and he turned me on to Hank Williams"?

And even then, in the 1970s, Davie was into synthesising music from all over the place in what he called "Folk Music of Planet Earth." When he was on that trip, his music rarely sounded like something identifiably Indian, say, or African. He just rolled up all the influences into one thing.  His music was also out and in at the same time.

I learned a lot from Davie and he helped me along the way with his imagination and enthusiasm. Some of his ideas were too out for the time, and only made more sense to people years later.

He also captured the essence of Scottish gallus humour, and put it into some of his own over-the-top projects. I remember him doing an amazingly powerful and comic-tragic version of Stormy Monday to a surprised and stunned audience in a pub in Richmond.

John shared some of Davie's qualities, especially in his spirit-playing. There was a period when we seemed to play little else than pibrochs – the ancient Scottish bagpipe laments. Davie had one kind of spirit vibe, and John had another.

John was much more "musical" than either of us, and that encouraged me to practice harder.  But he was never a technique-freak. 

It was always the drive, the energy and the passion which was important to John. He put his stamp on pieces like "MacCrimmon's Lament" with his tenor sax. And he was tremendously fluid and supple on clarinet, where his London-Irish background was allowed mournful emphasis.

John – who played in the Royal Air Force band at the same time as Paul Rutherford and John Stevens – could also handle all the jigs and reels we played with panache.

But it was the big music - the ceol mor in the Scottish tradition - he soared the highest perhaps.

These two horn players represented a way of playing that was decidedly edgy and in-your-face. Nobody had explored and extended Scottish traditional music like this before.

So I salute their comradeship, their drive, and inventiveness with a wee dram – of Talisker.