WHAT do Tony Green and Bra Gaynair have in common? Both are Alpha Boys’ School alums, as well as saxophonists.

Wilton ‘Bra’ Gaynair was a jazz musician whose primary instrument was the tenor saxophone.

Tony Greene is another great musical talent from a later generation from the campus of Alpha Boys’ School where the teaching of music in Jamaica began in 1892, under bandmaster Sergeant Harris. This was when the school’s band started as a Drum and Fife Corps.

Like Bra Gaynair, Tony Greene is a tenor saxophonist whose long musical journey started at the Alpha Boys’ School in 1971. Last Sunday afternoon, he, along with his quartet was featured in a concert staged by the Jamaica Music Museum at the Lecture Theatre, Institute of Jamaica, in celebration of the music of Jamaica’s saxophone great Bra Gaynair.

Billed as Blue Bogey, Tony Greene tipped his hat to Gaynair with some of the favourites standards taken from the legendary hornsman’s album Africa Calling. Greene’s mastery of his wind instrument brought joy to the small gathering of some of Gaynair’s faithful followers, as he delivered Kingston Bypass, Wilton’s Mood, Deborah, Joy Spring, Rianyag and The Way You Look Tonight.

Tony, as green as he is, recaptured the halcyon days of the late maestro who, as Herbie Miller noted, also possessed a passionate hard blowing style that was big, full of variation, and extremely sophisticated.

It is small wonder that this Alpha-trained musician’s technical ability was enviable as his playing demonstrated a combination of jazz’s intellectual capacity as well as its emotional instincts, which only the most advanced practitioners of this art form seem to possess.

After a six-year stint in the Jamaica Military Band, Greene fine-tuned the practical side of his craft at the Royal College of Music in London where composers Trevor Sharpe and Henry Mancini were among his tutors.

Embracing Jamaican pop music, he first joined the Bare Essentials Band before moving on to the jazz-oriented Sonny Bradshaw Seven.

He would later switch to the Roots Radics, the then backing outfit for Gregory Isaacs. Then before breaking away to pursue his solo career, he became a member of Lloyd Parkes and We The People Band.

If there is a difference between Greene and Gaynair, it is that Greene, who has an album called Evolution, is now evolving into an author. His passion for his instrument and the institution which nurtured him have led him to write a book he hopes to publish before the end of this year.

“The name of the book will be Reflection of Greene. The album that will come with it is called Mind Blowing,” he told the Sunday Observer.

“It took me three years to research, and I’ve completed the book now, and it is now in the editing process,” he added. He then went on to explain what inspired him to write this book. “The history of the music, where it really started and what really happened before even my time, in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s, in terms of that generation of hornsmen putting in the system what we as hornsmen today playing.

“We try to analyse what used to happen in the 20s, 30s, 40s. We used to copy everything from North America. Because remember, we never had ska or reggae yet, so we used to copy everything from the North American style world. Everybody wanted to be the Charlie Parker or the Coleman Harkins or the Lester Young or whatsoever, you understand.”

Greene who celebrated his 53rd birthday on March 18, added that at the same time there were not enough opportunities here in Jamaica in terms of studio facilities and so on, so a lot of the pioneers migrated to Europe and the United States.

“One of them Wilton Gaynair, to me he is one of the greatest hornsmen. Belonging to the second generation of hornsmen, he started to play 1940. He went to Alpha 1938 and left in 1944. People who were in school at that time were like Joe Harriot, Little G McNair, Bobby Ellis and Headley Bennett,” Greene noted.

A member of the Eric Deans Orchestra, he eventually formed his own group, the Wilton Gaynair All-Stars. It featured Don Drummond, Seymour ‘Foggy’ Mullings (former politician), Janet Enwright and Cluet Johnson. The band held residency at the famous Bournemouth Club before he went to London in 1955, after which he decided to settle in Germany because of the availability of work.

“What do I hope to achieve from this? I don’t see nobody with this history, the one man who did have it and could really relate this to us passed on — Sonny Bradshaw. So I decided by documenting it by writing the book,” Tony Greene explained.