In the 1930s state-school boys were a great rarity at Oxford

In the 1930s, state-school boys were a great rarity at Oxford. When war came, Johnson remembered being interviewed by a tutor about regiments. Others went into the Guards; he was allotted to a modest Midlands county infantry regiment, where he found that nobody had even heard of Lancaster, confusing it with Manchester. But, if he had any chip on his shoulder, he always wore it lightly. At Worcester one of his fellow undergraduates was Richard Adams, well known now for his rabbit epic Watership Down. Adams would come down to breakfast with a hangover, saying: “Johnson, make me laugh.”After the Second World War, Johnson spent some time at the great Paris college the Ecole Normale Sup?eure, forcing ground of many French writers and politicians, especially on the left.

At the annual ball, he met his future wife, Madeleine R?llard, who was at the equivalent college for women. He also met Louis Althusser, Marxist philosopher and apologist for Stalin Althusser is now notorious for having killed his wife. He came to stay with the Johnsons in London just before the murder A sleepwalker, he already was obviously unbalanced. Madeleine – “wisely”, as she said – didn’t stay in the house alone with him.In his retirement, Johnson developed a delightful line in obituaries of French public figures, the more obscure the better, written for The Independent or The Guardian: the Interior Minister who put down the student revolts of 1968, for example; the man who published Camus’s first play; the last survivor of the conspirators who plotted to kill de Gaulle.

He applauded de Gaulle’s concern with France’s place in history: the famous “certaine id?de la France”. De Gaulle, Johnson wrote, “has always impressed rather than attracted”. He did this “by enunciating general principles [about unity, about nationhood, about French self-interest] to which he remains faithful”. He was there when, unable to resist the offer of a huge fee for a tour of Japan, the band came together again in 1980:We spend a good deal of our money on the road just to live right. We consider that we’re of such calibre and station that we should stay in the best places and eat the best food.Inspired by the chamber-music aspirations of its pianist leader John Lewis, the quartet played with a sober dignity at all times and invariably wore morning dress on stage. It played to sell-out houses all over the world and the quality of its music thoroughly merited the prestige that it gained.Unusually for a black man in the United States, Heath flew as a fighter pilot in the Second World War, having trained with the Army Air Corps in Alabama.The Heath family was dedicated to music.

Percy Heath’s father played the clarinet and his mother sang in the church choir. Growing up in Philadelphia, Heath first took up the violin and sang in the family’s gospel quartet. His younger brothers Jimmy and Albert also became professional jazz musicians.Following his discharge from the Air Corps, Percy began to study the double bass in 1946 at the Granoff School of Music in Philadelphia. He learned so quickly that, after playing with local groups, he and his brother, the saxophonist Jimmy Heath, joined the trumpeter Howard McGhee’s band the following year and travelled with McGhee to play at the first Festival International de Jazz in Paris. This was one of the first American Bebop groups to play in Europe.Heath progressed rapidly on his instrument (in the early Fifties he recorded with Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie and other leaders) and eventually joined the Bebop quartet led by the vibraphone player Milt Jackson.