THE joyous, rampaging sounds of the Grand Union Orchestra have been ringing around Britain and the world for 40 years, their personnel an extraordinary amalgam of the finest cosmopolitan musicians playing in a huge stew of musical styles from US blues, Indian ragas, Latin American salsa to Chinese harmonies, Bengali songs, reggae basslines and West African percussion.

The current orchestra includes some of Britain’s most powerful jazz musicians: saxophonists Jason Yarde and Tony Kofi, trumpeter Byron Wallen and drummer Brian Abrahams, with their roots in the Caribbean, Ghana, Belize and South Africa respectively.

The orchestra’s founder, trombonist Tony Haynes, was born in 1941 in the grandstand of Epsom Racecourse, then being used as a wartime maternity hospital. He told me: “My mother was a secretary, my father a wireless operator who loved opera, especially Caruso. I was virtually self-taught on piano, learned violin at school and started on trombone at 14 so I could be a part of the traditional jazz boom. I was born on the day that my first jazz hero, Jelly Roll Morton, died.”