Dick Heckstall‐Smith

Dick Heckstall-Smith (September 16, 1934 – December 17, 2004) was an English jazz and blues saxophonist. He played with some of the most important English blues-rock and jazz-rock bands of the 1960s and 1970s - including Blues Incorporated (Alexis Korner's groundbreaking blues group), the Graham Bond Organisation (in the lineup that included bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker), John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, and the pioneering UK jazz-rock band Colosseum.

Heckstall-Smith was born Richard Malden Heckstall-Smith in Ludlow, England (his father then being headmaster of the local Grammar School), and brought up in Knighton, Wales. He learned to play piano, clarinet and alto saxophone in childhood. After refusing a second term at a York boarding school, he went to Gordonstoun, where his schoolmaster father, Hugh, had taken a job. Hugh soon fell out with the autocratic Kurt Hahn and the family retreated to Dartington.