Billy Jenkins came up through the London jazz scene of the 1980s, a fertile, slightly mad period that also produced Loose Tubes and a whole generation of musicians who'd grown up on punk as much as bebop. Jenkins took that mix and ran further with it than almost anyone. His guitar playing was deliberately rough around the edges — bent notes, feedback, blunt rhythmic stabs — closer in spirit to a pub rocker than a conservatory graduate, even though he clearly knew exactly what he was doing underneath the chaos.

What made him stand out wasn't just the noise, it was the jokes. Album titles like Scratches of Spain (1986), a gleeful dismantling of Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain (1960), tell you most of what you need to know about his sense of humor. He treated jazz's sacred cows as material to be poked at, not preserved under glass, and he did it with real affection rather than contempt. You can hear a guy who loved the music too much to let it get precious.

He led a string of bands with names as irreverent as his music — collectives that mixed composed sections with free improvisation, spoken-word asides, and the occasional deadpan rant about the state of British jazz or British weather. The playing could be genuinely abrasive one minute and strangely tender the next, which is part of why he never quite fit into any tidy box. Critics who wanted clean categories found him frustrating; listeners who just wanted something alive found him addictive.

Jenkins never became a household name outside the UK, and he probably wouldn't have wanted to be. He was a working musician's musician, respected by peers for his wit and his refusal to compromise, and for anyone bored of reverent jazz reissues, he's a good reminder that the music can still be rude, funny, and completely itself all at once.