Larry Stabbins
British musician
Larry Stabbins (born 9 September 1949) is a British jazz saxophonist, flutist and composer.
Biography
Larry Stabbins learned clarinet at school from the age of eight, when his musical idol was Acker Bilk. He started playing saxophone at the age of eleven. He was soon playing in local dance bands, doing his first paid gig aged twelve, and later also playing in soul bands such as Bristol group The Strange Fruits, particularly the music of Junior Walker and James Brown. He started working with pianist Keith Tippett when he was sixteen and later contributed to various Tippett projects such as Centipede, Ark, Tapestry and the Keith Tippett Septet. In addition the two also worked for a time in a trio with South African percussionist Louis Moholo.
In London in the early 1970s, after a brief period in the Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, he played with John Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Orchestra, and occasionally with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble (SME). During this period he also worked as a freelance commercial musician, playing studio sessions, nightclubs and West End shows, as well as playing in more jazz-based situations such as Mike Westbrook’s 'Solid Gold Cadillac'. In the 1980’s he joined the Tony Oxley Quintet and played in various versions of the band and also with the Celebration Orchestra, for many years.
Around the same time he joined the London Jazz Composers Orchestra as well as Peter Brötzmann’s Alarm Orchestra and its successor the tentet 'Marz Combo'.
“Larry Stabbins” enters the record as british musician. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Larry, Stabbins and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q949668. VIAF identifies the subject as 25921048. The Library of Congress control number is n81020507. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1949 and 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “Larry Stabbins” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.