It’s easy to imagine an electrified audience getting down to do the Twist the moment they heard this tune in 1948. Except that the Twist wouldn’t be invented for another decade.

When it came to honking sax players, Big Jay McNeely had a well-earned reputation as the most flamboyant of them all. The California saxman played on his knees, on his back, and on at least one occasion while being wheeled down the street on a mechanic’s “creeper.”

On another, in 1949, he mesmerised a baseball crowd at LA’s Wrigley Field by blowing his horn up and down the stands before carrying on from home plate to first base… on his back.

Fans used to say his wild-eyed squealing and skronking could peel the wallpaper right off the walls and, in 1989, it almost literally did – he was playing in the Quasimodo Club in West Berlin on the night the wall came down.

Cecil McNeely grew up in the Los Angeles ghetto of Watts, a few blocks from Johnny Otis’s Barrelhouse Club, and it was inevitable the two would cross paths. Inspired by sax greats Illinois Jacquet and Lester Young, Cecil played tenor and his brother Bob played baritone and they made their first recordings together with the legendary drummer.

It was Cecil’s exuberant performance on Otis’s Barrelhouse Stomp that earned him a deal with Savoy Records, whose talent scout Ralph Bass bestowed the stage name Big Jay on his new recruit.

His first hit, in 1949, was an instrumental called The Deacon’s Hop, showcasing his raucous one-note honking, followed by another called Wild Wig. He rose to national prominence with a tune called Blow Big Jay.

McNeely remained popular through the 1950s and 1960s, thanks to his spectacular live performances, which included a fluorescent sax that glowed in the dark, but retired in 1971 to become a postman and a Jehovah’s Witness.

Happily his horn drew him back to tour and record full-time again and in his late eighties he released an album mixing new material with re-recordings of his old favourites called Blowin’ Down The House – Big Jay’s Latest And Greatest.

He died in 2018 at the age of 91.