Gary Husband | Back on the road after surgery

Gary Husband has spent five decades behind a drum kit and behind a keyboard, quite often on the same night.

On 5 September he told his followers on Instagram that he had just come through a five-hour operation to relieve the nerve compression that had been threatening both of those careers at once.

The news is good. And there is a European tour waiting on the other side of it.

What happened

The procedure was an Anterior Cervical Discectomy and Fusion — ACDF — carried out by surgeon Mr Rohit Shetty. It took five hours.

The problem was compressed nerves affecting Husband’s right arm and wrist. For most of us that is a miserable few months. For a man who earns his living with both hands on a kit and both hands on a piano, it was a threat to the job itself, and he had been open about fearing exactly that.

Doctors have since told him the freed nerves have “an excellent chance of becoming fully functional again”. Husband’s own summary is rather more him: he expects to be “fighting fit again in a matter of weeks”.

Here is the post itself:

Who is Gary Husband?

If the name is new to you, the résumé is the argument.

Husband is one of a very small number of musicians called up at the top level on two instruments. He was Allan Holdsworth’s drummer for years, he has sat in John McLaughlin’s band at the keyboard, and he has worked with Chick Corea — a bandleader whose drum chair also passed through Steve Gadd and Roy Haynes — as well as Billy Cobham and Jeff Beck, across jazz, fusion, rock, funk and blues.

The Beck gig, incidentally, is one Terry Bozzio has also held. That is the neighbourhood.

So this was never one career at risk. It was two, and both of them route through the same right arm.

The tour

Gary Husband & The Orbital Band — Rocco Zifarelli on guitar, Tom Cawley on keyboards, Matthew Garrison on bass — launch a European tour across October and November 2026.

Two dates stand out. Leverkusener Jazztage in Germany on 12 November, and Ronnie Scott’s in London on 13 November, back to back.

Final thoughts

There is something rather bracing about a recovery update that arrives with tour dates attached to it.

Nobody outside that consulting room knows how the next few weeks will go. But the man himself sounds like someone already counting bars.

If you can get to either November night, go. Watching one musician be genuinely first-call on two instruments is rarer than it sounds.

For another long-awaited return, read Terry Bozzio is back — and selling his kits.