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I see it as H, which U NEEDY hugs - the colon is redundant in the cryptic reading.

Ah. Thanks again, loge.

As a jazzophile I saw this one pretty early. The album appears in nearly every list of the top 20 or 30 jazz recordings. A whole load of other EG recordings have been made available this year, presumably to mark the centenary.

Very frustrating this. Figured out the last two clues and have both messages.

Spent ages searching for divine inspiration as to who the composer / musician could be. Finally spotted a possible option in the grid, but it's only 15 letters and presume I need at least 19 for the preamble to work, unless there's another thematic item as well. Carried on looking for something else. Can't see anything else. Back to option 1.

Now searching the Internet for something that shows the sheet music for best known work but seems to be several notes played at once and I'm not a musician so how does that convert into one cell per column? And how does 15 plus 10 cells equal 29.

Now have endgame taking much, much longer than gridfill, thrashing about looking up random stuff on the Web, very frustrating. Presume there's a wrinkle I haven't figured out yet to get the extra cells. All extremely frustrating.

Try this smellyharry, loge@41 found this version
https://musescore.com/ericfontainejazz/misty

Thanks Muraria, extremely helpful. And I was getting my 10 rows and 14 columns mixed up so my 15 letter title works, of course, i have the right notes in the right places based on that score, I have added the extras as per the instruction and I am done. Hallelujah.

That's good sh, glad it helped

It seems like words 4 to 12 of the lyrics to this tune are what the majority of people posting on this thread have been feeling when they came to the endgame.
With way more help from you guys than I would ideally have wanted (but much appreciated nonetheless) I've finally cracked it.
(just to confirm - as no-one else has brought this up - am I right in thinking that the instruction derived from the down clues implies that the final grid, after the endgame, is blank apart from the 29 cells occupied by the thematic items? (I always get antsy when asked to delete large swathes of a grid that I have spent several hours happily filling in...)

Yes that's right Jif. I'm not quite sure what the thematic point of that bit was - perhaps it's so the remaining 29 cells appear more prominently?

I don't send enter my solutions for the prize/statistics, so I merely noted what was required without actually carrying it out.

Thanks, loge. At least it made filling in and checking my postal entry a doddle this week!
I'm wondering why 20dn has "Environmental Agency". Surely that should be "Environment Agency"?