Zoot Sims at Ronnie Scott's - by Simon Spillett

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Easy-going” is an expression that fitted the late tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims “to a T.” He was a friend of Larry Bunker, with whom I studied drums and percussion instruments for a time, and that’s how I met Zoot on a number of occasions as he would always check in with Bunk whenever he was in Hollywood.

Zoot was born in Inglewood, CA and Larry grew up in nearby Long Beach, CA so they had worked, recorded and jammed together on a number of occasions.

Probably the most well-known Larry and Zoot association occurred when they briefly worked together in Gerry Mulligan’s sextet before Gerry returned to New York and reformed the group with Zoot going along with him.

If as Pops says - “Jazz is who you are” - then it's easy to understand how Zoot got such a carefree, casual and cascading sound in his playing because that’s who he was as a person. 

“Sure;” “OK;” “You bet;” “I’d really like that;” “That would be great” - these types of go-along-to-get along phrases peppered Zoot speech. And they were a reflection of who the man was in terms of his nature and his character.

With this kind of attitude always on display, it’s not much of a stretch to read about Zoot's almost unintentional role in helping Ronnie Scott get his club up and going in the following piece by Simon Spillett.

What’s also not an incongruity is Simon Spillett on the subject of Jazz tenor saxophone, one that’s near and dear to his heart. 

Based in the UK, he leads his own quartet and big band and is the biographer of the great tenor saxophonist, Tubby Hayes. You can locate more information about him by visiting his webpage.

Simon does his research so his take on things is accurate and well-documented. He writes in a style that’s easy and fun to read. 

© -  Simon Spillett, copyright protected; all rights reserved, used with the author’s permission.

Zoot Sims at Ronnie Scott’s 1961 – The Complete Recordings Acrobat ACMCD4377

“The first American guest artist to grace the tiny stage of the original Ronnie Scott’s club in London’s Soho in the autumn of 1961, tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims was among the most consistently inventive jazzmen of his generation. The sudden arrival of this font of jazz creativity prompted Fontana Records to tape three evenings worth of live performances at the venue, documenting not only Sims’ graceful yet muscular playing, but the work of supporting bands led by Ronnie Scott himself and West Indian multi-instrumentalist Harold McNair, featuring British jazz legends Jimmy Deuchar, Phil Seamen and Stan Tracey and others. The two original albums – ‘Zoot at Ronnie Scott’s’ and ‘Solo For Zoot’ – have not previously been released in their entirety on CD, but this new Acrobat issue contains all their contents, including a rare unedited version of Love For Sale, unavailable for over forty years. Featuring comprehensive sleeve notes by award-winning saxophonist Simon Spillett, rare photographs and press clippings, this new album is the definitive document of a pivotal moment of Anglo-American jazz history.”

“If I had to name one musician whose playing perfectly exemplified the soaring spirit of freewheeling, therapeutic jazz, it would be John Haley ‘Zoot’ Sims.”

- Ronnie Scott, Some of My Best Friends Are Blues, 1979

“In what must rank as one of the oddest coincidences in the history of jazz in Britain, two famous American jazz saxophonists found themselves briefly resident in London during November 1961, each in his own way breaking new musical ground. The first to arrive was a California-born, thirty-six year old, Lester Young-inspired performer whose tremendous popularity with the audiences that thronged to see him play on this, his first visit to a tiny, basement venue in Soho’s Gerrard Street, mirrored that of his standing throughout the jazz world. Indeed, he was a musician who possessed an uncanny and yet totally unaffected knack of appealing to listeners of all stripes, highly unusual during the era of fierce partisan divides between fans of traditional and more modern forms of jazz. Alighting in the capital a few days later, the other man was a quite different proposition altogether; hailing from North Carolina, a year younger, and with a musical voice that, although its roots could be effectively traced back to players like Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins and Dexter Gordon, really sounded like no-one else’s. He was among the most controversial jazzmen of his generation and consequently his London debut, not in a small intimate club setting but on the concert stage of the Gaumont State, Kilburn, had been a whole different story, full of dramatic instances of audiences walking out, declamatory dismissals in the press and a general sense of awkwardness. Whereas after his nightly work the first man would amble back happy and untroubled to his hotel - named with ironic aptness The White House - the latter remained holed-up in another hotel in Mayfair’s Half Moon Street, wary of visitors and somewhat mystified by all the brouhaha.

The first man was, of course, Zoot Sims, the amiable, unruffled tenorist whose arrival on these shores inaugurated the import policy at Ronnie Scott’s club, making him the first ever American jazz soloist to play a residency at an English nightspot. The other was John Coltrane, bringing his ground-breaking quintet to Britain for what transpired to be his one and only UK tour. Despite occupying quite different ends of the broad church of “modern jazz” (by the early 1960’s, Sims was already being dubbed a “mainstream” player by some of the more realistic jazz writers), the two men knew each other well and a certain mutual respect existed between them, apparent on the one recording that documents their disparate styles in tandem, the album Tenor Conclave, taped in 1956 (Prestige PRLP 7074). Yet each man had his own distinctive methods. By the time he opened in Kilburn, Coltrane had already annexed the then-new Richard Rodgers theme My Favourite Things, radically transforming its simple melodic charm through the use of the equally new application of modes [scales] rather than chords. Sims, on the other hand, was playing what amounted to the repertoire of an earlier era on his shows in Gerrard Street. Indeed, songs like Stompin’ at The Savoy and Somebody Loves Me were exactly the kind of thing he’d played in bands like Benny Goodman, twenty years before.

Whether Coltrane and Sims met up during this brief overlap in London has gone unrecorded, but when a local journalist interviewing the former made a passing reference to Sims presence in town, Coltrane apparently smiled and said simply “That’s a rare bird”.

The arrival of this “rare bird” and ensuing story of the music he recorded whilst in London that autumn is a fascinating part of Anglo-American jazz history and forms a key foundation stone in the success of Ronnie Scott’s club. In fact, without securing Sims services, by 1961 the venue's future was looking decidedly precarious.

Scott had launched his night club in late 1959 amid a flurry of press attention, but had quickly come up against the same impasse as virtually every other jazz club promoter in the country: modern jazz remained a niche music with limited appeal, a drawback highlighted by the burgeoning popular success of the Trad Boom, and, worse still, British modern jazz continued to be regarded as a make-shift pallid echo of the real thing from across the Atlantic. Such prejudice meant that the local product was both devilishly hard to market and nigh-on impossible to export.

Although the British Musicians Union and the American Federation of Musicians had drawn a truce in 1956, allowing a band-for-band exchange enabling British groups to visit the US and vice versa, reciprocal club residencies had somehow never quite made it onto the agenda. Concert tours were all very well – indeed men like Scott himself had benefited enormously, musically speaking, from both trips to the United States and tours of the UK supporting visiting American bands – but witnessing a bona fide jazz improviser operating at his best was something that could only really be done in a far less pressured environment. As Scott and his partner Pete King sat around debating how best to ensure the survival of their fledgling venture in the early part of 1961, the only solution seemed to be importing American guests. But while the premise may have made sense, the practicalities were little short of nightmarishly impossible.

Nevertheless, King’s bloody-minded sense of purpose was enough to open the lines of communication. In order to try and float his proposal, he first contacted Harry Francis, the assistant secretary of the MU, who instantly saw the reasoning behind the idea. A man-for-man deal looked possible in principle, especially as King was mooting sending Tubby Hayes - then without doubt the most accomplished British modernist - to New York as a sort of prototypical musical Trojan Horse. However, Francis pointed out that the exercise would be little more than a pipedream if King failed to get the official say-so of James C. Petrillo, the notoriously intractable head of the American Federation of Musicians. King was willing to try almost anything, including a direct appeal, and in August 1961 he flew to America to enter a series of negotiations that promised to be about as easy as currying favour with a mafia don. But to his surprise, King found Petrillo not only far less intimidating than had been imagined, but also remarkably agreeable. If the Englishman could find a suitable player willing to fulfil the American side of the bargain, and an amenable venue, Petrillo promised he’d do all he could to make it happen. It was like being asked to pick one jewel from a box brimming with treasures, but, fortuitously for King, a tenuous association with Zoot Sims provided the answer.

Sims had met both King and Ronnie Scott in 1953, when the Stan Kenton band of which he’d been a member had made an appearance at an American Air Force base in Norfolk, and he’d kept in touch, meeting his English counterparts again in 1958 whilst touring with the UK with the Jazz From Carnegie Hall package. With his close associate and fellow saxophonist Al Cohn, during the late 1950’s Sims had begun to play gigs at a New York bar named the Half Note, run by the Italian-American Canterino family, a venue with an almost spiritual alignment to the Ronnie Scott club: small, unprepossessing and popular with the Big Apple’s knowledgeable jazz cognoscenti, it would make the perfect key but low key place in which to introduce a British jazzman. King played the Canterinos records by Tubby Hayes and they approved. He then asked Sims whether he’d be prepared to take the return gig in London, to which the easy-going tenorist replied “Sure. When do I come?” The deal was on.

It’s difficult over fifty years later, in a world shrunken into an international village by instantaneous global communication, to capture quite how great this coup was. However, consulting the music press of the day reveals in spades how Scott and King’s initiative was treated like the relief of Mafeking. [The Siege of Mafeking was a 217-day siege battle for the town of Mafeking held by the British in South Africa during the Second Boer War from October 1899 to May 1900.] 

“A Great Day For British Jazz”, shouted a headline in Disc magazine, with King going on to explain that Sonny Stitt, Coleman Hawkins and Al Cohn were among the other US names who’d expressed an interest in the exchange. There’s an almost breathless excitement to the article, although it’s possible to forgive King for getting a little carried away in the moment (he also suggests saxophonist Jerome Richardson and French horn specialist Julius Watkins as likely imports, neither that well-known as top-line jazz soloists), but when he declares “I can’t tell you how proud I am to have helped bring this off” the sentiment is wholly justified. “For all of us who believe in British jazz”, the article's anonymous writer appends, “this is like a crazy dream come true.”

The piece also reports that King had laid tentative plans to record Zoot Sims during his four week residency at Scott’s “for Fontana, under the supervision of Jack Baverstock.” Whilst not as radical an idea as taping Tubby Hayes on his American stint, a plan which King initially found firmly rejected, the postulation reaffirmed how great a part the Fontana label had in the brokering of the new agreement.

Hayes had been signed by Baverstock in the spring of 1961, jumping ship from the defunct Tempo arm of Decca Records, and his first album for Fontana, Tubbs (TFL 5142) had been the very tool Pete King had used to woo the Half Note’s management. A year later, in a piece for the new magazine Scene, Benny Green applauded the labels bravery in not only signing Hayes but in expressing a similar interest in other local players, describing Fontana’s head as the “one exception” to the list of “executives of most recording companies [who] would never be seen dead in a jazz club [and who had] learned, parrot-fashion, the litany of American star names and that is it.”

But Zoot Sims wasn’t just an expedient and acquiescent choice for Fontana and Ronnie Scott’s club. He had long been a favourite player of Scott’s, dating back to the days when both men were recent graduates from big dance bands in the late 1940’s – Sims from Woody Herman and Scott from Ted Heath. Both had been utterly fascinated by the genius of Lester Young, with Sims emerging as the hardest-swinging of the whole school of Young-derived “Brothers” who’d arrived in the end of the Swing Era. Although his tone wasn’t anywhere near as pretty as that of Stan Getz, and, when set beside the adventurous creativity of his close partner Al Cohn, his harmonic choices were rather conventional, Sims’ infallible time and ability to weave consistently inventive solos from the barest of musical bones marked him out as the ultimate jazz musician’s jazz musician. Indeed, a veritable queue of fellow saxophonists, from Cannonball Adderley through Sonny Stitt onto Paul Desmond, Lee Konitz and beyond rated him among the very best. Ronnie Scott himself once tried to sum up the root of this pan-stylistic appeal: “As soon as Zoot Sims starts to play, everybody wakes up and jumps about and smiles. Every single time I’ve heard Zoot he plays marvellously. An absolute natural. He can’t play anything that isn’t jazz, just can’t.”

Unsurprisingly, Sims debut at Scott’s at the end of October 1961 was treated like the second coming. “The Big Breakthrough” ran the strapline to a review of his first night in Melody Maker, with Bob Dawbarn going into raptures over the saxophonists “full-toned, gentle emotionalism” and freedom from “current jazz fashions and experiments”. “Zoot was a good choice to open up the exchange of soloists” he continued perceptively, “for his style should appeal to a pretty wide range of jazz tastes, from the far out boys to the mainstreamers.”

Writing in Jazz News, Kitty Grime agreed, finding the tenorists earthy delivery a welcome antidote to all the recent “Mod/Trad inhibitions”. “He seems to feel at home wherever the swinging is going on, and isn’t one of these tender souls who need personally selected sounds and conditions to play in. You feel all he needs is a foot to tap.” Another of the magazines contributors, the acerbic Danny Halperin was one of the few local writers brave enough to note how Sims opening at Scott’s had occasionally been a triumph over less-than-perfect circumstances, including a gaggle of a British jazzmen gossiping noisily at the bar and a coffee-machine that at times burbled louder than the guest star played.

However, there were bigger pressures than background chatter and recalcitrant espresso makers for the men tasked with accompanying Sims, pianist Stan Tracey, bassist Kenny Napper and drummer Jackie Dougan, all members of the band the clubs proprietor co-headed with trumpeter Jimmy Deuchar. British rhythm sections had long been the bête noire of parochial jazz critics, who frequently cited their work as representative of the imitative time-lag between English jazz and its real-deal American counterpart. For example, although he had already recorded an album of markedly personal and authentic sounding original compositions in the company of Napper and drum legend Phil Seamen (Little Klunk, Vogue VA 160155,1959), Stan Tracey was still being yoked by phrases like “Thelonious Monk clone”. The pianist had accompanied a number of American jazz names before, usually on tours under the guise of “variety acts”, including the bandleader Cab Calloway, and the experience had given him a certain wariness of the demands made by what he later called “twinkling stars”, but to his relief, Sims proved to be exactly the opposite, a no-nonsense, ego-free, let’s-get-on-with-making-things-happen kind of musician. “An absolute Teddy Bear”, was how Tracey remembered Sims when interviewed in 2001. “His playing and his attitude made it so easy.”

Indeed, with this unprecedented and largely unexpected approval from their guest the rhythm section could hardly receive their usual drubbing in the press. Bob Dawbarn described how on opening night “they already sounded like they’d been backing [Sims] for years….with no feeling of anti-climax between Zoot’s solos.” Kitty Grime also found the team that evening “fired with all sorts of enthusiasm. I’m quite certain that within days really exciting things will arise from the partnership.” Sims also acted as a recognisable stimulus to the other musicians who appeared opposite - and occasionally with – him during his run at Gerrard Street, including Scott himself, Jimmy Deuchar and West Indian multi-instrumentalist Harold McNair and so, when Fontana finally set the dates for the promised in-person recording of Sims, it also seemed like the perfect opportunity to document the positive effect that the new import policy was making on the local players.

Melody Maker announced the recording on its front page on November 11th, confirming that three nights worth of music would be taped at the club from November 13th. “The album will probably be called A Night At Ronnie Scott’s”, Pete King added. The week following the recording, the paper again emblazoned an in-action shot of Sims on its cover above a headline stating “Zoot Sizzles – on tape”. “The [original] idea was to issue one LP”, King now noted, “but we already have enough good material for three or four”. Choosing and sequencing exactly which examples of Sims nightly inventions to release was, in the words of sleeve note writer Benny Green, “the devil’s own job” owing to the stars unerring consistency, but in early 1962 Fontana issued the first of two LP’s made at the club, rather unimaginatively titled Zoot at Ronnie Scott’s.

The title was actually a bit of a fudge, for although the American guest’s contributions comprised over half the records playing time, they were supported by four examples from the bands that had appeared opposite him during the run, The Scott-Deuchar Quintet and The Harold McNair Quartet. However, rather than dissipate the impression made by Sims, the careful programming actually enhanced it, making the album appear like an evening of alternating club sets condensed to LP length. Alongside Sims’ “fire and invention which one rarely hears in an English jazz club”, Benny Green thought the tracks by the supporting players “should do a great deal towards dispelling the inferiority complex which burdens jazz in this country” with there being “no justification” for a pitying attitude to the playing of the rhythm sections that accompanied both Sims and McNair.

The press reviews of the album followed suit: “Fine jazz by any standards”, Melody Maker’s Bob Dawbarn commented in the papers March 31st issue, praising the album as “a wonderful memento of [Sims] stay at the Scott club.”

Barely a few months later, Fontana followed with another albums worth of cherry-pickings, this time without the added guests, under the appropriate title Solo For Zoot. Benny Green’s intelligent cover text for the album contained a useful précis of the process of taping the saxophonist in a club setting, one which could also serve as an explanation of the thinking behind all live jazz recording:

“[O]n all four of these performances…the growth of each saxophone solo can be watched [sic.] in close detail because the soloist is uninhibited by the red lights of the studio engineers or the invisible stopwatches of union rules. Zoot knows he can afford to be expansive about this business, to stretch the limbs slowly and deliberately and allow the improvisation to take wings in its own good time and of its own accord.”

If anything, with more space afforded Sims, the results on Solo For Zoot were even better. Bob Dawbarn once more delivered a firmly partisan appraisal for Melody Maker, describing how the saxophonists “apparent simplicity…hides a truly mastered technique” full of “swing, relaxation and melodic invention”, while Graham Boatfield of Jazz Journal admired how Sims “allows his imagination to roam unchecked” and liked Tracey’s “searching piano.” Jazz News’ Patrick James thought the album “a very, very good LP”, almost good enough in fact to make him forget his prejudice: “I wondered how Stompin’ At The Savoy would come off, and to tell the truth, it is a bit like a boys’ choir trying to do Balshazzer’s Feast on their own, but the effect soon passes.” 

Reissuing Zoot Sims at Ronnie Scott’s

Despite their novelty and impact, both the Zoot at Ronnie Scott’s and Solo For Zoot albums were eventual victims of the corporate chopper, as Fontana cleared away the chaff from its back-catalogue in the mid-1960’s, by which point the company was reaping its rewards from chart-acts like The Spencer Davis Group. However, it did briefly issue an imported Dutch version uniting material from both albums, and re-titled Cookin’, as part of its Jazz Club Series (Fontana 683 273 JCL). By the late 1960’s though, even this had fallen foul of a catalogue purge. 

Some of the Scott’s material – that featuring Sims only – was re-released on CD by the Spanish Fresh Sound label in 1991 (Zoot Sims Quartet – Live at Ronnie Scott’s FSR-CD 134), marking the first appearance of these recordings in the digital age. Using the tapes assembled for the Cookin’ album this issue included only the shorter, edited take of Love For Sale, which cuts several of Sims choruses as well as his thrilling exchanges with Jackie Dougan’s drums, an omission robbing the very core of a performance so stunning that the late jazz writer Brian Davies once nominated it as the most perfect audio example of the word “swing”. A straight facsimile reissue of Cookin’ was also released as a limited edition CD by Universal Japan in 2005, again utilising edited tapes (Universal UCCU-5272).

This new Acrobat CD is the first release of this material to include both the unedited (but still faded, as per the original LP) take of Love For Sale together with the supporting performances recorded by Scott and McNair, thus compiling everything commercially released from these sessions. It also duplicates exactly the sequence of both the original Fontana LP’s and whilst this means that the material featuring Sims alone is therefore probably not presented chronologically (the actual recording dates are vague to say the least) this album does retain the same sense of pace and programming logic the original producers intended. One can only wonder what other treasures from these nights may lurk somewhere in Universal’s tape archive.

One of the delights of revisiting this music is that it not only shines light once more on Sims timeless gifts, it also provides an effective microcosm of British modern jazz as it stood in the early 1960’s. The passage of time between then and now has not been kind, cruelly cutting down all but two of the musicians heard here, including the nominal leader, who passed away in 1985, aged just 59. Harold McNair, Phil Seamen and Jackie Dougan died in differing and yet tragic circumstances during the 1970’s: Jimmy Deuchar and Ronnie Scott passed on in the 1990’s: Jeff Clyne died from a heart attack in 2009 and, as this release was being planned in late 2013, Stan Tracey passed away, aged 86. Ironically, the two men who survive both long ago abandoned the British jazz scene: bassist Kenny Napper moved to Holland to begin a successful career as a commercial arranger and pianist Terry Shannon simply removed himself from the jazz world at the close of the 1960’s, and now lives a reclusive life in rural Lincolnshire. To hear them all combined as a phalanx of vibrant, highly creative young men only exacerbates this loss, and yet each has his moments of musical glory on this album.

Tracey’s playing, often described with words like angular and hard, is surprisingly more yielding than his detractors would allow. In just one example, listen to his deeply felt work on the blues Blue Hodge, a Gary McFarland composition erroneously listed as Blues in E Flat on all previous releases. Also, his accompanying skills are never better captured than on the firm, in-the-pocket groove he lays down behind Sims on Somebody Loves Me, negating all the criticism Ronnie Scott had when selecting such an idiosyncratic performer as his house accompanist. Tracey also remembered the piano he played on the album, the first instrument purchased by the club, as having “the hardest action I’ve ever played”, but recalled that by the time Sims’ arrived he’d “tamed it”.

Kenny Napper and Jackie Dougan also obviate all the critiques of inadequate British rhythm players, with Napper’s eloquent solo on Autumn Leaves even succeeding in overcoming the distraction of breaking glasses.

Harold McNair’s brace of tracks illustrate the tragedy that was his death from cancer, aged just 39 in 1971. The alto-led Tangerine showcases a style that could veer from polite to acidic and back and, in tone and occasionally harmonic content, suggests a hitherto overlooked link to the contemporary work of Eric Dolphy. His flute however is far more personal. Indeed, after Johnny Scott’s pioneering but sometimes twee explorations, and before Tubby Hayes really got to grips with the instrument as a double, McNair was the finest parochial talent on the horn, approaching it with a fearless assertiveness that could prove wildly exciting. The famous humming and blowing technique – discovered by Sahib Shihab but introduced to the wider jazz world by Roland Kirk – was just one of the many assets in his bag of musical tricks, one he allegedly taught and bequeathed to Tubby Hayes. During a later visit to Ronnie Scott's, McNair also gifted a flute to Zoot Sims, a typical example of his generous, magnanimous nature. There’s also a suggestion of future post-bop leanings in the off-beat rhythm of Harry Flicks, a theme dedicated to a well-regarded Midlands jazz promoter, which includes a definitive example of the Shannon-Clyne-Seamen triumvirate who had once so effectively served Tubby Hayes.

The proprietors own quintet, formed in March 1960, with the aim “to play the jazz we all feel the same about” is heard on two items typical of its approach, the helter-skelter Jimmy Deuchar composition Suddenly Last Tuesday and Stan Tracey’s jazz waltz The Haunted Jazz Club. The presence of one of his idols clearly inspires Scott, never more so than on Desperation wherein he has the unenviable task of preceding Zoot Sims, whilst Deuchar’s famously inconsistent articulation appears not to have troubled him at all during these sessions, as can be heard in the beautifully executed solo he unleashes on Suddenly Last Tuesday.

As for Sims, these recordings veritably abound in superior examples of his art, whether that be in the dynamic, fluttering solo he offers on Autumn Leaves, the deep blue colours he conjures on the expansive Blue Hodge or the aforementioned band-levitating swing of Love For Sale, with each improvisation reminding the listener how free from cliché his brand of jazz truly was. 

Zoot Sims opening salvo in the war on union restrictions actually transpired to be the only one required to end the conflict. By the time he returned to Ronnie Scott’s the following year, in tandem with Al Cohn, the club had successfully presented two further American guests, saxophonists Lucky Thompson and Dexter Gordon, thus setting the initial pattern for the years immediately ahead. Although he was to play at the Scott’s many more times before his death, and would make further recordings in London with two of the players heard here, Stan Tracey and Kenny Napper (Al and Zoot in London World Record Club, TP 714, 1965 and Waiting Game, Impulse A 9131, 1966), Sims’ first visit was to remain a cherished high-point in the annals of the venue, not simply for its historical impact but also for how it had cemented the personal bond that existed between player and promoter. This close association was even recognised across the Atlantic and when Scott attended Sims’ memorial service in New York in 1985, at the last minute he found himself co-opted to speak in front of a church full of jazz royalty. Trawling their thirty-year friendship for a single defining example of the late saxophonists' beautifully unpretentious manner, he remembered the time they’d shared his club's band room to watch the televised pictures of Neil Armstrong’s first moon walk. “Jeez”, the American suddenly broke the awe-struck silence. “They’ve put a man on the moon and I’m still playing Indiana!” 

Whatever Sims played, and whenever he played it, the result was the same. “He can’t play anything but jazz, just can’t,” Scott once remarked; a rare bird, indeed.

Simon Spillett

December 2103

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. Love For Sale (Porter)

Zoot Sims (tenor sax); Stan Tracey (piano); Kenny Napper (bass); Jackie Dougan (drums)

2. The Haunted Jazz Club (Tracey)

Ronnie Scott (tenor sax); Jimmy Deuchar (trumpet); Stan Tracey (piano); Kenny Napper (bass); Jackie Dougan (drums)

3. Desperation (Deuchar)

As track 3 but add Zoot Sims (tenor sax) 

4. Tangerine (Schertzinger, Mercer)

Harold McNair (alto sax); Terry Shannon (piano); Jeff Clyne (bass); Phil Seamen (drums)

5. Gone With The Wind (Wrubel, Magidson)

Personnel as track 1

6. Harry Flick’s (McNair)

Personnel as track 4 but McNair (flute)

7. Suddenly Last Tuesday (Deuchar)

Personnel as track 2

8. Blue Hodge [Blues in E Flat] (McFarland)

9. Somebody Loves Me (Gershwin, McDonald, de Sylva)

10. Stompin’ At The Savoy (Goodman, Webb, Sampson, Razaf)

11. Autumn Leaves (Kosma, Prevert, Mercer)

Personnel as track 1

Recorded live at Ronnie Scott’s club, 39 Gerrard Street, London on November 13th-15th 1961

Tracks 1-7 originally issued on Fontana STFL 588 Zoot at Ronnie Scott’s (February 1962)

Tracks 8-11 originally issued on Fontana 680 982 TL Solo For Zoot (August 1962)

Original sessions produced by Jack Baverstock

With grateful thanks to Tony Prior