Ronnie Scott's Revisited

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“The feel becomes more important, the truth of it. You accept yourself for what you are. If it’s not Stan Getz or Mike Brecker or John Coltrane, at least it’s you. For better or worse.”

- Ronnie Scott

“There have been musician-run Jazz clubs before – Shelly’s Manne Hole, Ali’s Alley, Fred Anderson’s Velvet Lounge – but none with the quiet charisma of Ronnie Scott’s in London’s Soho.”

- Richard Cook and Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD

“It is no small tribute to the talents of Ronnie Scott and Tubby Hayes that their Couriers of Jazz Quintet was the first to break the ice for modern Jazz with a two-tenor combo, by no means an easy unit to work with. There has been one other such successful two-tenor unit in recent years, that of tenors Al Cohn and Zoot Sims which excited Jazz fans during its brief existence.”

- Ralph J. Gleason

Over the years, the editorial staff at JazzProfiles has had the good fortune of visiting London on a number of occasions.

These trips were mostly to do with business, but usually included a little pleasure thrown in on the side.

One cold and rainy night [apologies to Dickens] as we were finishing work, a colleague who was also a Jazz fan suggested that we drop-by tenor saxophonist Ronnie Scott’s world-famous Jazz Club located at 47 Frith Street in the Soho section of the city.

The club opened on 30 October 1959 at 39 Gerrard Street, also in Soho, before moving to its present location in 1965.  Having celebrated its 70^th anniversary in 2019, it is still in operation today. 

My colleague had a membership in the club which provided for a reduced cover charge, a discounted drinks ticket and other privileges including an annual subscription to the club’s newsletter.

He was also apparently so well-known to those granting admission that they allowed us access to the downstairs bar, a small basement room at Ronnie’s where musicians hung-out before, during and after sets.

After we had settled-in, we both noticed that Ronnie Scott was there smoking a cigarette and having a drink. I gathered that my associate knew Ronnie well enough to walk over to say "Hello" ["Hallo"?] and introduce me to him.

Upon meeting Ronnie, I blurted out something to the effect that I had been in his debt for a number of years.

By way of background, I had studied drums in Southern California with the late, Victor Feldman.

Also a native of London, Victor had come to the United States in 1956 at the urging of none other than Ronnie Scott.  Scott had been like an older brother to Victor, so when he basically told Victor that there was nothing left for him to achieve in English Jazz circles, Victor took his advice and accepted Woody Herman’s offer to come to the USA and join his big band

It was the beginning of a 30-year career for Victor [who died in 1987] which was marked by huge commercial success in the Hollywood studios as well as a number of artistic high points in the Jazz World including a stint with Cannonball Adderley’s Quintet, a recording session and short term gig with Miles Davis and a number of his own, excellent piano-bass-drums trios with bassists such as Scott LaFaro, Monty Budwig and John Patitucci and drummers like Stan Levey, Colin Bailey and Johnny Guerin.

All of which prompted me to say to Ronnie Scott: “If it hadn’t been for you, Victor Feldman may not have come to the states and I might have missed the chance to study with him and to get to know him as a friend.”

Ronnie shook my hand and then said: “Victor and Tubby Hayes were the best Jazz musicians that England ever produced.”

To which I said: “I’m glad I never had to choose between them.”

Ronnie Scott smiled and retorted: “Smart man.”

He then motioned with his head to bring over a nearby cocktail waitress and as she approached us he turned and said: “Keep your money in your pocket, you’re my guests tonight.”

Nice man who did a ton for Jazz.

If you wish to know more about Ronnie Scott, his career in music and the history of his club, there is no better pace to start than with a copy of John Fordham’s Jazz Man: The Amazing Story of Ronnie Scott and his Club, [London: Kyle Cathie Limited, Rev. Ed., 1995].

Mr. Fordham is a Jazz critic, writer and broadcaster who contributes regularly to The Guardian and he has a number of other books on the subject of Jazz to his credit. Based in the UK, John uses English spelling.

© -John Fordham, copyright protected; all rights reserved. 

“'Blow!' yelled Tubby Hayes. His partner Ronnie Scott launched a solo on 'Some of My Best Friends Are Blues', a mid-tempo twelve-bar blues that constituted one of his rare contributions to the art of jazz composition. The tenor was harder and more gravelly now, but zigzagging gracefully over the chords. A packed house at London's Dominion Theatre on that night in 1958 had already warmly greeted the band's breakneck opening version of Cole Porter's 'What Is This Thing Called Love?', even though the band they had really paid to hear was still to come - the American Dave Brubeck Quartet, then at the beginning of its boom years.

Hayes and Scott cut distinctly contrasting figures in the footlights. Though both were immaculate in suits - something that the sartorially pre­occupied older man had always insisted on - clothes looked as if they fitted Scott to the last thread, while Hayes couldn't help resembling a schoolboy who had borrowed his father's Saturday night special.

As with most British modern jazz ensembles, nobody did anything par­ticularly demonstrative on stage. Scott would stand virtually motionless at the microphone, the horn held slightly to one side, his eyes often closed. He was restrained in the presentations on that night, slightly nervous but still registering his old familiar trademark.

'Thank you very much,' he said to the audience's applause for 'Some of My Best Friends Are Blues'. 'And now from a brand new LP which you may have seen in the shops, entitled Elvis Presley sings Thelonious Monk...'

The headlong delivery of the Cole Porter tune had been virtually a def­inition of their style, preceding the melody with wild, nervy riffing like the sound of frantic footsteps on a staircase, Porter's original notes suddenly materialising as if the perpetrator had burst through a door.

Most of what the Couriers did had that crazed momentum about it, it was sealed, hermetic, impervious, music not particularly suited to the expression of human frailties of the kind that were being poignantly articu­lated at the time by Ronnie Scott's old playing partner, the West Indian Joe Harriott, or by the Scottish player Bobby Wellins. But it had a gleeful, belli­cose appeal. On the Dominion gig, they closed an equally tumbling version of 'Guys and Dolls' with a call-and-response section that turned into a head­long unison coda, ending on a blipping high note as if someone had abruptly planted a full stop in the music. It brought the house down. The finale was a rendition of 'Cheek To Cheek' so fast that only dancing partners bound at the neck could possibly have sustained the lyric's original sentiments.

Though Brubeck himself, highly impressed with Scott and Hayes, was to say at the end of the tour 'they sound more like an American band than we do', there was an unintentional irony in his remark. Brubeck didn't really sound much like an American band at all, being preoccupied with European conservatoire music and a kind of ornate, theoretical jazz. But American modernist outfits like those of Art Blakey and Hank Mobley in reality sounded quite different to the Couriers.

The attack of the rhythm sections was the dividing line - Blakey's cym­bal beat was restless and probing, the momentum sporadically lifted by huge, breaker-like rolls and admonishing tappings and clatterings. With underpinnings so strong, the soloists could afford to play less, and avoid the hysterical, fill-every-chink manner frequently adopted by their admir­ers abroad. Insecurities about their quality by comparison with the Americans led British bebop bands to a kind of over-compensatory pyrotechnics, like teenagers driving cars too fast to prove their mettle. The palais-band tradition was audible in the Couriers' work too, in expert but slightly fussy arrangements that sounded very close to the repertoire of a miniature dance orchestra. But the Brubeck tour of Britain was a golden opportunity for the band, and the Dominion gig - recorded for EMI as The Jazz Couriers In Concert - was a high spot of it.

Though the band represented as much as he'd ever wanted from playing, Ronnie Scott revealed later that year, in a passing remark during an inter­view, that he had not forgotten that old 52nd Street dream. He was featured in Melody Maker in the autumn of 1958, where he was described as 'one of the post-war angry young men of jazz'. Scott reiterated his dislike of critics, a point he made whenever he got the chance. He was asked if he wanted to be a session player and replied that nothing would please him more, except that 'the only sessions I've done recently have been rock 'n' roll, where I have to play out of tune/ But the end of the interview showed the way his mind was turning. What were his hopes for the local jazz scene? I'd like to see a new type of jazz club in London/ Scott replied. 'A well-appointed place which was licensed and catered for people of all ages and not merely for youngsters.'

By the summer of 1959, the steam was going out of the Jazz Couriers. Tubby Hayes had never really stopped relishing the idea of a larger band, one that could handle the growing scope of his writing and arranging.

The last date was 30 August at the City Hall in Cork. And after the demise of the Couriers, which Ronnie Scott would have continued with indefinitely if the choice had been entirely his, there seemed little enough to get excited about in the jazz world. The only versions of the music that seemed likely to attract a substantial following were the Dave Brubeck group and the Modern Jazz Quartet. They were subtle, intelligent outfits, but they didn't display that infectious creative tension audible in Stitt's band, or Miles Davis's, or the Couriers themselves on a good night. After the first tidal wave of rock 'n' roll had subsided, you could demonstrate your taste by having a recording of one of Brubeck's explorations of fancy rhythms and hybrid classicism in your collection, or the hushed, cut-glass chamber-jazz of the MJQ. They were the closest fifties jazz came to pop­chart success.

Critics were divided about them. Benny Green had by this time virtu­ally stopped playing and was working regularly as a jazz critic for the Observer, a new career offered to him by that newspaper's most influential jazz fan, theatre critic Kenneth Tynan. Green was a fluent and witty writer, one of the few jazz musicians who was comfortably capable of turning the offhanded, oblique, observant and frequently macabre humour of the music business into prose. He hated the hyping of Brubeck and the MJQ and frequently laid into them in print. 'The British jazz fan is highly con­scious of his own insularity,' Green began an article on Brubeck during the pianist's 1959 visit to the Royal Festival Hall. 'He yearns to be in the swim, so our promoters cater most thoughtfully for this desire by sticking topical labels on their American touring shows/ Green went on to describe Brubeck's popularity 'as one of the peculiar aberrations of current taste'.

The Modern Jazz Quartet fared little better. Green concluded resignedly that: 'For the last five years four men have sought with painful eagerness to transform the racy art of jazz into something aspiring towards cultural respectability/ That much was undeniable. The MJQ took pains to dress like a classical chamber group, and performed with a measured and metic­ulous deliberation, for all the improvisational gifts of its four members in other settings.

While on holiday in Majorca that year, Scott had a reminder that maybe running a club could simply be fun (which was all he'd ever really asked for) and an opportunity to make a little money, present musicians he admired, and have somewhere amenable to play. He met a drummer and club proprietor called Ramon Farran, who was the son of a Catalan band­leader and had married Robert Graves's daughter Lucia. Through Farran, Scott came to meet the writer at Canellun, the house that Graves had built in the picturesque village of Deja in 1929. The poet broke the ice by simply enquiring: 'What's the pot situation like in London now?' He turned out to be fascinated by jazz, had even acted as patron to unconventional artists like Cecil Taylor. Scott was in turn fascinated by Graves and a little dis­comfited by his circle too. They had all read so much, and they were so funny, but with a sense of humour impenetrably dependent on knowledge and an education Scott hadn't had the benefit of, not the wisecracking, fatalistic, self-defensive shield against fate that came from a childhood on the streets of the East End.

Graves showed Scott around his booklined study. He seemed, Scott reflected later, to have written most of them himself. 'I've tried writing,’ Scott began tentatively, 'but I find it the hardest thing in the world.'

'Of course you will,’ Graves replied somewhat brusquely. 'Unless you're God.'

They got on well. Scott spent a good deal of time walking and swim­ming with Graves. He was astonished by the old man's boundless energy, springing up the steep slope from the sea to the house like a gazelle.

By 1961 Ronnie Scott was visiting the Majorcan capital Palma regularly, often performing with Farran's Wynton Kelly-like trio at the drummer's Indigo Club, and he was to continue his visits until the early 1970s. Graves would periodically visit London, too, in the days after Ronnie Scott had become a promoter as well as a performer of jazz. 'Robert's in the club/ Scott would call through to Benny Green. 'Do you want to come down?'

The breakthrough was an accident, of course. Jack Fordham, the Soho entrepreneur, had lost interest in the Gerrard Street premises that Scott and King had occasionally used for their own jazz presentations. Fordham's principal living came from the hamburger joint - one of the first - he ran in Berwick Street. Eventually he offered 39 Gerrard Street to Scott for a knock­down rent. It became Ronnie Scott's first club.

Pete King - who like Benny Green had by now realised that he needed to choose between a playing career and something more promising - was almost entirely involved with promotion, partly on his own account, and partly in association with Harold Davison, and worked out of his own Soho office. He caught Ronnie Scott's enthusiastic conviction that this was the moment they'd been waiting for. Then Scott went to his parents to ask for help and got a loan of £1000 from his stepfather to get the ball rolling. Sol Berger was by this time a successful partner in a textiles company, and he willingly bought a stake in his step-son's club.

Number 39 Gerrard Street had nothing but space and not very much of that. The two would-be club proprietors went to the East End in search of cheap furniture and bought a job lot of chairs which they arranged in aus­tere lines in front of the bandstand. Pete King's father-in-law, a Manchester carpenter, came down to help build a few rudimentary tables. Then there wouldn't be room for dancing, so it was going to have to be a venue for fans who really wanted to come and listen. There was no liquor licence and the best the establishment was likely to be able to provide was tea, for years sta­ple fuel for the Archer Street metabolism (the two men had established a lifelong 'tea bag connection' with a Chiswick wholesaler), coffee, and maybe a hamburger.

From the start, it was an unspoken agreement that the front man would be Ronnie Scott and that the club would bear his name, though King was crucial to the graft of administration even then, and would become the dif­ference between survival and collapse in later years. King's commitment was total, and Stella was obliged by the working hours to bring up their two children almost singlehanded. But to King, Scott was the unchallenged star. Someone had to embody the club in the eyes of the jazz public. Scott was the most highly regarded modern jazz musician in Britain, apart from Tubby Hayes, and his reputation was something money couldn't buy.

The London modern jazz world of the late 1950s was a limited market and for the new contenders in it, the lie of the land was not so difficult to gauge. In Wardour Street, a stone's throw away, was the Flamingo, already in existence for two years. The old Studio 51, which opened after the Club Eleven's demise, had started life with a modern jazz policy but by 1959 was presenting revivalist and traditional music. As for the amount of music you could reasonably expect to present and still come out ahead, Saturday night audiences were good and Sundays passable, but weekdays were graveyards.

Scott and King thought the entrance prices charged by the other jazz clubs were too low ever to be able to finance really unusual acts. They never considered Americans, and anyway the embargo was still firm. They would gradually improve their modest premises so that one day it would be the kind of place where people wouldn't mind paying a little more just to be in a real club. And they would build towards making jazz a part of London life. After scratching together the basics, they went about developing a marketing policy. What this amounted to was a weekly pooling of gags by the musicians that could be deployed as publicity in small ads in Melody Maker. Scott had never seen any reason why you shouldn't present any enterprise to the customers as if the whole thing were a joke, as long as you didn't treat it as one when it really counted, and that meant playing. He therefore placed an entry in the columns of Melody Maker of 31 October 1959 which declared the following:

RONNIE SCOTT'S CLUB

39 Gerrard Street, W1

OPENING TONIGHT!

Friday 7.30pm.

Tubby Hayes Quartet; the trio with

Eddie Thompson, Stan Roberts, Spike Heatley.

A young alto saxophonist, Peter King, and

an old tenor saxophonist, Ronnie Scott.

The first appearance in a jazz club since the

relief of Mafeking by Jack Parnell.

Membership 10/- until January 1961.

Admission 1/6 (to members) 2/6 (non-members)

The entry concluded boldly: 'The best jazz in the best club in town' - Ronnie Scott having learnt from the American example that you didn't lose any­thing by excess. If the punters didn't agree they could always vote with their feet. It was a gamble, but Ronnie Scott came from a long gamblers' line.

Scott and King had opened the proceedings with a shrewd mixture of attractions, a blend of the new and the familiar intended to cut across as many of the modern jazz persuasions as possible. Hayes was a sure-fire cert, of course, and would be appearing with the Couriers' old pianist Terry Shannon, and with Phil Seamen on drums and a brilliant new bassist, Jeff Clyne, who had played on the streets of Edgware with Ronnie Scott's step­sister Marlene and who had revered the local heroes, the Feldman brothers, on those same streets. As for the reference to the 'young alto saxophonist Peter King', this was not a gag at his partner's expense but introducing a sensational new arrival on the scene, a thin anxious-looking nineteen-year-old from Tolworth in Surrey, who had been playing for just a little over two years and already demonstrated his intense admiration for the work of Charlie Parker - King's speed of thought and richness of resources were close to rivaling Tubby Hayes even then. The newcomer's preoccupation with Parker extended, as Benny Green observed, to his small-talk, which consisted almost entirely of analyses of the structure of various Parker solos.

In the press, Peter King was modest about his achievements. He said he was 'limited both technically and musically. But I can feel something com­ing.' In fact, as the more discriminating of local observers immediately realised, King was virtually there. He was already one of the few British interpreters of Parker's methods to execute the complexities of bop with an air of ease and relaxation. This was not so much discernible in the young man's demeanour onstage (his eyes would be downcast as he played, his legs splayed and knees bending with the beat like a man who had spent a long time on horseback, and he perpetually looked nervous) but in the flu­ency with which streams of new melody tumbled from his horn, and the momentum of his rhythmic attack.

King had never served an apprenticeship in one idiom and then switched to another. He was a modernist through and through. His very existence was a testament to the value of the players of Scott's generation having made those pilgrimages to New York and spent those long hours in Carlo Krahmer's studio listening to imported 78s. They had built a spring­board for new players that would make possible a conclusive rejection of the inferiority complex that British players had about their jazz.

The first gig also featured Eddie Thompson, a pianist whose ideas absorbed swing music, bop, the majestic 'orchestral' jazz pianists like Art Tatum and Duke Ellington and a good deal of classical music too. In fea­turing Thompson, the club was opening with one of the finest keyboard artists in the land.

It was an evening of magic. Scott and King had already set themselves several dates that they had eventually missed and the club wasn't really ready for business even on that memorable occasion of 30 October 1959. There were shows every night of that weekend; in the daytime frantic efforts were made to improve the place. The club was packed with musi­cians and friends. Ray Nance, Duke Ellington's trumpeter who was returning to the States after the band's European tour, dropped in on the Friday night to wish Scott luck. It became obvious that the all-nighters were such a magnet for after-hours players looking for somewhere to blow that the club began to charge them 2/- for the privilege, a state of affairs that caused a certain amount of hurt surprise.

Many in the business, who thought they knew only too well not only the prospects for modern jazz in London, but the temporary nature of some of Ronnie Scott's enthusiasms as well, gave the place no more than a couple of weeks. But in the event it was just what the London jazz public needed. It was informal, it didn't charge nightclub prices, the music was consistently good and it was devoted to a no-messing policy of presentation of the best practitioners of jazz in Britain. Melody Maker ran a spread on the club the week after it opened, with photographs of Scott, Thompson, Tubby Hayes and others. The copy declared:

In addition to presenting the top names of British modern jazz, Ronnie intends to feature promising young musicians at the club and Friday's guest stars included the new alto sensation, Peter King.

In its pre-Christmas edition, its correspondent Bob Dawbarn also com­mented on the new arrival as 'a highly optimistic note for British jazz. There are still too few places for the modern musician to ply his trade, but the players themselves took matters into their own hands.'

Word of mouth was the publicity machine for the most part, apart from those little ads in Melody Maker. Scott devoted himself to making a minia­ture art-form out of them in the hope that people would seek them out, promising anything he could think of. He would claim that the club would be featuring an unexpected joint appearance by Sir Thomas Beecham, Somerset Maugham and Little Richard. He would promise food untouched by human hands because the chef was a gorilla.

The place caught on. Visiting musicians from abroad, increasingly prevalent in Britain as Harold Davison and others staged more and more concerts that would tie into existing European tours, were to be seen in Ronnie Scott's, which added to the glamour of being there. There were, after all, few enough places in any town where such a rare bird as a jazz musician could truly feel at home. The drummer Shelly Manne, in London with one of Norman Granz's 'Jazz At The Philharmonic' packages, even returned to the States to open a club of his own after having spent some time absorbing the atmosphere at Gerrard Street. That the place was run by musicians was already promising to be a considerable benefit. Even though Scott and King were not in a position to pay big money, they were in the same business as the professionals they were hiring, and they were honest. Players didn't suffer the crippling paranoia, fleecing and all-round disrespect that often characterised relationships between jazz musicians and promoters.

Two problems were soon apparent. The first was that there was a law of diminishing returns about presenting British jazz players - even the very best - night after night. Scott and King soon felt the draught of this diffi­culty. They ran the establishment on a simple principle, based on a consul­tation with the rudimentary accounts at the end of each week. If there was enough in the kitty to pay the artists and the rent for another week's work, it meant the place was still open.

The second snag was the absence of a bar. Scott and King looked into the formalities and the regulations were complicated. If you were going to serve alcohol, you needed a 'wine committee'. Ronnie Scott and Pete King formed two-thirds of the wine committee and asked Benny Green to be the third, being a literary man and a correspondent for a high-class newspaper. Green duly travelled to Wembley police station to make a statement as to why Ronnie Scott's Club wanted to make a public nuisance of itself in this way.

'What is the purpose of this club?' asked the station sergeant wearily.

'It's to try to get rhythm sections to play in time,' intoned Green, straight-faced.

The sergeant dutifully took it down word for word. The club's liquor licence was also dependent on providing some form of emergency exit in the case of fire. It was rudimentary enough, and fortunately never had to be tested, being simply a metal ladder that extended upstairs into the hallway of the Jewish garment manufacturer above. Relationships with that estab­lishment were mixed during Ronnie Scott's tenure in Gerrard Street.

 Early on it became apparent that Scott and King were going to be no orthodox club-owners. Scott's guiding philosophy, as it had been back in the days of the nine-piece, continued to be that if you could get a laugh out of it, it couldn't be all bad. The word soon got around. Here was a place where all of the misfits and square pegs of a square mile of London dedicated to the entertainment of the normals by the weirdos could relax in congenial company - like writer Colin Maclnnes, a deep devotee of jazz and friend of Denis Rose, like actor and playwright Harold Pinter. A man called Fred Twigg attached himself to the club, and became its odd-job man and cleaner. He took to sleeping on the premises, which worsened a chronic condition that Twigg lived with - apparitions. He often complained to the proprietors of flying creatures and gorillas that frequented the establish­ment at night. And in those early days, the club unexpectedly became an actors' studio as well.

Ronnie Scott had known the actress Georgia Brown from the East End, and she suggested to him that the Gerrard Street cellar would be perfect as a daytime rehearsal room for an actors' company. The company turned out to involve the likes of Maggie Smith, George Devine of the Royal Court Theatre, Michael Caine and Lindsay Anderson. (Ronnie Scott fell unrequitedly in love with an actress called Ann Lynne and visited the Royal Court night after night to watch her in performance with Albert Finney.) Scott and Benny Green found the rehearsals irresistible. They both took to standing behind the tea bar for hours, endlessly making lemon tea for the labouring thespians and eventually found their own communications with others helplessly enmeshed in fake stage-speak. 'What dost thou fancy in the 4.30?' Scott would enquire of Green.

One of the rehearsals involved George Devine donning an elaborate mask, and demanding that the actors guess the emotion expressed by his body-language only. Devine went up to the street to prepare, and promptly vanished. It transpired that the passing citizens of Soho had concluded from Devine's mask that exotic fetishistic pursuits were going on downstairs, and had mobbed him. Devine eventually tore himself away and fled inartistically down the steps. 'Fear!' promptly supplied the members of the actors' company on the appearance of the master, still sticking to instructions.

Throughout 1960, the difficulty of sustaining an audience for the local musicians continued to nag at Scott and King. The Musicians' Union ban had stopped being unconditional two years previously and international artists regularly came and went. But residencies, the maintaining of an imported star in a British venue night after night for a week, or a month, had not been considered. King, who still worked with the now highly suc­cessful impresario Harold Davison, knew that the latter would not be keen that his protégés step on his territory.

But King also knew that things could not go on as they were. He began at the British Musicians' Union, with the assistant secretary, Harry Francis, who was amenable to the idea of a new arrangement that would suit the requirements of a specialist nightclub. If the exchange of artists would be one for one, Francis was convinced that the request would go through on the British side. King turned his attention to the real nub of the problem. Since the 1930s, James C. Petrillo of the American Federation of Musicians had effectively battened down any form of trade in musical resources likely to cause loss of earnings to his own members. Petrillo (nicknamed 'Little Caesar' because of his stocky, pugnacious, Edward G. Robinson-like demeanour) was a man with a straight-shooting style of negotiation that made him a formidable opponent. The American Federation's policy had grown out of far leaner years than the 1950s and King, as a musician himself, was generally sympathetic to the union's orig­inal position. Its inflexibility from the mid-fifties onwards was principally fuelled by the attitude of the British Musicians' Union, which was con­vinced that American members would receive far more attractive invita­tions to Britain than the other way around. King reasoned that if jazz musicians were the Cinderella’s of the profession already, it was short­sighted now that times were not so hard to turn down a policy that might further the public's interest in the music generally.

Scott and King needed to pick their first guest, then worry about the bureaucracy afterwards. They chose Zoot Sims, a one-time partner of Stan Getz in the Woody Herman band and a player with much the same lyricism and raffish elegance as Getz but with a more robust and muscular delivery. Sims was popular at the Half Note Club in New York, an Italian family business by the Cantorino brothers, with a reputation similar to that of the Scott club in London for presenting good music to audiences that cared about it in an atmosphere conducive to relaxation and inventiveness. Sims accepted readily.

King then went to New York to try to sew it up. He told the music press that Tubby Hayes was taking a holiday in America at the same time, and it was only reasonable that he, as Hayes's manager, should make an attempt to arrange some work for his client. King met Sims for a beer to chew it over. They played Tubby Hayes's records to the Cantorino’s, and from dis­trusting a project they felt they didn't really need - an English jazz soloist on a month's residency in the heart of New York's jazzland - the Italians came around to the idea, and wanted to help Zoot, an old friend. The mat­ter went backwards and forwards inside the American Federation officials' headquarters for what to King seemed like an age. But the news finally came through that Petrillo had accepted the deal. King rang Scott in London and told him they were in business. Scott rang Harry Francis at the Musicians' Union and the swap was on. Finally they called Sims, who asked simply: 'When do I come?'

The exchange was arranged for November 1961. Ronnie Scott's Club was about to become an international jazz venue.

Zoot Sims was a delight.

After his first show, the proprietors of London's new international jazz club sat bemused in their locked up premises, counting the hours until they could hear him play again. For Scott, who had probably already subcon­sciously decided that a policy of booking practitioners on his own chosen instrument was going to be one of the principle ways he would enjoy being a promoter, Sims was a definition of the modern jazz musician who was still functioning wholeheartedly and pragmatically in the world everybody else had to live in.

He had a lot in common with Ronnie. He had been a teenage saxophone star in a showy jazz orchestra, the Woody Herman band. He was an unpre­tentious, unaffected, music-loving enthusiast. He knew jazz history. And he always played the music as if he enjoyed it. Sims was the kind of player who could have thrived in just about any sort of jazz band of the previous forty-odd years.

Sims delivered his easy-going swing and gentle rhapsodising through­out the month of November 1961 to thrilled audiences at the club. A casual, fresh-faced man, Sims would play without demonstrativeness, holding the instrument still. His opening bars would establish the tune with the direct­ness and confidence of a player completely at ease with his raw materials, and much of his appeal was founded on the manner in which his sound exhibited both confidence and a heady lightness, as if he were performing a graceful juggling act in slow motion. King arranged a short tour of out-of-town venues for Sims, and the proprietors presented him with a silver brandy flask after his last performance. Other local musicians donated such peculiarly British gifts as copies of Goon Show records.

Sims was also one of the first Americans to experience the off-beam goings-on that entered the folklore of the Ronnie Scott Club in its various in­carnations. Somebody threw a smoke-bomb into the room on 5 November which cleared the premises, but the Californian, a man after the Eastenders' hearts, barely raised an eyebrow. Fred Twigg, the club's vision-prone cleaner, was deeply suspicious of the quiet, unassuming visitor. 'Russian spy,' he warned Scott ominously. 'He's a Russian spy.'

In an interview, the usually unforthcoming Sims declared he was delighted with playing in London, since the intimacy of a club gave him the opportunity to relax. 'It reminds me of the Half Note,' Sims said. 'The atmosphere is warm and it's an easygoing place. Musicians like it. It has the same kind of management.' Sims added that he'd like to see Ronnie Scott play in the States. 'It depends on his confidence,' the American accurately observed.

For Scott's part, he was sad to see Sims go. 'My God,' he mused. 'What an anti-climax next week's going to be.'”

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

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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