"COMPADRES WITH B R U B E C K" - Jerome Klinkowitz, Listen Gerry Mulligan: An Aural Narrative in Jazz [From the Archives]

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

“Although the billing of the group is ‘The Dave Brubeck Trio featuring Gerry Mulligan,’ Brubeck invariably refers to it as “the quartet.” He is thinking of it now in more long range terms than when it was first put together in the spring of 1968 to play a few concerts in Charlotte, New Orleans and Mexico City. Then Mulligan seemed to be a visitor whose place might be taken by someone else at other concerts. But he is settling in as a regular part of the format.

‘I never thought that things would work out this way with Gerry,’ Dave admitted. ‘He hates piano players.’”

- Willis Johnson, liner notes to Blues Roots, CBS CS 9749].

This post deals with an interlude in the career of two of Modern Jazz’s most significant innovators, one which cast them together on and off over a five year period [1968-72] and resulted in five LPs with Jack Six on bass and drummer Alan Dawson on which they create some of the most original solos in their storied careers.

Both Dave Brubeck and Gerry Mulligan were equally accomplished as instrumentalists as well as composers, but it was the latter skill in support of one another that took them to a higher level of improvisation on these recordings.

The exuberance, energy and enthusiasm between the two is almost palpable. Sometimes it gets to a point where it bubbles over. “Gerry,” Dave explained, “loves to play and he gets very impatient. He keeps coming in on my solos all the time and I’m kind of digging it. Paul Desmond never interrupted me and I never interrupted Paul. But now I am beginning to interrupt Gerry.” 

“In the old quartet, Paul and I left each other alone in our solos. For awhile we had some improvised counterpoint but that kind of faded away because we liked the rhythm guys to stay out of it and they got bored.”

“But in this group nobody cares if the bass player is on the roof or if the drummer keeps the beat, so we can make the transition to complete freedom. Now we’re going more and more to free improvisation. Sometimes we really sound like this new approach, but the way we do it is harder because we keep a structure underneath so the listener has something to relate to.” [ Excerpts from Willis Johnson’s liner notes to Blues Roots, CBS CS 9749].

© Copyright ® Jerome Klinkowitz, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“The spring of 1968 found Gerry Mulligan and Dave Brubeck in parallel situations at similar points in their musical careers. Although a few years older than the baritone saxophonist, Brubeck had risen to prominence almost simultaneously with Mulligan. Their two quartets helped set the tone for fifties jazz, and into the sixties both players continued to develop in styles building on the principles of "white" jazz music—that is, with techniques drawing more on the classical European approach than on African or black American influences. 

As American society was itself transformed in the years surrounding 1968, this orientation became more critical, for while broad segments of the culture were turning to a more rhythm-and-blues-based music, Mulligan sought pop roots in the Beatles and Roger Miller, while the Brubeck quartet's hiply intellectual penchant for tweaking the nose of pop culture with such projects as Dave Digs Disney (which actually made successful jazz renditions of such tunes as "Heigh Ho" and "Some Day My Prince Will Come") continued unabated with such albums as Gone with the Wind (which included "Camptown Races") and Anything Goes! The Dave Brubeck Quartet Plays Cole Porter. For the general public, Brubeck's quartet had meant "jazz" for seventeen years, and its readily identifiable sound and stylistic approach guaranteed the success of these otherwise novel projects.

This strong indentifiability, however, could easily turn into a rut, making other styles of expression unlikely or impossible. And so in 1967 Brubeck disbanded his quartet, which had featured Paul Desmond, Gene Wright, and Joe Morello for so many years that their collective presence had become a virtual trademark of mainstream jazz, and turned instead to several classically based individual projects. His situation, then, matched Mulligan's, though for different reasons. Gerry's Concert Jazz Band did not record after December 1962, but not for reasons such as its leader's wish to explore new frontiers, unfettered by his previous style. Instead, economic demands had nipped the CJB almost in the bud, just as cancer had taken Judy Holiday's life before she and Gerry could collaborate on more than half-a-dozen recorded songs and one produced album featuring their material and others'. Nevertheless, Brubeck and Mulligan found themselves suddenly alone in 1968, uninvolved in ongoing groups and gigs for the first time in their professional lives.

Yet they were still Dave Brubeck and Gerry Mulligan, and by spring the country's leading jazz promoter, George Wein, was approaching Brubeck to collect on a promise to appear at the Mexican version of Wein's Newport Jazz Festival. Because a similar package celebrating the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City soon expanded the commitment to four additional appearances, Brubeck decided to forgo touring as a single and assemble a group instead. Bassist Jack Six had worked with him on his classical performances, and George Wein suggested drummer Alan Dawson. Because Mulligan was already being included on the tour as a featured attraction, Brubeck elected to meld the two acts as "The Dave Brubeck Trio Featuring Gerry Mulligan." With two warm-up concerts in Charlotte and New Orleans, the four players set out for Mexico and the album that would appear as Compadres: The Dave Brubeck Trio Featuring Gerry Mulligan (Columbia CS-9704).

Brubeck's and Mulligan's histories had intersected at several previous points, but their unison was still surprising — and, to the anticipation of some ears, potentially jarring. Their respective groups had shared concert stages many times before, dating back to the California Concerts program of 1954 when the Brubeck quartet would play the evening's first half followed by Mulligan's combo after the intermission. And of course Mulligan and Desmond had recorded two full albums together. There had even been an occasion, when Desmond was temporarily out of action with dental work, in which Mulligan took his place within the Brubeck quartet and its repertoire. Yet Mulligan meeting Brubeck would be an affair entirely different from a blowing session with Paul Desmond, for it had been in affiliation with the classically trained pianist that found Desmond at his abstract brainiest. Mulligan had made his first claim to fame by publicly renouncing the piano and its supposedly inhibiting effect; now he was to work in tandem with one of the era's most distinctive and imposing keyboard figures—not a light-fingered session man willing to add the minimum of rhythmic fills but a self-described heavy-handed and chordally inclined master, whose voice and presence in the quartet had been even more forceful than the group's horn. Mulligan himself took pride in the commanding presence and distinctive voice of his own solo playing, plus he was bringing three compositions to fill out nearly half of this first album's program. The possibilities for a collision were certainly present.

• Dave Brubeck-Gerry Mulligan: "Jumping Bean," "Adios, Mari-quita Linda," "Indian Song," "Tender Woman," "Amapola," "Lullaby de Mexico," "Sapito," and "Recuerdo," from Compadres, Columbia CS-9704, May 1968. Gerry Mulligan: baritone saxophone; Dave Brubeck: piano; Jack Six: bass; Alan Dawson: drums.

Although the two players never did collide, towering strengths makes Compadres and the four other American albums (recorded through 1972) successful. Their debut number, Mulligan's own "Jumping Bean," depends upon it for effect. No easy Mulligan Meets Brubeck tune in the style of the simple little ditties composed to get a blowing session underway, this piece is rhythmically complex and hard hitting in the sharp attack it demands from both lead instruments, creating a situation in which both the piano and baritone sax must play in a percussive manner. For this attack to work, neither player can back off in favor of the other; like a synchronized combat team, each must slug it out ahead with an implicit trust that the other will be in place. Mulligan's solo in particular sustains this mood; where he might be expected to drift, he takes direction from the song's emphatic rhythm, a stutter-and-clash affair that precludes lots of lazily flowing notes and demands that he approach his horn like its bass clef cousins in the bottom reaches of the orchestra. Between Brubeck's solid left hand and Jack Six's determined playing, the only style open for Mulligan's work is within their rhythmic structures. But rather than feeling confined, his solo assumes direction and functions as the equivalent of Brubeck's pounding piano.

Good pacing of a concert demands contrasting material, and in structuring the album's first side Mulligan and Brubeck turn to the slower, smoothly swinging (over a Latin rhythm) "Adios, Mariquita Linda." Its melody is a strong and familiar one, coming directly from the Mexican culture to which the two composers refer in the originals they've brought along. Partially for this reason, Mulligan keeps his solo very close to the melody; but his faithful reflection of the song's melodic nature is also a sign that he likes it, and much like his playing on the Beatles and Roger Miller tunes from a few albums back his confident playing of the song's original line confirms that there has been something in it akin to his own way of handling a score. How Mulligan handles a song that invites more inventive soloing is made clear on the next number, Brubeck's "Indian Song," which returns to the harshly percussive style with which the album began, here augmented by the drummer's imposition of a 6/8 time signature. Within this radically different context Mulligan takes pains to construct a definite, clear melodic line of his own, for in its rhythmic busyness this is just what the song itself lacks. Thanks to Mulligan's strong solo, Brubeck can take a more contemplative turn himself, exploring a set of classical exercises that the number never could have borne without Gerry's self-invented melody intervening.

The balance of Compadres benefits from this complementarity. When the number demands it, the two men can play together forcefully, their two instruments creating as much drive and presence as a much larger ensemble. Such is the effect in "Amapola," the closest they come to straight out blowing on this first LP. More often, the two support each other's more subtle work, especially on an older Mulligan composition that had been waiting for just such an appropriate premiere: "Lullaby de Mexico," a delicate composition in the manner of Brubeck's own "Tender Woman" from the first side. In both cases the numbers' careful construction and almost fragile structure demand that the two players work in almost duet form, each offering a gentle cushion to the other's gestures toward a melody that would collapse if overstated. Mulligan's clear lead distinguishes both pieces, and his solos sustain the compositional mood throughout. His own "Lullaby" asks bari and piano to play together at the end, and their gentleness is all the more remarkable in view of the immense power unleashed in earlier numbers.

If Compadres has a weak link, it is Mulligan's "Sapito," which comes across as a novelty piece; moreover, its faster pace and plethora of notes force the bari to struggle a bit, hardly a situation that flatters its composer. But this solitary lapse is more than compensated by the beauty of "Recuerdo," Brubeck's tonally haunting and rhythmically complex ballad. Though piano and sax begin the piece together, the two players soon divide for their own approaches — Mulligan taking a strongly melodic solo, Brubeck relying on his personal, classical style both for thematic and rhythmic improvisation. From the perspective of two decades, the material chosen for Compadres might seem a bit patronizing; although George Wein made much of Brubeck's reputation in Mexico, that country's audiences were not treated to the master playing his own famous material but rather horsing around with supposedly nativistic songs, which to some ears could sound like a vaudevillian parody of Hispanic rhythms and themes. To their credit, neither Brubeck nor Mulligan let their solos be over directed by this Mexicali impulse, but that fact makes it even more evident that the Spanish flavor of their tunes is mere window dressing. Only on Brubeck's "Indian Song" and Mulligan's "Lullaby de Mexico" is their playing strongly influenced by the song itself, and in both cases these compositions predate the tour's occasion. And so, even as Mulligan makes a decided turn away from the 1960s promotional style that had threatened to compromise his work, the festival influence lingers as a pressure to slant material and performances to a show-biz impression of what audiences want and expect.

• Dave Brubeck-Gerry Mulligan: "Limehouse Blues," "Journey," "Cross Ties," "Broke Blues," "Things Ain't What They Used to Be" "Movin' Out," and "Blues Roots," from Blues Roots, Columbia CS-9749, 1969. Same personnel as May 1968 above.

Of the five American-issued Brubeck-Mulligan albums, four are concert or festival performances (three of them abroad, where the pressures to conform to supposed audience expectations are even stronger). Hence their single LP done in the studio, Blues Roots, takes on a strongly different character from the others, since for once the two giants are immediately responsible only to themselves. The result is by far their most idiosyncratic album and perhaps Mulligan's most avant-gardist project to date, for the seven cuts push the blues structure to its most abstract limits. Each number chooses one facet —  rhythm, melody, the chromatic nature of chord changes — and explores it with a thoroughness usually not found outside of the classical conservatory. Such a mode comes naturally to the formally trained Brubeck, a student of Darius Milhaud, but for Mulligan — who learned his theory in the bands of Tommy Tucker and Johnny Warrington — the undertakings of Blues Roots make for a radically new experience. On his Jimmy Witherspoon album Mulligan had explored the blues from its roots in popular culture, but now more abstract and theoretical questions were being brought to the table. For the opener, "Limehouse Blues," the percussive aspect of the idiom gets major, almost exclusive emphasis. Brubeck takes the first phrase by literally pounding out a single chord in place of the song's melodic line, at the same time that Mulligan reduces his own instrument to its most basic function, sustaining a bottom-of-his-horn low note throughout. As the piece develops, the two players augment rather than develop their roles, Brubeck's piano taking on a syncopated striking of two chords while Mulligan's bari hits on just the opposite beat to create a solid wall of sound, nearly all of which is percussive in nature. The effect is intentionally jarring, not at all what listeners have come to expect from this classic at the center of jazz's most traditional canon, but appropriate nevertheless as a distillation of the song's key element — much like an infrared photograph that highlights the most prominent features of a topography, or an expressionistic canvas capturing the more extreme reaction of a painter's subconscious feelings.

How important that percussive effect is becomes clear with the second number, Mulligan's own "Journey," which forgoes all except the most casual rhythmic support in order to emphasize the lyrical bluesiness of his horn. Here his playing is relaxed and more characteristically simple, which yields an interesting result: at this pace, with the rhythm flowing smoothly instead of percussively forceful. Mulligan's songwriting capabilities carry his own solo through to its lyric completion, while in these circumstances Brubeck, forced to a lighter touch, relies on the conservatory approach of chordal permutations and rhythmic symmetry. Yet Brubeck proves himself equally abstract, albeit in a more modernistic way, on his own composition, "Cross Ties." Played in a brisk 3/4 (which yields the rhythmic feeling of 5, even though the solos and melody take a three-to-the-bar cast), the piano begins by playing on top of the rhythm but gradually drifting away from it into stutters and spurts of percussively phrased lines. Mulligan takes these at face value and adds his own spice to the potpourri, much as Paul Desmond delighted in doing on the Two of a Mind LP. Mulligan goes to the extent of adopting Desmond's practice of double-tracking a third melodic line (at which point the rhythm backs off to allow the piano line and the two baris to create an atonal, partially arhythmic effect). When the bass joins them with a fourth line, while the drums introduce various other rhythms to which the piano responds, the blues structure is stretched almost beyond recognizable form.

This peak of abstraction is sustained through Teo Macero's "Broke Blues," a five-minute exercise in which Brubeck (apparently on harpsichord) sets a classical mode within which Mulligan plays a baroque line, much like the Bach-inspired numbers from the Brubeck quartet's earlier Jazz Impressions of Eurasia LP. What anchors the Age of Enlightenment approach is the fact that all four instruments play constantly throughout the piece, with no apparent solos by any one instrument. Rather, in the Bach tradition, all four solo simultaneously, the interweavings of their lines taking complementary paths thanks to the composition's rationalistic design.

With the album's second canonical blues, "Things Ain't What They Used to Be," Brubeck and Mulligan take on the challenge of another piece whose traditionally almost defies any further distillation. Johnny Hodges's composition does survive almost to the end, when after some legitimate swinging by both Brubeck and Mulligan the piano starts wandering away from the tune's loping pace in favor of some random-sounding phrases that, try as they might, fail to deconstruct the song. A faster pace keeps things moving beyond such temptations in Brubeck's "Movin' Out," where Mulligan's horn stretches the outer limits of each four-bar change without ever sounding intellectually dense. By comparison, Mulligan's experiments with the chromatic structure of "Things Ain't What They Used to Be" are more extreme, yet when the piano and bari get together for some polyphony toward the end of Brubeck's song the tonality once again begins to wander. It makes sense, therefore, that the album concludes with Mulligan's "Blues Roots," the solid wailing of which prompts Brubeck to lay copper strips across his instrument's strings to make it sound like a thumbtacked honky-tonk piano. Mulligan's playing emphasizes the four-to-the-bar beat, enhanced by piano, bass, and drums hitting the rhythmic roots while his sax does a minimal amount of sliding around in between.

As on the Compadres album, Blues Roots distinguishes itself as anything but a traditional horn and piano-trio album. Once again, Brubeck's instrument has spotlighted itself as much as Mulligan's; within the catalog of Gerry's work, only his meeting with Thelonious Monk carries the same impression, for in terms of relative dominance he might as well have been playing with another horn.

• Dave Brubeck-Gerry Mulligan; "Things Ain't What They Used to Be," "The Sermon on the Mount," "Indian Song," "Limehouse Blues," and "Lullaby de Mexico," from Live at the Berlin Philharmonie, Columbia KC-32143, 7 November 1970. Same personnel as May 1968 above.

The distillation factor yields especially good results on the next Brubeck-Mulligan album, taken from performances during the Berlin Jazz days in 1970. With one exception, the selections are drawn from Compadres and Blues Roots, but finalities of each previous album cross-fertilize each other and produce a synthesis of solid performative jazz. "Things Ain't What They Used to Be" and especially "Limehouse Blues" lose some of their avant-garde abstraction in favor of the Mexican album's more exuberant sense of swing, while "Indian Song" is redistilled to emphasize its rhythmic properties, and "Lullaby de Mexico" is explored in terms of dynamics and tonalities, its compositional parts being disassembled before the audience's ears.

Like the Compadres effort, Live at the Berlin Philharmonic is solidly presentational. The emphasis is on maintaining a sense of swing throughout, and any tendencies to tamper with structure serve only to energize further the "live" nature of this performance. As if to emphasize the roundly swinging nature of "Things Ain't What They Used to Be," Mulligan jumps right into the first phrase with a super-imposition of the Ellington baud's other rolling number, "Don't Get Around Much Any More"; both his and Brubeck's solos maintain this expansive sense of swing until just before the end, when some sax-piano polyphony threatens to get abstract, until the out chorus brings things back to the solid Johnny Hodges idiom. Brubeck's "Indian Song," one of the more successful pieces from Compadres, is here presented with an even greater emphasis on rhythm, to the extent that Alan Dawson's long drum solo fits in naturally with its presentation. In both numbers Brubeck's tendencies toward the percussive aspects of piano do not become a matter in themselves but are instead enlisted in support of the song's rhythm — swinging in the first, staccato in the second. It is a sure sign of the new quartet beginning to gel.

There may be some slackening of avant-gardist effort in this fresh synthesis, but not too much. The cacophonous pounding that made "Limehouse Blues" such a jarring affair on Blues Roots is now limited to just the first few bars, after which Brubeck settles back into such a traditional treatment that the festival audience can applaud in recognition of its familiar theme; what gestures there are toward an abstract understanding of the song's percussive and tonal elements are reserved for occasional interpolations with the baritone, a much less dogmatic approach than taken on Blues Roots. 

When Brubeck and Mulligan wish to highlight a special effect, it becomes the quality of sound itself; "Lullaby de Mexico" is reshaped for this performance to emphasize its dynamics and phraseology, while Brubeck's original (and the album's one new piece) "The Sermon on the Mount" forgoes any developing rhythmic and melodic structure in favor of spotlighting the stirring beauty of Mulligan's deep-voiced horn, the playing of which comes closest to creating something out of nothing.

• Dave Brubeck-Gerry Mulligan: "Blues for Newport," "Take Five," and "Open the Gates," from The Last Set at Newport, Atlantic SD-1607, 3 July 1971. Same personnel as May 1968 above.

Following their 1970 Berlin appearance, Mulligan and Brubeck collaborated on two more albums, each of them taped at festival appearances: The Last Set at Newport from 3 July 1971, and the reunion with Paul Desmond given the apt title We're All Together Again For the First Time, a collection of takes from late October and early November 1972 in Berlin, Paris, and Rotterdam. On these LPs Mulligan's direction is clear, taking less of a creative role in the Brubeck combo while showing evidence of writing for his own new group, which had recorded the Age of Steam album in the months preceding Newport. Because of the dominance of Brubeck's own material and his strong playing on the first LP and the presence of Desmond on the second, these productions fit more squarely in the canon of the Dave Brubeck Quartet than they do in Mulligan's—for once the group's formal name, "The Dave Brubeck Quartet Featuring Gerry Mulligan," seems appropriate.

Comprising just three numbers. The Last Set at Newport is definitely Brubeck's affair, from the retrospective look at "Take Five" (the first time Mulligan would be asked to play an old Brubeck classic, and a Paul Desmond composition at that) through the opening "Blues for Newport" (a blues credited to Brubeck) to the leader's symphonically based "Open the Gates (Out of the Way of the People)," which complements his "Sermon on the Mount" from the Berlin festival.

The blues piece is the album's most impressive contribution, one of those rare performances in which creativity has been stimulated rather than complicated by the festival context. Bill Chase's electronically dominant fusion group had preceded the quartet on the bill, and Dave confessed to organizer George Wein that he feared he couldn't compete with its sound level. Advised to go out there and wail, Brubeck and Mulligan deliver their most energetic playing in the service of an extremely percussive, heavy-handed blues that despite its heavy beat never gives up on swinging. Brubeck's playing can even be said to rock, while Mulligan throws the pianist's playing into even higher contrast by taking the better part of his own solo in several variations of rhythmic stop-time.

"Take Five," in its fame as a virtual identifier of the Brubeck quartet at its peak, is the greatest challenge to Mulligan's playing. He exerts his own personality almost at once, slurring and swinging the bridge more than Paul Desmond did on the quartet's hit record, hut then backing off for the rest of the tune, playing his own riffs in response to the time signature instead of constructing a careful melodic line as had his predecessor. That the term "predecessor" itself comes into play shows how the innovative aspects of the Mulligan-Brubeck collaboration were beginning to run their course, with the future remaining more solidly in Brubeck's hands as the baritone sax player's creative genius begins looking elsewhere. This disposition is no more apparent than on Brubeck's "Open the Gates," where Mulligan doesn't really solo at all, his role being reserved for the symphonic duty of joining in with the leader's piano at its peak to create the number's orchestral height.

• Dave Brubeck-Paul Desmond-Gerry Mulligan: "Truth," "Unfinished Woman," "Take Five," and "Rotterdam Blues," from We're All Together Again for the First Time, Atlantic SD-1641, 28 October and 4 November 1972. Same personnel as May 1968 above, with the addition of alto saxophonist Paul Desmond.

The European reunion album with Paul Desmond is just that, an occasion for bringing together the key elements of Brubeck's 1950-1967 and 1968-1972 periods with an eye toward his and Mulligan's futures. That those futures were heading in remarkably different directions is clear from the album's two new numbers, "Truth" and "Unfinished Woman." The former is a Brubeck oratorio, subtitled "Planets Are Spinning," and of all the quasi-classical pieces Brubeck had brought to his collaboration this one is by far the least jazz oriented. Mulligan and Desmond attempt conventional enough solos, but Brubeck's performance speaks of the modernist conservatory throughout. Its back-to-back position with Mulligan's new composition makes for an especially strong contrast, for while Brubeck was heading in a classical direction, Mulligan's piece was one of the first numbers written for his Ark/Orchestra, a fusion group that would propel its leader through the 1970s and 1980s. The number, based on the repetition in two chords of a simple riff, outlines Mulligan's new goals, which include a fresh emphasis on rhythm and a greater interest in sustaining sounds (as opposed to constructing elaborate melodies). His solo builds on these new influences, holding single notes much longer and limiting his phrasing to the major chord, not shifting the direction of his line until the chord structure itself changes.

The balance of We're All Together consists of the original Brubeck quartet (without Mulligan) doing a reprise of one of their more famous numbers, "Koto Song," plus Gerry joining in for a fresh version of "Take Five," in which a softer approach brings new attention to the melody. "Rotterdam Blues" is an improvised encore, as is "Sweet Georgia Brown," the latter lasting just one minute. The blues piece is good-humored barrelhouse playing, in which some of Mulligan's favorite licks from the Meeting sessions of a decade and a half before resurface. But with Brubeck's sixty-second solo curtain call, the lights come down on this period of collaboration—a workshop exercise of sorts that not only sustained the two great musicians through a difficult transitional period but allowed them both to refine key aspects of their playing, reaffirming their jazz roots no matter what the nature of the group's material.”

Stablemates (Live At Maybeck Recital Hall, Berkeley, CA / September 29, ... R.I.P. Mike Wofford [1938-2025]

Buddy Tate Featuring Milt Buckner (1968)

Herb Pomeroy Orchestra - Theme For Terry

Herb Pomeroy Orchestra - Jack Sprat

• Herb Pomeroy – trumpet
• Lennie Johnson – trumpet
• Augie Ferretti – trumpet
• Everett Longstreth – trumpet
• Joe Gordon – trumpet
• Joe Ciavardone – trombone
• Bill Legan – trombone
• Gene DiStasio – trombone
• Deane Haskins – baritone sax
• Varty Haroutunian – tenor sax
• Jaki Byard – tenor sax
• Zoot Sims (uncredited) – tenor sax^[1][4]
• Dave Chapman – alto sax
• Boots Mussulli – alto sax
• Ray Santisi – piano
• John Neves – bass
• Jimmy Zitano – drum
• 
  

In Salah - Tubby Hayes / Ronnie Scott (The Jazz Couriers)

Ronnie Scott - tenor sax, Tubby Hayes - tenor sax, Terry Shannon - piano, Jeff Clyne - bass, Bill Eyden - drums. 1958

Composer Mose Allison

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.'”

Gene̲ A̲m̲m̲o̲n̲s̲ – J̲u̲g̲a̲n̲t̲h̲o̲l̲o̲g̲y ̲(1̲9̲5̲5̲-̲5̲7̲)̲

“The music that goes under the very broad heading of “jazz,” has undergone so many changes and branched off in so many directions in the course of its history that there aren’t many definitive statements one can make about the music as a whole. But I can think of at least one; it’s about feeling. A good jazz musician, whether it’s Kid Ory or Ornette Coleman, has always been a musician who feels what he’s doing and makes his listeners feel it too.   If the feeling isn’t there, it’s not jazz. An intellectual exercise, maybe. A display of virtuosity, perhaps. But not jazz. Gene Ammons has never in his life played a note that was anything other than jazz.

Ammons has suffered much critical abuse for such imagined shortcomings as lack of inventiveness and insufficient technique, but even if the critics were right on those scores they’d be missing the point. The point is that feeling is central to Ammons’ approach and there have been few other musicians who put so much real, unaffected into everything they play. Like a great athlete whose every move is a thing of beauty, Ammons is a natural. Listening to him in action, it sometimes sounds as if playing Jazz comes as easily to him as laughing, or crying, or breathing, that he plays as though he was born to, because it’s in his blood.

This may sound a bit melodramatic, but there is at least one sense in which music really is in Gene Ammons’s blood. His parents were both musicians, and his father, Albert Ammons, was one of the undisputed giants of boogie-woogie piano. Among the earliest recordings he ever did were some sessions under his father’s leadership in the middle Forties. At the time, Gene’s playing was very much in the Lester Young bag, touched slightly by the harmonic and rhythmic advances being introduced in those years by the likes of Parker and Gillespie.

Someone under the influence of the President of both the Tenor Saxophone [known for the mellowness of his approach] and the modernists [who were becoming notorious for their defiance of tradition] might seem an unlikely sideman for one of for one of the masters of a piano style that is simple, direct and stomping. But the band between Ammons père and Ammons fils was more than simply genetic. It was one that, in a larger sense, is an essential component of the African-American experience: the bond of the blues.

The blues is perhaps the most basic form of artistic expression that has ever been developed [if, indeed, it was “developed,” as opposed to simply grown like Topsy]. It is the foundation upon which the towering edifice of Jazz is built. A Jazz musician who knows what he is doing is a Jazz musician who understands the blues. Boogie-woogie with its throbbing bass lines and its structural simplicity, is piano blues in its rawest form.Whether it was by actual study, by heredity, or by osmosis, it was clear from the beginning  that Gene Ammons had picked up much of Albert Ammons’ natural aptitude for playing the blues.

The blues, pure and simple, has remained at the core of Gene Ammons’ music, no matter how many stylistic influences he has absorbed.”

• Peter Keepnews insert notes excerpt, Juganthology [Prestige P-24036]