Happy 50th birthday Ronnie Scott’s

This month, the world’s most famous jazz club celebrates five decades of playing host to an extraordinary procession of musical legends

Fifty years ago this month, what was to become the most famous jazz club on the planet – Ronnie Scott’s – staged its first gig. The location wasn’t today’s glitzy Frith Street supper club, with its soft-lit ambiance, plush furnishings and coolly expert young bar staff, but a dingy basement around the corner in Soho’s Chinatown, where the stage could barely accommodate a quartet, the furnishings were cast-offs, and the staple beverage was tea.

Now, Ronnie Scott’s is preparing for its 50th anniversary, with jazz celebrities including cult crossover trio the Bad Plus, sax legend Pharoah Sanders, and pioneering ska guitarist Ernest Ranglin lined up for the celebrations. Though the club changed hands in 2004 and then underwent a luxurious makeover that polished off a little of its tatty bohemian charm, its commitment to a an all-jazz policy has significantly strengthened latelyand the photographic gallery of jazz giants covering the walls reminds musicians, audiences and owners of a great tradition demanding respect.

Many of the jazz heroes and heroines who’ve played at Ronnie Scott’s are no longer with us, but their names are familiar even to those with only a passing interest in jazzBill Evans, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Zoot Sims, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, and scores more. Sonny Rollins, very much alive and blowing, and due at the London Jazz festival in November, was also a regular visitor to in the 1960s. Rollins was often resident for weeks, pursuing eccentric odysseys of blistering improvisation into the small hours that those who were present still recall with awe. Significantly, the club’s proprietors were jazz musicians themselves, with empathy for their guests. Ronnie Scott was a star saxophonist on the British scene of the 40s and 50s and kept playing until his sudden death in 1996. His business partner, Pete King, was a fellow-saxophonist who turned to full-time management when the club they had launched with such modest expectations took off.

Scott was originally Aldgate-born Ronald Schatt, the son of successful bandleader/saxophonist Joseph Schatt, or Jock Scott. The younger Scott and his Charlie Parker-obsessed friends took to visiting New York’s jazz district in the late 40s, working their tickets as bandsmen on the Transatlantic ocean liners. Inspired by the city’s jazz clubs, they dreamed of a London equivalent. The first experiment was Club Eleven, a musician-run venture with an anti-commercial all-bebop policy, but it was eventually closed down by the drugs squad in 1950. The wittily charismatic, snappily dressed and musically respected Scott then pursued his playing and bandleading career through the next decade. But in October 1959, he and King opened the first jazz club to bear the Scott name, in a basement in London’s Gerrard Street.

At first, economics and union restrictions ruled out foreign players, but King began a determined negotiation with the American and British musicians’ unions that gradually prised open the door. An extraordinary procession of jazz giants soon began to come through it. For British jazz musiciansable at last to share a bandstand with such starsit was both a thrill and an overnight education.

Scott perfected an inimitable persona, as a laconic, wisecracking, chain-smoking loner, whose exhausted east London drawl almost, but not quite, camouflaged boundless admiration for his guests. He wouldn’t tolerate noise or disrespect from audiences, and he believed that a small and intimate venue like his was the ideal environment in which to appreciate the spontaneous conversational intimacies of jazz improvisation. Scott and King ran the place as enthusiasts, not entrepreneurswhich tempted them at times to put tough business choices on the back burner, to the extent that the club almost went under during the 80s. An official receiver came on to the board, and turned into a jazz fan himself. The enthusiasm and largesse of many friends Scott and King made in music pulled the club back from the brink.

Scott died in 1996, and eight years later, the then 75-year-old Pete King reluctantly sought a successor. Theatrical impresario Sally Greene, the new owner, took a while finding her feet and getting attuned to the remarkable institution she’d acquired. But this year, Ronnie Scott’s has been consistently packedand mostly for an undiluted jazz programme featuring both international celebrities and cutting-edge locals including Polar Bear and uncompromising Mercury nominees Led Bib. Ronnie Scott and Pete King may well have done more than any other Britons to make jazz seem like a part of everyday life rather than a weird, marginalised and elitist obsession. Theirs has been a hard act to follow, but the signs are that the new Ronnie Scott’s is now taking a long look at the authentic script. Happy anniversary to it.

JazzJohn Fordham on jazzJohn Fordham

source : www.guardian.co.uk

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