Back in 1979 the late Ronnie Scott
wrote a book called
'Some of My Best Friends are Blues';
and a very good book it is too.
Now, Ronnie Scott has always been
a favourite tenor sax player of mine,
who had a powerful ability to slowly
wind up the tension of his playing,
which more often than not resulted in fiery,
bluesy solos. I remember seeing him play
with Woody Herman's
International Herd back in the 1960s, where he played
a tremendous solo that brought applause not only
from the audience but the band too; he looked
as pleased as punch, or as pleased as punch as that
Mr Punch face of his would allow.
'Some of My Best Friends are Blues' was co-written by Mike Hennessey (a
very funny jazz writer and rather good jazz pianist), and first
published by W.H. Allen & Co. A new edition was
published in 2004 by Northway Publications.
To give you a flavour of the jazz scene back in the 1950s (a decade
where Scott grew up musically, and a period from which the often
down-at-heel British jazz musician created, out of necessity, a real
sense of humour that was a mixture of Hancock's Half Hour and The Goons.
Let me quote from the late Benny Green's wonderful introduction to the 1979
edition:
“The first time I ever heard Ronnie Scott mention the idea of a jazz
club was in the bandroom of the Orchid Ballroom, Purley, in South
London. The year was 1953. At the time, Scott, myself and seven others
were waging a bitter, and in the end triumphant campaign to keep alive a
co-operative orchestra whose strategy was to get itself booked into
dance halls, and then play uncompromising jazz once it got there.
Already most of the country's bandleaders had conceived a deep loathing
for us, which we did our best to aggravate on all possible occasions.
The trouble was that an orchestra which splits the profits is a violent
blasphemy against the dance band convention that the musician is a hired
hand pledged to making the fortune of the bandleader, with whom he is
expected to reach a relationship of grovelling servitude.
“To the non-playing maestros of the period, our co-operative enterprise
must have smacked strongly of syncopated Marxism. If our little cell,
starring Scott, proved to be the first of many, then the nation's
bandleaders, threatened with redundancy, would have no choice but to go
out and get an honest job. And yet, had our enemies been able to see us
that night at Purley, they might well have tempered their distaste with
a little sympathy.
“The evening had been a disaster.
“ Scott and I were in the bandroom, slowly changing out of our band
uniforms and into what we laughingly called our street clothes and
pondering the implications of the box-office returns. For the last five
minutes we had been trying to work out how many times nine went into
£14/6s/5d. Such mathematics was not good for the soul, so I was
astonished when Scott remarked that he intended investing his share of
the profits from our orchestra in a jazz club.
“What profits?” I asked
“It won't always be like this,” he said. “Not every date will turn out
to be like this one.”
Ronnie Scott was born Ronald Shatt on January 28th, 1927, in South Tenter
Street, Wapping, in the East End of London.
His Jewish family had fled the Russian pogroms in the 1880s, settling in
Broomehead Street, just off the Commercial Road. Ronnie's grandfather,
Morris, set-up a tailoring business that, as a result of acquiring work
from Queen Victoria, initially prospered. And no doubt as a result of
that prosperity Morris, and his wife Betty, began to raise a large
family, one of whom, Joseph (Jock) Scott, became an accomplished, and
renowned saxophonist and band leader in the 1920s, as would
his son some thirty years later, as well as creating one of the most
famous jazz clubs of all time, as Ronnie describes:
“What, you may ask, induced a carefree, happy-go-lucky, easy-going guy
like myself to get involved in running a jazz club? After all, I'm the
kind of person who gets worried when I don't have anything to worry about.
“Well, the standard answer to this question has always been that I
started the club so that I could guarantee myself somewhere to play,
and it's absolutely true. If I hadn't been a musician, there would have
been no Ronnie Scott's Club. However, the possibility of my being
anything else but a musician never really occurred to me. I took up the
trade because, at the time, it seemed a lot better than working, and I
didn't feel I was cut out to be a neuro-physiologist, High Court judge,
palaeontologist, or any of the other hand-to-mouth professions that my
East End mates seemed to be drifting into in the forties.”
Which shows off superbly well the in-built humour that was Ronnie
Scott's trademark throughout his professional life. I remember once
hearing him tell an audience, in his most ironic fashion, that his most
famous of bands, The Jazz Couriers (co-led by Tubby Hayes), was about to
play the entire Elvis Presley songbook; which, on reflection, wasn't
such a bad idea, but in those musically divisive days brought the house
down.
But it soon becomes clear, reading 'Some Of My Best Friends Are Blues',
that Ronnie Scott looked back on his own origins and childhood with
mixed feelings, and perhaps, deep down, not a little hurt.
“My father was a musician: a very good saxophone player who worked
under the name of Jock Scott and who was highly regarded in the
profession. But that really wasn't a factor in my becoming a musician
because my mother divorced my father when I was about four. I really
have no childhood memories of my father and, of course, he wasn't around
either to encourage or discourage me when I decided I wanted to be a
musician.”
Although it has to be said that Ronnie didn't go short of paternal
advice, with Jock's brother, Dave, a violinist in a dance band,
nurturing Ronnie's interest in music throughout his young life.
“I was born on 28 January, 1927 in one of those typically little East
End terraced houses in Aldgate. The rooms were tiny, there was a boiler
in the kitchen and we had a postage stamp backyard. We were a poor
family [certainly so after Cissie divorced Jock, having then to work in
a local department store to bring up her family]. My father was from a
Russian immigrant family and my mother's ancestry was a mixture of
Portugese and Dutch. I was brought up by my mother and my grandmother.
“The first musical instrument I ever owned was a cornet which I bought
for five bob in a junk shop on the way to school. I was rather proud of
it, even though it was completely unplayable. I soon gave up the cornet
and bought myself a soprano saxophone, as invented by Sir Charles Soprano.
“I took saxophone lessons from Vera Lynn's father-in-law, Jack Lewis
(that's still one of my principle claims to fame) and long before I had
any competence on the instrument, I was playing semi-pro gigs with a
bunch of local musicians whose collective nerve and enthusiasm left
their talent a long way behind.”
And the book is full of such self deprecating humour, and wonderful
jokes, such as the soprano one, and not least the trials and
tribulations of running a jazz club, and trying to make money running a
jazz club, and the wonderful jazz musicians (and heroes) Scott came to
know and hire, some of whom were decent sorts, others less so.
But above all else 'Some of My Best Friends are Blues' is a chronicle of
not only British jazz, but also of that period in the history of the
music when some of the legends of American jazz were in their last flush of
inventiveness, with Scott, and his partner Peter King, giving just
about everyone of them what amounted to a testimonial, and a chance
for the likes of me to see and hear them.
And when he wasn't doing that, he was giving a platform for new talent,
especially the aforementioned Tubby Hayes, and in the late 1960s, John
Surman, musicians who had been brought up in a very different world to that of Scott.
But Ronnie's world did give him the chance to play with the bands
on the Atlantic liners that allowed Scott to travel to New York,
where he was able to see and hear such musicians as Charles Mingus,
Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis, musicians that would help create his
own style, and fuel the passion he had for the music.
Let me leave the last word to Charles Mingus:
“Of the white boys, Ronnie Scott gets closer to the Negro blues
feeling, the way Zoot Sims does.”
Ronnie Scott died on December 23rd 1996.
