Slowing Down (14 page)

General jokes
Of the staff:
‘That waitress – she just moved! Mind you, she’s a very intelligent girl. I asked her if she liked Dickens. She told me she’d never been to one. She thinks Moby Dick’s a venereal disease. She eats a banana sideways.’

Of a very fat man who at one time worked on the door: ‘Then there’s Big Henry. His shadow weighs more than I do. He eats furniture for lunch.’

‘The chef here is very good. Pygmies come all the way from Africa to dip their arrows in his soup.’ And then, after a thoughtful pause and sotto voce, ‘How do you fuck up cornflakes?’

On mentioning a musician due to appear in the near future: ‘He’s the best in the country. Mind you, in the town he’s lousy.’

Of the club:
‘This club always reminds me of home. It’s filthy and full of strangers!’

For some reason the East Coast resort of Scunthorpe, where most touring bands had played over the years, inspired Ronnie into inventing a series of observations which could hardly have delighted the town’s publicity officer. An example: ‘My bedroom was so small, every time I opened the door the handle rearranged the furniture.’

Defensive ploys
If there was not much reaction to any of his jokes, he would tap his hand-held mike and enquire anxiously, ‘Is this thing working?’

If no attention at all was being paid, he would stare at the party seated nearest the stage and ask himself, ‘Why do I always get a table of dead Greeks?’

A mere sample, but I hope you will grasp the flavour.

As he left the stage, inevitably he would round off his act with the laconic sign-off: ‘So much for humour.’

Ronnie’s occasional periods of depression seemed to be brought on most often by the departure of his current and always beautiful girlfriend. Why they left him was, to me at any rate, a mystery. Could it have been they felt that he loved his sax and the club itself more than them, with his worldwide tours an additional cause? This is pure speculation on my part but, when they did leave, they hid, not in London or even in the provinces, but in the far-flung corners of the earth – New Zealand, perhaps, or Canada. When he found out where they’d gone, he would follow them to try, in each case unsuccessfully, to persuade them to come back. Their refusal was the camel’s straw. It brought on a breakdown, sometimes leading to a period in a nursing-home.

I went to see him on one of these sad occasions. He was almost silent, and it was like visiting a zombie. But then he would recover, another beauty would fall under his irresistible spell, he’d blow again with renewed passion, and the table of dead Greeks, the pygmies, Scunthorpe and Moby Dick were resurrected.

The year of his death, however, there were many additional reasons for his despair, although the absconding of his latest
belle-de-nuit
was certainly contributory. They were: his teeth, as essential to a horn-player as hands are to a pianist, were causing him great pain and his hope to have new ones embedded was impossible, his dentist told him, because his gums were too weak. He was about to be seventy, a birthday he dreaded. And he hated Christmas (snap). Not a bad list for a depressive.

Actually John Chilton had observed several changes that season. Usually Ronnie opened the door to the dressing-room when it was time for us to go on stage and said one word, ‘Gentlemen’. But this time he came and sat with us most evenings and talked about the past. Once, when we were having a private conversation, he confided that he felt that, musically, he’d said all he had to say.

On the last night I saw him alive he did something unprecedented: he went on stage to tell his jokes and the audience, many of them drunken office partiers or noisy yuppies and their bimbos round the bar, were, as was usual during that season, shouting at each other at full volume. Usually, irritated or not, he just ploughed ahead, but this time, not long after he’d started, he stopped and told them, ‘If you don’t want to hear my jokes I’m fucked if I want to tell them!’ and stalked off.

That Christmas, too, his only daughter had come over from the States to keep him company, although I got the impression that their relationship was not all that easy. On the night he died they’d had a ferocious row in his Chelsea flat, and she’d left to go home. He rang her up and pleaded with her to come back, but, given how unpleasant he’d been,
she refused, thinking she would return to make it up next morning. She did, but found him dead on the floor by his bed. There was an empty bottle of pills and a bottle of vodka on the carpet.

Suicide? Many people, including myself, thought so. Others believed that it was an accidental overdose. As far as I could see, though, the press never printed or even hinted at my former conclusion.

The police informed Pete King, his long-time business partner and best friend, first, and he, while clearly deeply upset, told us that evening, but asked us not to let it out to the full house until the end of our second set. It had already reached the staff, however, and they were all crying, which didn’t make our ‘show must go on’ endeavours any easier. After our last number, ‘Nuts’, as far as I can remember, I told the audience and they were completely silent. The next day the press reported it, but their reaction was a complete surprise. Front-page headlines in almost every case, and all favourable, either on the page or in the editorial comments. What’s more, when later there was a memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square (a strange place to commemorate a nice Jewish boy), not only was the church full to capacity (no need for the vergers to ‘throw them in off the streets’) but there was a huge crowd outside. The other media, TV and radio, also mourned the lonely death of a bop saxophonist. Only the death of Princess Diana attracted such attention – but Ronnie’s was without the flowers or the hysteria.

From then on, on a large table in the lobby of the club there has always been a vase holding a beautiful bunch of fresh flowers in Ronnie’s memory. On the walls throughout
the whole premises are photographs of him and in the downstairs bar a semi-cubist portrait. Sometimes he is alone, sometimes with the many jazz stars, both British and American, who have appeared there. His wry spirit haunts the building and especially the stage, where he blew his heart out night after night. We remember Ronnie all right.

Not so long ago (this is March ’05) I was asked by the
Evening Standard
to write a piece on ‘Is Jazz Dead?’, a question frequently posed over the years when they need to fill a features page. It was to find out my reaction to the news that Jazz FM was about to change its name to Smooth FM. It was, I felt, not before time. Despite Jazz FM’s brave beginnings, its name had long become inappropriate. Jazz proper was by then confined to about an hour on Sunday night; the rest, at best cocktail bar music, was meant to soothe housewives at their repetitive tasks, and for them even the word ‘jazz’ was off-putting, too challenging, and besides what was ‘jazz’ anyway? Not much to do with cleaning the oven, making beds or wiping the baby’s bum, and appealing only to a comparatively small public. And so, in order to increase the listening figures, jazz was a word to drop, which the station eventually did.

But to cheer up the piece I concluded with an optimistic reflection. Ronnie Scott’s club had grown from its tentative beginnings in a grimy basement, to become the most respected jazz venue in the world, the place where it was considered an honour to be booked.

Yet it was always threatened by economic difficulties. Some artistes, who demanded and deserved a huge fee, could pack it for weeks at a time. Others, especially if at all
experimental, drew a very limited audience. On top of that, premises in Soho became more and more expensive. Rents and rates soared, closing many much-loved small family businesses, most of them of Italian or French origin, which had given the district its attractive village atmosphere. Cheap restaurants and cafés were, with very few exceptions, taken over by expensive chains; the whores were banished from the streets to become call-girls, mostly owned and exploited by pimps; sex shops, at least much reduced these days by their need to hold a licence, seemed to me depressing, with their multi-sized dildos and blow-up sex dolls. Only a few clubs remain from my youth. Indeed, ex-con turned author Frank Norman wrote a musical about this change. He called it ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’ Be’.

And Ronnie’s? Difficult to manoeuvre in order to keep up with vastly increased upkeep. At intervals it seemed near to collapse, but Ronnie’s name and presence and Pete King’s refusal to give in to market forces saved it, usually ‘in the nick of time’, as they used to write in curly letters on a black ground to punctuate those exciting weekly serials of the silent screen. On several occasions, too, someone, a rich jazz lover or benevolent or guilty capitalist, would take up the burden, placate the bank, and Ronnie’s was saved.

But only temporarily. Sooner or later, the current Maecenas, alarmed by his rapidly shrinking bank account, bowed out, but then, as Ronnie used to say, ‘the only way to make a million out of jazz is to invest two million.’

This time, however, the benefactor seems much more solid and permanent: a lady called Sally Green (a name that could well form the opening words of one of those mildly indecent vaudeville songs of the twenties: ‘Miss Sally Green

‘The only way to make a million out of jazz is to invest two million’

of New Orleans/She ran a buffet flat’ – ‘Soft Pedalling Blues’, Bessie Smith) who is married to an American millionaire with a deep love and knowledge of jazz, and the personal friendship of everyone in the world who loves the music, ex-President Clinton (sax) among others.

Furthermore she has met and got on well with Pete, and intends to do something about the cuisine, although I hope somebody warns the pygmies in good time to stay where they are in the rainforest. She sounds a five-star lady and I wrote about her in the
Standard
as the antidote to ‘Smooth FM’ (‘Bland’ would have been even more apt, but perhaps over the top).

Then I got a very hurt phone call from Pete. It also didn’t make much sense. He said I’d suggested that the club’s difficulties had begun only after Ronnie’s death. I never did or would. That the welcome intervention of Ms Green was meant to be a secret and I’d blown it, and that he had thought of me as a real friend. I assured him that I too would always think of him very warmly, but that as to Ms Green’s identity, it had been sprung in a long article about her in the
Daily Telegraph
only a few days earlier, so was surely not hush-hush. His reaction to that was ‘That was another drag’, which doesn’t make much sense in context, but I do know how much he loved and misses Ronnie, how sensitive he is about him. I rang him a few days later and we got on fine. He said, which I certainly suspected, that whereas Ronnie hadn’t played much part in running the business he was, as Pete rather touchingly put it, ‘a shoulder to cry on’. Also they had been together for so many years, fought for what they believed in musically (Pete King had originally played sax himself but recognized his talent was
more administrative than musical and assumed his present role), faced triumph and near-disaster, and now of course that partnership was all over. He nearly reduced me to tears.

A mystery, however, remains. Bop is now accepted jazz history, but not a widely popular music. Its true public, while convinced of the pleasure to be derived from it, its importance in the history of jazz and its value as art, is still, though much larger than it was, a minority. Most people over, say, twenty know of the club’s existence, and many have been there and heard Ronnie blow his uncompromising horn, but this cannot explain the outburst of grief at his death, the crowds inside and outside the church only half a mile from the club itself.

My feeling is that he possessed what the Catholics believe to be a mysterious glow surrounding their saints – charisma. Of the many artists in both jazz and rock, a mere handful are still universally mourned: I can cite John Lennon, Charlie Parker, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holiday. There are many more we admire and miss but that is on a different level.

Ronnie once asked me what benefits were to be expected from his
MBE
. Money? ‘No,’ I said. ‘A better table in posh restaurants?’ ‘No, you’d get that from being Ronnie Scott.’ ‘Upgrading on planes?’ ‘Same difference.’ And I concluded, ‘It won’t impress your bookmaker either!’ At this he allowed himself a wry smile. ‘So,’ he said, ‘it’s no use at all!’ I suspect, however, that, like most people, he was flattered to have received it.

So how did Ronnie Scott
MBE
, this obsessive gambler, East End Jewish saxophonist, one-time gaol-bird for possessing a small amount of pot back in the draconian and
hysterical post-war period, this acute manic-depressive, have the power to demand our love, to make us feel loss? We shall not look upon (or hear) his like again.

And a big bear-hug from me for Pete King
OBE
.

10. Discomforts and Pleasures

It is early in 2005, and generally, I am well. Dr Watson, while of course still disapproving of my intake of drink and my renewed smoking, was pleased with my chest, no wheezing, but felt I needed some iron pills. At the hospital the specialist said my calcium count was still up, but not so bad as to necessitate surgical treatment. What I ate didn’t matter; I noticed the other day some yogurt I was spooning down claimed to be ‘full of calcium’, but he said that didn’t matter either. The villain, it seems, is a small gland near the throat working overtime, but yes, an operation could affect my singing. Bugger that!