More book reviews

CD reviews

The latest CD reviews by Chris Parker

Join the Vortex
email list

To receive monthly gig details, news and ticket offers.

RSS feeds

For news, gig and CD reviews and information about the club.

Click on the link below to get the subscribe address
Vortex news

For more informaton about RSS see the
RSS help pages

Ronnie Scott's Jazz Farrago

(Ed) Jim Godbolt

Hampstead Press (204pp., Ł19.95)

'Recommended to anyone who wants to taste the flavour of a vanished era' was the summing-up line of a previous review dealing with a Jim Godbolt production (his consistently entertaining autobiography, All This and Many a Dog, republished recently by Northway), and much the same might be said of his latest project, a selection from the 159 issues of Jazz at Ronnie Scott's he edited between summer 1979 and February 2006.

Said flavour, of course, can be bitter as well as fine and mellow those whom Godbolt himself would undoubtedly refer to as '-ismists' will find much to exercise them within these pages but let's accentuate the positive: the aforementioned vanished era was one in which jazz struggled to be heard, let alone appreciated, and Ronnie Scott's club, kept open for four decades against all the odds, courtesy of the sheer determination and dedication of Scott and partner Pete King, was for much of that time a lone voice crying in the wilderness.

The history of the club, from Gerrard St to Frith St; the pioneers of UK bop, from Laurie Morgan and Frank Crombie to Scott himself and Johnny (as he then was) Dankworth; the heyday of (and subsequent raid on) Club Eleven; interviews with Kenneth Clarke, Charlie Watts, Ruby Braff, Barbara Windsor, Michael Parkinson et al.; features on Stanley Unwin, cricket and jazz, Duke Ellington and his encounter with another Edward, the Prince of Wales; plus any number of personal reminiscences, whispers, murmurs and asides from the editor himself, interspersed with Scott's jokes, the limericks of Ron Rubin, the letters of Herbert Coot all this (plus cartoons by the likes of Trog and Jack Pennington and a host of evocative pictures) has been lovingly reassembled for these packed pages. Jazz in Britain (and British jazz) owe an incalculable debt to Ronnie Scott's club, and this collection should be praised for reminding us of this.