Slowing Down (13 page)

The poet and critic Al Alvarez once wrote that one summer’s day he and a contemporary were chatting amicably on Hampstead Heath when two ravishing girls in their late teens walked by. He and his chum automatically chirped up, adjusted their body language and, while appearing not to notice the girls, presented themselves as possible prospects. No way! The nubile pair didn’t so much look through them as make them feel totally invisible.

When I hobble on stage these days and sit down to sing, I open my set, not with John Chilton’s ‘Good Time George’, which he wrote for me about thirty years ago, but Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Old Rockin’ Chair’. Far more appropriate now. After that I gaze into the auditorium or club. ‘I can remember a time,’ I tell the audience, ‘when I used to look at you and wonder not just whether, but which – No more!’

But now, after this fairly convincing demonstration of my inability not to indulge in involuntary repetitive anecdotes
as the shadows grow longer, back to Ronnie’s and last year’s season.

It was much as usual. There were no disasters, although once, fuelled by Jameson and Digby by vodka, I became pompous in bringing up things I felt might be mutually improved and he reacted by pointing out that after all it was
his
band. Next day, though, we rang each other up, eager to apologize first.

This was Digby’s second year (2004) at Ronnie’s and he is still amazed at being there and to such a warm reaction. It was my thirty-first year at the club but I’m just as thrilled as he is. For me it’s the sense of sharing the ‘green’ (greengage = stage) with an impressive number of past jazzmen and -women. As a small sample (a full listing would cover about six pages): Count Basie, Ben Webster, Don Rendell, Coleman Hawkins, Ella Fitzgerald, Max Roach, Milt Jackson, Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis – and of course Ronnie himself.

My long years there with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers, including our last season together, were equally exciting for me, but not for him. Tired and nervous, he was longing to retire and about to do so. For him Ronnie’s was already in the past, but not for me.

In our break Digby and I go down to the bottom bar, quite often accompanied by his friend Lisa, who is a wonderful businesswoman and a brilliant grafter at selling CDs and books, which we sign. I have a blank piece of paper for people to write their names down so I can spell them correctly as otherwise, being so deaf, I would quite often get them wrong. In John’s day, although he sometimes did
it himself, usually a member of the band was paid to take Digby or Lisa’s place.

Of course, this Kasbah-like activity leaves us exposed not only to nice people, many of them younger than you’d expect at Ronnie’s, who simply want to say how much they enjoyed it, and others whose parents or even grandparents were or had been fans of mine, but also to bores, and drunken bores at that.

Last year, for instance, as you’ve read, I went to see Conroy, who had just become physically and mentally ill, in an annex of the Hampstead Royal Free Hospital. Emerging, rather depressed, I was intercepted by a nurse who had been looking after the waning surrealist. She’d heard I was at Ronnie’s (it must have been almost December, but I recall a fine day – how ageing memory plays tricks!), and she wondered if I could get her boyfriend free tickets. Aware of how badly hospital staff were paid and that anyway she was ministering to my old and valiant friend, I agreed and did so, leaving the tickets at the desk and warning the staff.

They came all right and showed up in our break. She told me in a stage whisper that her boyfriend was an alcoholic, a fact self-evident to the naked eye and, if he staggered close enough, the nose. I immediately named her Nurse Pot and he Mr Kettle. Eventually they reeled back to their table, but shortly afterwards one of the door staff appeared and told me that they were making such a noise and annoying so many people that he’d come to ask me if I minded if he got rid of them.

I explained how they had come to be my guests and, feeling only minimally like St Peter, gave him full permission
to throw them into Frith Street. I never heard from Nurse Pot again.

That was ’04. Early in ’05, and on the same night, Digby and I suffered from equal monsters. I was first. A 35-ish-looking man with a bald head and glasses, and slightly but not apparently very drunk, came up to me and flourished a twenty-pound note under my nose. ‘I want you to sign that,’ he said, ‘and then we’ll drink a double whiskey together.’ I told him ‘no’ on both counts. To sign a banknote, if you weren’t the Chief Cashier of the Bank of England, was absurd. ‘I’ll never spend it,’ he assured me. ‘I never would.’ I doubted his word on the grounds that eventually he’d find himself without funds and with a necessity to pay for something. He continued to deny he ever would spend it. Ever!

I suggested that he use it to buy a CD or a book. He refused and returned to try to persuade me. I was getting a little, no, a lot irritated. He eventually let the question of the note drop and proposed we drink his double whiskeys. I refused that too, on the grounds that during a performance I watched my intake and had fulfilled it. He wouldn’t have it. Over and over he pushed the note at me and proposed the whiskey. Up until then he had been leaning on the table. Now he came round it and sat between Digby and me. Finally I did something I very rarely do. I lost my temper, an event which is usually so unexpected and unconvincing that those present are forced to ‘corpse’, as they say on the stage, or suppress their laughter.

I turned to my tormentor. ‘You are without doubt,’ I told him with the calm that precedes a tropical storm, ‘the most boring man I have ever met.’ I paused while he took this in, and then yelled at the top of my voice (the palm trees bent
double, corrugated-iron roofs and coconuts flew through the air, great waves crashed against the shore), ‘FUCK OFF!’ Even this had only a delayed impact, but, after several repetitions, he went.

Digby’s experience later that same evening was even more dramatic.

We were still in the downstairs bar, still selling and signing, when I had to go for a pee. During my absence (it often takes me some time these days because, although it seems urgent, I have to whistle to get it going) a weasel-faced man came and sat by Digby and asked him if it wouldn’t be possible on my return to con some money out of me. It’s true that many people imagine because I’m quite well known that I am also rich. They’re wrong. I’m a spender, not a saver. I love, when I have money, going to expensive restaurants and taking taxis. In general though, to use a memorable phrase of somebody’s invention, I would describe myself as ‘broke but not poor’.

Even so, had I been Croesus, or Midas or all the Rothschilds, Digby, my true friend after all, would have been furious. I knew he had depths below his surface ebullient charm, but to see the rage break the surface of his general bonhomie like a furious sea-monster emerging from six miles down was an awe-inspiring moment.

‘FUCK OFF!’ he shouted at weasel-face and, rising and repeating this simple injunction at ever-louder volume, he assumed, when they reached the bar, the posture of a Regency bare-knuckle boxer. The weasel was beginning to look extremely nervous.

I had returned from the gents at this point and was very impressed, if, as yet, unaware of the cause of the furore.
Digby continued, still holding his 1820-ish pose. ‘If you don’t FUCK OFF,’ he reiterated, ‘I’ll send for Pete King,’ a gentleman of whom weasel I doubt had ever heard, but must have imagined as a composite of Frank Bruno and Reggie Kray. ‘And he,’ snarled Digby, ‘will send for the door staff and throw you into the street without any hesitation. So FUCK OFF!’ But by this time weasel-face was already half-way up the stairs.

Digby and I discussed this double whammy later and had to admit we had both enjoyed this flood of adrenalin. Yes, really enjoyed it!

No such disturbance for the rest of the run and the taxi still worked its magicas I climbed into it under the swinging red neon saxophone above the double doors.

9. Ronnie

The right of man to his own suicide –

Surrealist pamphlet

In a book like this it seems fitting that I should write a few friendly obituaries of people I have admired and who, although they may have ‘left the building’, continue to influence me. Since I’ve written about his club, I should begin with Ronnie Scott.

Ronnie, like a large number of modernist musicians, was of Jewish East End origin. He didn’t appear to me either to exploit or conceal this. He reminded me of a sketch in
Beyond the Fringe
, where Jonathan Miller stands alone while the other three talk about him as a Jew. Eventually Miller is irritated enough to react. ‘I’m not a Jew!’ he snaps at them. ‘I’m Jewish.’ This, in my view, applied to Ronnie. He only once made a Jewish joke in my hearing. He described the ultimate proof of ecumenical progress as a ‘ham-bagel’.

I only once saw him at all irascible in a Jewish context. It was the wedding of his friend the late Benny Green, in a North London synagogue. It was an entirely traditional ceremony: the canopy, the smashing of the symbolic glass, Hebrew and a proper rabbi with a beard. Ronnie was standing next to me and said nothing until the chanting started. This so irritated him that he hissed in my ear, ‘I don’t know how long it is since I went to schul, but they’re fucking up
the traditional harmonies. They’ve
Westernized
them.’ I felt, though, that he was scandalized not as a Jew but as a musician.

I don’t intend to go in any detail into Ronnie’s early years and their musical history: his influences, his first trips to America, his fight to establish a public for bop. All I need say is that for us revivalists, or ‘Mouldie Fygges’, as the bop musicians contemptuously called us, he was simply ‘the enemy’, the Napoleon of the flattened fifth.

In the 1950s the agent for Mick Mulligan’s band, Jim Godbolt, and myself, both convinced revivalists (although Jim, within that fairly wide field, had a greater enthusiasm for early white jazz than I), assumed imaginary cloaks, wide-brimmed hats and dark glasses and visited Club Eleven, arguably the first bop stronghold in London. It was, in retrospect, a sensational gathering of modern musicians: not only Ronnie but also Tony Crombie, Lennie Bush and Johnny Dankworth. George Robey, ‘the Prime Minister of Mirth’, used to recite a monologue accompanied at the piano which my mother would often quote on what she felt were appropriate occasions. The last line went: ‘So I stopped, and I looked – and I left!’ Jim and I likewise. We went into a nearby pub in Soho and snorted like two old colonels over our half pints. Little could we have guessed that two decades later Jim would be editing the Scott club’s house magazine and I would be appearing there for over thirty years on the trot.

In the interim I got to know Ronnie and several other major figures in the bop world such as the late Tubby Hayes, and found them witty human beings and not the perverse ear-smashers and leg-pullers we had imagined. More, not
only did Humph swim into the mainstream but several erstwhile ‘Mouldie Fygges’ became converted to bop itself. Keith Christie, the best revivalist trombonist Lyttelton ever employed, was one such. Dickie Hawdon, originally on trumpet in the ultra-revivalist Yorkshire Jazz Band, was another. There was also Dill Janes, pianist and Welsh charmer, who could play and was equally enthusiastic in every idiom from Jelly Roll Morton to Thelonious Monk; while for some years, as hopeless as a peace-maker in the Middle East, he at least could talk to both schools. I went at some point to his flat for a party of bop musicians and their cool svelte girlfriends. There, for the first time, I smelt the pungent and pleasant fumes of marijuana.

So, at least by the time we moved into Ronnie’s, we were less apprehensive than we might have been, and anyway John Chilton, with his love for small Harlem swing bands of the thirties, had less far to move.

Ronnie himself, while no matinée idol, was attractive in a thin, hidden-depths way and turned out to be more complex than I had imagined. I knew him as a formidable comic, cynical, hard-edged, and with a sense of timing the equal of any musical star past or present, but I hadn’t realized that, like many on ‘the Halls’, he suffered from acute bouts of depression.

He always played the interval spots at the club during our season, so I got to hear him a great deal. His early influences had been digested, his style was tough and sinuous, but you could tell that musically he was entirely serious. I admired what I’d now call, however contradictorily, the hard-edged fluidity of his music. At times, many stars of stage, screen and radio, not to say politicians from every party, came in,
but Ronnie never allowed this to shake him. The MD at that time was, while friendly and helpful, something of a star-fucker. Very over-excited, he ran into the office behind the stage where Ronnie was warming up.

‘Liza Minnelli’s out front,’ he announced as breathlessly as if bringing news of a successful medieval battle to his monarch.

Ronnie, the master of cool, said, ‘Oh yes. Well I’ve got things to blow,’ and, raising his sax again, continued to rehearse runs and cadenzas.

I, however, am almost as much of a star-fucker as the MD (if, I hope, less obviously), and during our interval was very pleased to join Liza Minnelli, at her request, for a drink. She batted her long eyelashes at me and said, ‘Momma would have
loved
your numbers!’ Could she have told me anything more calculated to please?

If, while admiring his dedication, I was never a complete convert to Ronnie’s ‘organic’ bop, his humour was a different matter. Every night he was appearing he would stroll on and tell clusters of jokes on various topics. This routine, all thirty or so minutes of it, was always the same. Yet, in the same way that I could listen with total pleasure to the set routine of Max Miller, I loved it. Timing in comedy is more important than content. I did once ask Ronnie why, since he was a spontaneously witty man, he didn’t change any of his jokes. ‘Oh they do change,’ he said. And then, after a pause, added, ‘imperceptibly’.

As dear Ronnie ‘left the building’ eight years ago (at the time of writing) and increasingly in the future there will be fewer and fewer people who actually heard him live, here are some of his ‘imperceptibly’ changing gags.