Scott died in 1996, so we can be grateful that in this book he himself took the opportunity to write about his life and club. Others have undertaken the same task. John Fordham's Jazzman: The Amazing Story of Ronnie Scott and His Club (Kyle Cathie, 1994) is a warmly evocative study of Scott and the post war British jazz scene and a highly readable account of the vicissitudes and comedy inherent in Scott; indeed it drew heavily upon Scott's text. Rebecca Scott's A Fine Kind of Madness (Headline, 1999) has an awkward quality to it. Although written from a far more personal aspect (she is Scott's youngest child), it comprises too much cold regurgitation of known fact and ultimately fails to unravel a complex character; this of course may speak more of Scott's diffident handling of his personal relationships than anything else.

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A Fine Kind of Madness: Ronnie Scott Remembered

Innovations in British Jazz

Scott was without doubt a man of many parts. Gifted with a rare wit (who else would have countered live on radio that they required "a blow up doll" as their Desert Island Discs luxury?), he had once considered a career as a writer but complained to the author Robert Graves that he found it "too difficult;" Graves reply was unequivocal: "Of course you will, unless you're God!" One suspects that Scott meant really that writing was too time consuming and that he lacked the patience, although over several years he contributed many amusing and provocative pieces for The Melody Maker and other periodicals, and was always the first to write in askance at some ill-conceived review or opinion. He perhaps lacked the tenacity to become a serious writer and his wit was better employed on the fly, unlike his friend Benny Green, a more scholarly pundit who contributed a typically sidelong foreword to Some Of…. Nevertheless, one of the chief attractions of this book was that it documented Scott's long running (and well rehearsed) stand up routine, inserted between the main chapters in the same interval fashion it was used at his club. All the old favourites are presented, -from the Cotton Wool Balls to the Nativity in Scunthorpe - nonetheless amusing for being in print. Scott was amazed that he would receive requests for jokes, and if they lack anything on the written page, it is only his sense of timing. Like the best comedians Scott was always able to throw you an old idea anew.

The opening of Ronnie Scott's first club in Gerrard Street in 1959 was essentially an extension of this concept; Scott had harboured a desire to present jazz music seriously (but not po-faced) in Great Britain since his first eye-opening trip to the United States in the late 1940s, and the first third of the book concentrates upon his various successes and failings in this respect. The early days as a jobbing musician in war time London, the cross-Atlantic trips with Geraldo's Navy, the bebop hot house of the Club Eleven and his rise as this country's first accomplished modern jazz saxophonist are all recalled, as are his association with musicians such as Tony Crombie and Tubby Hayes, and the heroic and amusing struggle to maintain a programme of unadulterated modern jazz in an unsympathetic Britain of the 1950s, accompanied at all times by Scott's sardonic outlook.

In the autumn of 1959, Scott's decision to open a modern jazz venue in a tiny cellar in Soho's Gerrard Street was regarded as novelty bordering on commercial suicide. Other London clubs, such as The Flamingo and The Marquee, despite showcasing all the local musicians that Scott himself hired, were night-clubs first and foremost, still marketing jazz as primarily a dance music. "I felt that if he were still operating by New Year's Eve he would be doing better than he could have hoped," was Benny Green's pessimistic view of Scott's venture.

However Scott's secret weapon was to invert the usual equation, so much so that in the early days that there would often be more musicians in the club than paying customers ("..it was two hours before we noticed our cashier was dead…."). In retrospect, it is a wonder that nobody had conceived of Scott's idea sooner as Britain's jazz scene in the early 1960s boasted some formidable talents (the opening night line-up of Scott himself, Tubby Hayes and Peter King is still mouth-watering), but inevitably it was to Scott, and his unique ability to make things happen, that the responsibility fell. Tony Crombie once described one of Scott's regular bands (of which he was member) as a "Madhouse on Wheels", and the early story of his club might well be termed a "Madhouse in Situ," concentrating upon the characters who helped to make the club run. (A brief consultation of Scott's advertisements in the music press of the day makes this madhouse come alive: Food Untouched by Human Hand - Our Chef is a Gorilla and Next Week; We're Holding a Musicians' Ball are two examples.)

Occasionally the guests' agitation was displayed in public, as on the night when critic Steve Race arrived in the club during a set by the blind virtuoso reed player Roland Kirk, a musician discontent with his ability to play peerless bebop tenor and who had devised a manner to play his saxophone simultaneous with two other hybrid horns and had added a veritable array of whistles, flute and nose flutes. Race had recently described Kirk's music as that of a circus clown, a remark that had deeply upset the dedicated jazzman. A piano player of sorts, Race was unceremoniously hauled on stage and given a thorough public drubbing. "A convincing example of losing a Race whilst winning," was Scott's assessment

The brinkmanship of the early days of the club is illustrated best by the circumstances surrounding the opening night of the pianist Bill Evans and his trio in 1965, recounted in Some Of My Best Friends… Evans' group were the first wholly American band to work at the club and at the eleventh hour Scott and King decided that the house piano was not good enough. Beaten into submission over five years by Stan Tracey, the instrument could hardly serve as an effective vehicle for a player so delicate and light fingered as the American, and so without further a do it was sold. The two proprietors then found that securing a grand piano for a basement jazz club was not an easy task. Several companies were next to useless, but rather than whimper and plea for help Scott and King took a firm line; "Oi! f*** off!" screamed King in the ear of one very trying minion from a rental firm who revealed a vision of a jazz club more informed by a 1930s gangster film than by reality. Only on the day of Evans' opening did the pianist Alan Clare offer of one of his pianos. It was a close run thing, but Ronnie Scott's club in these years never ceased to be anything but.

Scott's move to larger premises (and their subsequent extension) in Frith Street in 1965 meant larger overheads and the necessity of a more commercial booking policy. To their credit, Scott and King did not really flinch; their opening night act, the saxophonist Yusef Lateef, was as exotic a jazzman as you could encounter and was not likely to be a record breaking attraction; even though singers were used as a warm up attraction, Scott and King's policy to book challenging artists, such as the avant garde saxophonist Archie Shepp or bands as bank-breakingly voluminous as that of drummer Buddy Rich, provided reassurance that Ronnie Scott's was not about to become some supper club safe bet. The club, Scott recalls, built outward from the music, even when employing talents other than jazz musicians; performers as diverse as classical guitarist John Williams and comic Irwin Corey (a man with the temerity to snatch Miles Davis' sunglasses and remark "No wonder you're smiling. Everyone looks Black!") shared an excellence the both Scott and King could respect.

Although nearly forty years have elapsed since the move to Frith Street, the modern era of Ronnie Scott's effectively began then, and so the last part of Some Of My Best Friends… is a swift gloss on some of the artists and occurrences from the 1970s that has a foreshortened feel to it, as though Scott had simply had enough and sought another muse.

The book's credit reads "with Mike Hennessey," an ambiguous suggestion of ghost writing although there is enough evidence present throughout to attest to Scott's first hand intervention. If anything, Hennessey probably subtlety 'tweaked' Scott's text and fleshed out more accurately the timeline of events, although several errors are still present. (Scott had a notoriously variable attitude towards nostalgia: sometimes he recalled events with accuracy, sometimes he feigned ignorance).

The main body of text (if such a term applies to a book which barely stretches beyond 120 pages) is bookended by contributions from two of Ronnie's close associates, the verbose Benny Green, who reveals that the club proprietor's surface lassitude and humour covered an intense desire to have music presented with serious respect, and Spike Milligan, who offers a typical rant of both praise and damnation (the food is "tolerable and if you point a loaded pistol at the waiter he will give you an ice bucket"). Scott's contribution is remarkably free of any vainglorious bragging, but one criticism could be that he rarely plumbs the depths of any of the artists he introduces; but then Scott was a musician first and foremost, a successful club owner almost it seems by default, and a writer when advocated. One can imagine it was a labour of love getting Ronnie to document his experiences. His self effacement and off-hand humour (typical of the "Frith Street School of Charm") were often defensive mechanisms employed as a smoke screen to hide his true character. There are several instances throughout the book where Scott could have turned mawkishly dramatic; an incident where he wrestles a gunman to the floor of the club is delivered with phlegmatic humour, and Scott's enthusiasm for his guests never descends into obsequious pandering. When Stan Getz criticised Stan Tracey's playing over the microphone one night, Tracey's response was to shout "bollocks!"; "I wish I'd thought of that," Scott remembers. And in describing his feelings about the longevity of his venture, Scott gets about as sentimental as he would allow on paper: "I'm a little bit proud of it myself."

SIMON SPILLETTNovember 2004