By gone Ronnie Scottland
Michael Horovitz
LET'S JOIN HANDS AND CONTACT THE LIVING by John Fordham
Elm Tree Books, f6.95
If you want to dismay a modem jazz fan, ask him or her to imagine London without Ronnie Scott. Anyone who knows the man will recognise him on every page of this first biography, and those who don't will get an intriguing and memorable introduc- tion to more than the 'façade behind the façade' of the familiar public figure. Love affairs, nervous breakdowns, world travels and the kicks and pricks of his several careers — one of Britain's most prodigious tenor saxophonists, sporadic but efferves- cent band-leader, and co-proprietor of what has long been the country's best loved and attended jazz club — are explored in graphic detail.
With Scott pushing 60 and his club having survived 25 years of the pitfalls, prat-falls and changing night-faces of Soho, the book is well timed. It is forthright and genial about the early Bohemian and mis- sionary years, during which 'we had the bouncers chucking them in. A guy rang up to ask what time the show started and we said, "What time can you get here?" The band was playing "Tea for One" and at the end of the number the audience was on its foot . . .' Hence Fordham's title, another quote from le patron.
If the substantial exposition is to be believed (and most of it appears well confirmed, where not confided, by its subject), he turns out to be a multi-faceted jester-dealer prone to violent psychic ex- tremes more redolent of the novels of Mailer and Saul Bellow than the deadpan supremo of Frith Street. But as Brian Case of Melody Maker observes, though 'usually associated with up-tempo bebop, Scott is also a master of both ballads and blues, fair indications of emotional depths.'
Unfortunately the book comes raddled with misprints, one of the less helpful glosses that may have rubbed off on it from the Grauniad, whose essentially trustwor- thy jazz critic John Fordham is. In some cases the happenstance is happy — 'Lenny Bruce revealed in routines' to be sure, as well as revelling in them. Another printer's gremlin adds an aptly surrealistic note to the evocation of the Roland Kirk session which provoked a police raid. That blind Afric witch-doctor of multi-instrumen- talists used to launch, toward the finale of his sets, into . . . a tune called 'Here Comes the Whistle Man,' for which he passed tin whistles out to the crowd and invited them to blow the daylights out of the instruments at strategic points in the music. One night Kirk charged into the theme, blew the first choruses and gave his fans the nod to blow everything at much the same moment as the officer in
charge gave a similar nod to a throng of police officers assembled outside. As the crowd tootled on gaily, the Metropolitan Police, sounding their own whistles for all they were worth, came charging in. Kirk had no idea what was going on. Neither had the police, who eventually started pulling at the saxophonist's clothes to get him to stop. Kirk was used to the over-enthusiastic in the front rows doing this to him and carried on regardless.. .
The constabularly had understandably assumed that the extraordinary volume of euphoria jetting out of the club's front door could only have been stirred up by an orgy of drug-taking. Instead they found a 077-party quite innocuously high on breath-and-sounds conjoined if somewhat astonished when, after the final bout of whistling and applause, under their aus- pices, 'Kirk was finally brought, puffing like a runway steam engine, to a stand- still.' (Presumably Fordham wrote `runaway' steam engine . . .) Some of the details that go wrong are almost like the legendary jokes Scott is wont to deliver at the microphone in his ringmaster's hat. It is said of the Aldgate household of his beginnings that Ronnie's immigrant gran 'guarded as much of the tradition as could be. . . candles on Friday nights, and respect for the fast of the Passover' — but Passover nights are the biggest beanos of gobbling and guzzling in the Jewish calendar! The music scholar Victor Schonfield is, pace Fordham, a nephew and not the brother of the late lamented economist Andrew Fordham's choppy prose style is another recurrently disturbing factor, piling up more or less inscrutable traffic jams of barely related participles and pronouns in convoluted, frequently asyntactical series. If, as I gradually did, you can 'go with the flow' of the richly absorbing content, you may come to relish a verbal approximation to the pell-mell chord clusters, spon- taneous diffusions and seemingly random disconnexions of the hard bop life. But if your feeling for jazz wanes rather than mounts after the Louis Armstrong-to- Swing era, then the book is no more calculated to turn you on than is a visit to the club at its heart.
The author's qualifications and experi- ence as a journalist have a double-edged effect. Some of this reads as though it was never meant to be good, only finished before opening-time; much else displays an instinct for the appropriate metaphor at once racy and concise. Sonny Rollins is characterised playing 'Prelude to a Kiss' 'with shrugging indifference as if trying to freeze the remnants of the tune from the bell of his horn, then with braying spine- tingling laughter, shaking it so vigorously that every last coin, matchstick and frag- ment of long-lost memorabilia fell out of its pockets.' Eventually all passing reserva- tions were stilled by my gut response to the energy, intensity and drive of Let's Join. Other readers who get to the end are equally unlikely to want to echo the consti- tutional reaction of Ronnie's apocryphal Indian critic, 'I. Pandit Unmercifully.'
Fordham's remarkable contribution is that — like Scott and his club — he really does join the often desperately far-flung or quarrelsome hands around the jazz galaxy and bring together many of its most dyna- mic and heavily breathing, fast fingering, wildly whirring constellations. Scott is re- called sitting as he invariably does in front of the bandroom telly, with Zoot Sims (another of the US sax colossi the club has made a habit of importing), when the American astronauts first landed on the moon. Sims exclaimed 'Jesus — they're walking on the moon and I'm still playing "Indiana". For music lovers stuck on the moon or the proverbial desert island (or just British rail, bus or air) who'd prefer to stay transported in orbit by the likes of Sims, Rollins, Kirk or Scott himself, this chronicle will be a most agreeable luxury.
Scott once kindly called me 'the human poet'; Fordham proves him at least as engagingly human, and also pioneering, a musician, impresario, comedian and stoically suffering soul.
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