Presenting The Ronnie Scott Sextet.
I was really pleased to pick this album up
at a charity shop recently. It’s a solid album throughout. This issue dates to 1968 but presents numbers
recorded over two days in London in early January 1957. That was the year I was
born, although I was not yet quite a twinkle in my parents’ eyes.
I’m becoming a big fan of Fifties British
jazz. It has a distinctive feel to it I think, the slower numbers seem to be
drenched in melancholy, and whatever the pace adopted one is left with a sense
of sepia tones. The Second World War left Britain with a long hangover, and
that’s what comes through I think.
The sleeve notes tell us the tracks here
were recorded a few weeks before Ronnie Scott “head(ed) the first group of British modern jazz musicians to go to
America under the Anglo-American exchange scheme, as tricky a delivery of coals
to Newcastle as had ever been ordered”. A couple of years later (incidentally,
I see it was on the day my wife was born) Ronnie, together with Pete King, opened
his famous London club, originally
located in Gerrard Street. The informative sleeve notes also make mention of
Ronnie’s penchant for jokes and one-liners delivered during his sets and as
host at his club and tell us in 1967 he added “a new joke to his canon. ‘The police have asked me to remind you’… ‘that
breathalyser tests are now in operation. So if you’re thinking of drinking and
driving tonight – don’t breathe.”
(Strange but true - I had decided on the
two tracks to feature from the album before I wrote this little piece. It wasn’t
until I typed their titles it struck me how appropriate they were!)
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