find some jazz.”
S OHO ON a warm summer evening is alive with conversation and tobacco smoke. Every pub spills out into the street, every café has its customers outside at tables perched on pavements that were originally built just wide enough to keep pedestrians out of the horse shit. On Old Compton Street fit young men in tight white T-shirts and spray-on jeans admired one another and their reflections in the shop windows. I caught Daniel pinging his radar off a couple of tasty young men checking themselves out outside the Admiral Duncan but they just ignored him. It was Friday night and after all that gym time they weren’t getting into bed for anything less than a ten.
A tangle of young women with regulation-length hair, desert tans, and regional accents slid past—female squaddies heading for Chinatown and the clubs around Leicester Square.
The band and I didn’t so much proceed up Old Comptonas ricochet from one clique to the next. James nearly fell over as a pair of white girls ticked past in stilettos and pink knit mini dresses. “Fuck me,” he said as he recovered.
“Not going to happen,” said one of the girls as they walked away. But there was no malice in it.
James said he knew a place on Bateman Street, a little basement club in the grand tradition of the legendary Flamingo. “Or Ronnie Scott’s,” he said. “Before it was Ronnie Scott’s.”
It wasn’t that long since I’d been patrolling these streets in uniform and I had a horrible feeling I knew where he was going. My dad’s been known to wax lyrical about a youth misspent in smoky basement bars full of sweat, music, and girls in tight sweaters. He said that in the Flamingo you basically had to pick a spot where you were prepared to spend the night ’cause once things kicked off it was impossible to move. The Mysterioso had been designed as a deliberate re-creation of those days by a pair of likely lads who would have been the quintessential cheeky, cockney barrow-boy entrepreneurs if they hadn’t both been from Guildford. Their names were Don Blackwood and Stanley Gibbs but they called themselves the Management. It had been a rare weekend shift when me and Leslie didn’t end up on a shout to the street outside.
The trouble was never inside the club, though, because the Management hired the roughest bouncers they could find, strapped them into sharp suits, and gave them carte blanche on the door entry policy. They were famously arbitrary in their exercise of power and even at eleven forty-five there was a queue of hopefuls down the street.
There’s always been a tradition of po-faced seriousness about the British jazz scene and a kind of chin-stroking “yes I see” roll-necked sweaterness to the fans—my current company being a case in point. Judging from the punters in the queue, old tradition was not the Management’s target demographic. This was Armani-suit, dress-to-impress, bling-wearing, switchblade-carrying jazz and I didn’t think it likely that me and the band were going to make the cut.
Well, definitely not the band anyway. And to be honest thatsuited me because whereas the band had grown on me, a night of semiprofessional jazz has never been my idea of a good time. If it had been, my dad would have been a happier man.
Still James, in the grand tradition of belligerent Scotsmen down the ages, was not prepared to give up without a struggle, so ignoring the queue he went immediately on the offensive.
“We’re jazzmen,” he said to the bouncer. “That’s got to count for something.”
The bouncer, a side of meat that I knew for a fact had done time in Wandsworth for various crimes that started with the word
aggravated
, at least gave this some serious consideration. “I’ve never heard of you,” he said.
“Maybe maybe,” said James. “But we are all part of the same community of spirit—yes? The same brotherhood of music.” Behind his back Daniel and Max exchanged looks and shuffled back a foot or
S OHO ON a warm summer evening is alive with conversation and tobacco smoke. Every pub spills out into the street, every café has its customers outside at tables perched on pavements that were originally built just wide enough to keep pedestrians out of the horse shit. On Old Compton Street fit young men in tight white T-shirts and spray-on jeans admired one another and their reflections in the shop windows. I caught Daniel pinging his radar off a couple of tasty young men checking themselves out outside the Admiral Duncan but they just ignored him. It was Friday night and after all that gym time they weren’t getting into bed for anything less than a ten.
A tangle of young women with regulation-length hair, desert tans, and regional accents slid past—female squaddies heading for Chinatown and the clubs around Leicester Square.
The band and I didn’t so much proceed up Old Comptonas ricochet from one clique to the next. James nearly fell over as a pair of white girls ticked past in stilettos and pink knit mini dresses. “Fuck me,” he said as he recovered.
“Not going to happen,” said one of the girls as they walked away. But there was no malice in it.
James said he knew a place on Bateman Street, a little basement club in the grand tradition of the legendary Flamingo. “Or Ronnie Scott’s,” he said. “Before it was Ronnie Scott’s.”
It wasn’t that long since I’d been patrolling these streets in uniform and I had a horrible feeling I knew where he was going. My dad’s been known to wax lyrical about a youth misspent in smoky basement bars full of sweat, music, and girls in tight sweaters. He said that in the Flamingo you basically had to pick a spot where you were prepared to spend the night ’cause once things kicked off it was impossible to move. The Mysterioso had been designed as a deliberate re-creation of those days by a pair of likely lads who would have been the quintessential cheeky, cockney barrow-boy entrepreneurs if they hadn’t both been from Guildford. Their names were Don Blackwood and Stanley Gibbs but they called themselves the Management. It had been a rare weekend shift when me and Leslie didn’t end up on a shout to the street outside.
The trouble was never inside the club, though, because the Management hired the roughest bouncers they could find, strapped them into sharp suits, and gave them carte blanche on the door entry policy. They were famously arbitrary in their exercise of power and even at eleven forty-five there was a queue of hopefuls down the street.
There’s always been a tradition of po-faced seriousness about the British jazz scene and a kind of chin-stroking “yes I see” roll-necked sweaterness to the fans—my current company being a case in point. Judging from the punters in the queue, old tradition was not the Management’s target demographic. This was Armani-suit, dress-to-impress, bling-wearing, switchblade-carrying jazz and I didn’t think it likely that me and the band were going to make the cut.
Well, definitely not the band anyway. And to be honest thatsuited me because whereas the band had grown on me, a night of semiprofessional jazz has never been my idea of a good time. If it had been, my dad would have been a happier man.
Still James, in the grand tradition of belligerent Scotsmen down the ages, was not prepared to give up without a struggle, so ignoring the queue he went immediately on the offensive.
“We’re jazzmen,” he said to the bouncer. “That’s got to count for something.”
The bouncer, a side of meat that I knew for a fact had done time in Wandsworth for various crimes that started with the word
aggravated
, at least gave this some serious consideration. “I’ve never heard of you,” he said.
“Maybe maybe,” said James. “But we are all part of the same community of spirit—yes? The same brotherhood of music.” Behind his back Daniel and Max exchanged looks and shuffled back a foot or
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