Ronnie Scott's, the most famous jazz club on earth, is this week celebrating its 45th anniversary. It's an endurance record hardly any other establishment running an all-jazz programme has ever managed. “Like a prison sentence," the late Ronnie Scott once exhaled wearily, when the 30th anniversary came up, in 1989. “Thirty years in a jazz club."
Scott lived for playing jazz, and for the opportunities his unique club offered to get close to some of the most gifted artists who ever created this wilful and impulsive music. Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Ben Webster, Stan Getz and scores of others, all played on his premises. When Scott died, aged 69, in 1996 - his departure probably hastened by depression and frustration that he would never be the player he dreamt of becoming - he had already done more to encourage jazz-making to take root as an art-form in Britain than anyone else. Pete King, the club's co-founder and Scott's close friend, shared the same missionary spirit.
For more information contact All About Jazz.
