Sounds Like London

by Lloyd Bradley

  Or at least it was, until the Blue Notes set themselves up in London to blow a blast of fresh air across the scene. They played a fairly pure hard-driving bop with a verve and spontaneity that bordered on abandon, clearly enjoying themselves on stage, shouting to each other, cracking jokes – both verbal and musical – and sweeping their audience along with them. Eminent music writer Chris Welch, who then covered jazz for Melody Maker, was moved to describe how the quintet:

  ‘Surprised Ronnie Scott club regulars with a tough, exciting hard bop. Surprised because excitement is not an everyday occurrence in British jazz. This scene can do with a bit of shaking up … The Blue Notes actually aroused the audience from their usual coma.’

  The remarkable thing was that the Blue Notes themselves greatly appreciated the overall musical revolution that was happening in London during the second half of the 1960s, and saw the new rock groups as inspirational. Especially for a drummer:

  ‘By the time we reached London, London was a Mecca for music, man, everybody was there, even the Rolling Stones, the pop cats were playing some drums, man! Speaking from a drummer’s point of view the pop guys were playing their arses off! Ginger Baker, Keith Moon and Charlie Watts and shit, they were really kicking arse. Robert Wyatt … All around you were people who just wanted to play music.’

  Powered by Louis’s ferocious drumming, Johnny Dyani’s agile bass created the platform for furious exchanges of ideas between Dudu Pukwana and Mongezi Feza (tenor sax and trumpet, respectively), while Chris McGregor marshalled proceedings from the piano. Unlike what they might have played back home, this was, Mike reckons, totally township-free:

  ‘At first they were playing very internationally recognised bop – broadly, we all were at that time – very much the suits and with an impeccable American feel about it. Hard bop music. But straight away they created a theme that was on the edge of going into a freer sort of thing. My first impression of them was very modern jazz.’

  But the Blue Notes had open minds, and a commitment to experimentation and free playing that had been honed by their time in Europe. Their live performances usually walked round the edge of mayhem, without ever tipping over to become impenetrable. Hazel doesn’t believe they could have done it any other way:

  ‘They were amazing people, each of them a larger-than-life character, and when they got here they just steamed in feet first. Some people said they were wild – and they were borderline wild. They were free spirits, and very intuitive as musicians, so I suppose some of what they were letting loose in London comes from being brought up in an oppressive regime, and once they had the freedom to play they just played. There was always a constructive thing in it, it was never just noise. They were too good musicians for it to be anything like that.

  The Blue Notes in the late 1960s; Chris McGregor channels his inner Gandalf as Johnny Dyani keeps time.

  ‘They joined in with the scene they found in Europe. They brought energy and a vitality to things, which brought more out of other people. Harry used to say to me there were loads of gigs where he and Louis and perhaps Chris were backing somebody else, or they had a different front line, and he’d say “We really burned their arses tonight”. They were such a powerhouse they’d push people on.’

  THE BLUE NOTES MADE SUCH an impact, and the music press loved them so much, that all sorts of stories keep cropping up as to their being resented by the London jazz establishment, or the group being given the cold shoulder by a combination of jealousy and racism – there weren’t any black British jazz players at this time. Mike happily debunks such myths:

  ‘A lot of stuff has come to light about the fifties and the terrible discrimination that was the case in London. However I don’t think that extended to the jazz scene … but it becomes convenient. You can read certain accounts where people see Joe Harriott as a martyr to racism, where I’ll kind of question that – the guy was a very successful musician and then there just wasn’t a lot of scope for modern jazz, he had health problems and he was an unhappy guy. I don’t think racism was the reason, but there’s a lot of people who would like to say, or give the impression that all the problems were that.

  ‘You have to remember that if you were to embrace a counter culture like modern jazz or whatever, you’re joining a whole thing that is nothing to do with race. At that it’s just that you’re all a kind of underclass. And that’s where we all still are, really, struggling to make the society better, but of course there are terribly entrenched forces at work here, that are probably still there.

  ‘In the true jazz world, so much of it is to do with “Can you play, or not?”, and the Blue Notes could certainly play. Jazz is largely a very honest world because you can’t get away with posing and pretending, you’ve got to be able to back it up and deliver whatever it is you’ve got to do. And you’ve got to satisfy your peers even before the public gets to hear you. You only have to look at how those guys fitted in – there was a bit of a musical community there, and certainly they immediately became part of it.’

  Hazel, who had more opportunity to stand back and observe than Mike, is more equivocal, but still adamant there weren’t any major issues:

  ‘I think some musicians might have resented them – a few people I can think of, maybe, but I wouldn’t like to say that we experienced that. It wasn’t a general thing, just a couple of odd people and that was their problem, not ours.

  ‘Yes, they shook some people up, but almost everybody embraced that because jazz thinking is always changing, continually, that’s the beauty of it. It’s not set in little categories, that’s the media and the record companies that do that. Jazz was all a sort of learning curve and a development… it’s like a painter, he does a painting one day and “Ooh, that’s not so good”, tries again the next day and he’s on a buzz and it’s “Woah! Look at that”. It’s the same thing with creative music. Jazz is embryonic, it’s continually developing in different directions, and the Blue Notes just pointed out another one. Most people [on that scene] saw that.’

  Louis laughs when I suggest there might have been an element of resentment within London’s jazz community:

  ‘We-e-e-ll, we were likeable people sometimes and luck had something to do with it, man. We fell in love with the people in London too. We were very much accepted in England, wherever we went, not spoiled like the Beatles or anything like that, but accepted. We were just cool cats, man, likeable people, and our music spoke for us: Mongezi Feza was amazing, man, Dudu Pukwana fantastic, there you go, Johnny Dyani our baby was ridiculous, you know. We were blessed, and it wasn’t easy, it was what we did, and we worked very hard to be in that position to be liked.

  ‘Somehow we came at the right time too, and that helped. There was acceptance of whatever we did, you know, sometimes we were trying out things and they worked, sometimes they didn’t but they were accepted. England was England too, there was a buzz about it too. That helped a lot. And for the first time too we were free, away from apartheid, expressing ourselves, we were having a good time. Away from the chains! People would say to us “What? Apartheid? Jesus Christ you come from there?” And they’re shocked, but we’re in the United Kingdom, we’re having a good time, man! We could express ourselves and we liked the people and the people like us. It was how we were.’

  Louis is quite correct about their timing. Yes, the Blue Notes injected vivacity into a torpid situation, but up until then London’s modern jazz was suffering, and the scene couldn’t progress because it had nowhere to go. Quite literally.

  ‘The time at which the Blue Notes arrived in London was the time that a lot of people like us, young guys, were coming up with new ideas. They fitted right into that attitude, and we might have been able to change things, but because of the change to R&B we struggled to find places to play. We’d trek around town to do half-hour spots in these clubs for five pounds for the whole band. In a sense we were all in this same boat. Fortunately, the Old Place opened and we could restart the scene.’

&nbs
p; The Old Place was Ronnie Scott’s original club, located in the basement of 39 Gerrard Street in what is now Soho’s Chinatown, where the Blue Notes made their London debut. In December of 1965, Scott opened his relatively swanky (for a jazz club) and soon-to-be iconic new premises, a couple of hundred yards away in Frith Street, but as the Gerrard Street lease still had a couple of years to run, the saxophonist kept it on. He dedicated it for use by experimental and up-and-coming jazzers, and it became a place where freer-thinking souls could jam and explore ideas without the inconvenience of having to pander to an audience in order to make money. As dangerously indulgent as that might sound, it became absolutely vital to the much-needed development of modern jazz in London, and was at the core of how the South African quintet came to influence more than just that single genre.

  THE OLD PLACE WOULD BE SOMETHING of a shock for anybody familiar with the second incarnation of Ronnie Scott’s club. Down steep stairs, with the ticket office handily situated on a turn, the tiny cellar club was, Mike reckons:

  ‘Like a nightclub in miniature. A very small bar, a kind of sandwich place, down the left-hand side; loads of seats and tiny little tables; and a stage that was no bigger than five or six metres across – I don’t remember a grand piano on it, I think it was just an upright, but we’d still get a ten-piece band playing on it. It was very intimate, I wouldn’t think the capacity was more than a hundred people, a hundred and fifty at most. There was a band room at the back that was like a cave – no windows, totally airless and, of course, thick with smoke.’

  During the six years since Scott opened the club in 1959, it had as London’s premiere jazz spot hosted such stars as Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Roland Kirk and Lee Konitz (both Scott and his partner in the club, Pete King, were saxophonists!). Now, as an incubator for the capital’s free jazz movement, it was perfect. So exciting was the vibe, indeed, that many of the big-name Americans booked in the new Ronnie Scott’s made sure to find the time to jam at the Old Place, usually unannounced.

  As the other significant free jazz venue – the Little Theatre Club, on the top floor of a building in Garrick Yard, off St Martin’s Lane – was an actual theatre, albeit a very small one, the music could only kick off after each evening’s performance had finished. Sessions ran from midnight until three in the morning, and musicians frequently had to position themselves amid whatever scenery was being used. Nobody seemed to mind; if anything, audiences appreciated free jazz coming from a living room, a forest, or even a court room. This club was set up by drummer John Stevens – one of life’s organisers, according to Mike – primarily to develop group improvisation with his Spontaneous Music Ensemble, as an alternative to his day job as a bebop musician. During the 1970s and 1980s, incidentally, John’s son Richie Stevens became one of London’s most sought-after session drummers, particularly in the reggae world. He was a mainstay of the lovers’ rock scene, detailed in chapter six.

  Although Blue Notes Johnny Dyani and Mongezi Feza featured frequently in Stevens’ SME, the South Africans had their greatest impact at the Old Place. Chris McGregor’s Blue Note-ish groups were the Friday-night house band, while Mike’s band did Saturdays; Louis played in both for a while. In the beginning, everybody played hard bop, with leanings toward the free. The audiences were pretty good, and everybody got paid a fiver – Scott reckoned he used to lose between £100 and £150 per week on the Old Place. Mike claims this generosity had a seminal effect:

  ‘There was a real change in the jazz scene after that, because in order to get a hearing young musicians didn’t have to do all that business with the dance bands that Ronnie’s generation had done. You know, work your way up and hope to get a break. People were able to come in and start playing straight away, creating music.’

  Louis is still excited to remember how this scene contrasted with the European jazz world of which the Blue Notes had been a part, immediately before coming to London.

  ‘Before we came to England we came to the continent, and the Coltrane thing was happening a lot, man. It was just Coltrane Coltrane Coltrane Coltrane, and people looking to imitate people. We came to England and bang, there you go, even the pop guys are playing their arses off! There were some fucking good drums on the pop scene! Yeah, man! Then there were people like Keith Tippett and John Stevens, who embraced us and we embraced them, we taught each other… Kenny Wheeler, oh man, it was fantastic. England was kicking arse, man, cats like John Surnam and them, wow! Mike Osborne, you know what I mean? Everything was just laid out … Tubby Hayes, Phil Seamen, Jesus Christ, man!

  Dudu Pukwana in the 1970s.

  ‘In a way, England was leading the way. That scene brought a lot of guys from the States, these so-called masters like Sonny Rollins and them, to play at Ronnie Scott’s. There was a phenomenal music happening then, man. Stan Tracy, fucking hell, man! Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott … Yeah! Ronnie Scott was kicking arse, man, we even had the privilege of playing with him in the Brotherhood Of Breath, he just came in and played with us on the continent.’

  Chris McGregor of the Blue Notes became fundamental in creating the music Mike describes. Although the Old Place offered McGregor the chance to perform new music in front of appreciative crowds, in assorted different-sized groups – ‘Chris McGregor Nights’ were regular occurrences – it was after hours that things really moved forward. John Jack, the venue’s manager, would allow Chris or Mike to stay as long as they liked after the punters had gone home, to experiment and write, either by themselves or with other musicians. Jack would often stay and make the coffee, but if not he’d either leave the keys or lock them in until he came back about midday the next day.

  As 1966 progressed, the Blue Notes were pretty much over as a bop outfit, while in demand individually to work with other groups both here and abroad. It was when they came back together at the Old Place as the Chris McGregor Group that they began seriously to explore a free jazz direction. Chris and Dudu Pukwana, the two who had always shown the strongest African manifestations, in composing and playing respectively, spent the most time working in London during this period. Now, with Chris leaning increasingly towards a ten- or twelve-piece sound – the Chris McGregor Big Band was an Old Place regular – his improvisational approach was building on obviously African influences. His work recalled the big band that he’d formed in South Africa before he left, known as the Castle Lager Big Band after the huge brewery-sponsored jazz festival in Soweto’s Orlando Stadium at which it performed. That was a Blue Notes side project that featured Dudu and Mongezi Feza, and one critic described their integration of American and African music as ‘a very powerful and expressive thing’. It came as no surprise to Hazel, whose husband Harry frequently gigged with Chris, that he was moving back in this direction:

  ‘Chris was a big-band man. Always was. Even in his solo stuff that came through. I’m about to put out a solo album he did in 1977, and you can hear it’s definitely a big-band man playing that piano – you can hear all the parts coming in. They were playing jazz as the rest of Europe expected it when they first got here, but as jazz musicians they were interested in improvisation – that’s what jazz is, and in the sixties the improvisation scene here was magnificent, it was so fertile. You could honestly say that the guys here, Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, John Stevens, were leading the world. And the South Africans appreciated this musical freedom, and they were in there.

  ‘They listened, they could hear it and boom… and they adapted it with their music. Underneath the jazz, their music was different, they had a different approach, it was almost like listening to somebody talking, because their language was very musical. If you listen to a band of South Africans who are talking Xhosa or even Zulu – the Miriam Makeba thing of the “Click Song”… the click thing, it’s a rhythm, it’s all in the language. It was a different area, from the idiom that was coming in from America, and the South Africans bringing a flavour of Africa was what everybody loved. That was what gave them the edge, which was why they had such a big i
nfluence.’

  EVEN THOUGH CHRIS WAS THE WHITE member of the Blue Notes, his immersion in African music was as complete as any of his fellow band members, and it had long been his mission to bring together the black musics of America and his part of Africa in the same style. The same went for the others, who saw free jazz in London as a chance to explore African backgrounds that were such an intrinsic part of who they were, that they had never really thought about them before. Freed from the constraints of established styles, much of the music had a basis in South African folk songs, presented as sax-heavy big-band jazz, with plenty of scope for solo-ing and improvisation. Although always as surprising and as serrated as the best free jazz, the strong underlying lyricism from the folk music made it easy for the less committed audience members to follow – there was always a generous sprinkling of tourists and students in the crowds at the Old Place.

  The band attracted young British players like Mike Osborne, John Surman and Malcolm Griffiths, around a South African core of Chris, Dudu and Mongezi, and frequently saxophonist Ronnie Beer and Harry Miller on bass. They exerted considerable influence on the London improvisation scene from the point of view of how they did things, rather than what they actually did. Their South African-isms demonstrated that America was not the only jazz touchstone, and that free jazz didn’t have to suffer if it wasn’t so intuitive as to exclude other players as well as the audience. John Stevens’ basic rule was that there’s no point playing in a group, if you’re not playing as part of that group.

  Mike often sat in with the South Africans, and he recalls how the band’s methods impacted a modern jazz scene that was far too sure of itself to simply copy somebody else’s style: