Founded by musicians for musicians ... Ronnie Scott's
How do you get a jazz musician to make a million quid, the joke goes. Give him two million, naturally. Which happens to be more or less the sum that the London theatrical impresario Sally Greene (owner of the Old Vic, and co-producer of the Billy Elliot musical) has reportedly poured into the late Ronnie Scott's world-famous jazz club, which reopened on Monday after three months.
The new owners will be watching the tills anxiously to see whether the jazz joke can be proved wrong. With Wynton Marsalis, David Sanborn and Chick Corea on the way, they'll certainly get their packed houses - but a lot of money will be flying in the other direction to draw those huge stars, too.
I've been a serial skulker at the bar of Ronnie Scott's since the 1970s, and heard some of the greatest players in the history of jazz music on its stage, from Stan Getz and Sonny Rollins to Sarah Vaughan and a teenage Wynton Marsalis. I've seen periods when jazz has been hip and fashionable, when popular outfits like the late-lamented Loose Tubes big band could lead an ecstatic audience out into the Soho streets and stomp round the block raising hell.
And I've seen times when the music has been out in the cold, and a tenor-sax giant like Joe Henderson could be playing to an almost empty house, or a then unknown band called Weather Report make dazzling new music to a handful of insiders and a few bemused drunks. When the official receivers were in at one dark point in the 70s, somebody told co-founder and club manager Pete King: "If you'd been shrewd businessmen, you'd have seen this coming." "If we'd been shrewd businessmen we wouldn't have been here at all," was King's reply.
King was putting his finger on the club's raison d'etre, and the reason for its legendary status for both players and fans. It had been founded by musicians (both Scott and King were saxophonists) for musicians, in the belief that if the music was good enough the audience would come without any other inducements. Photos inside the original 1959 Chinatown basement club suggest a seminar of physicists rather than a jazz audience - rows of scrubbed and enraptured fans absorbing the outpourings of Dexter Gordon or the young Sonny Rollins.
Now all that has changed, and much of it for the good. The gender balance has evened out in the jazz audience, the music doesn't exist in a strange, private world but is open for everyone to enjoy, clubs have become more welcoming and relaxed. But, in the end, jazz is rarely a market-oriented, corporate-backed, easily digested form of music making, humming unobtrusively in the background while punters discuss the wine list. Passion for an extraordinary music is what keeps the jazz torch passing from one generation to the next. Anybody getting into the jazz business should keep King's words pinned up above the desk.
