Ummm, niiiice! Jazz clubs like Ronnie Scott's have had to adapt with the music.
What makes a good jazz club? Intimate atmosphere, friendly relationships between the punters and the venue (one promoter in Scotland even does a ring-round of his regulars to personally invite them to the next gig), good sound, a bar - and above all, a space small enough to offer proximity to the action.
Jazz is music of spontaneous, rapidly evolving relationships, which are sometimes sublimely harmonious, sometimes deliberately bloody-minded, often gleeful, occasionally competitive, baffled, or downright lost. It seems to mirror human life as it's lived from moment to moment. Reliant on the fleeting glance and the startled smile between players rather than the written score, jazz can be at its most engaging when you can experience that process unfolding with your eyes as well as your ears.
Ronnie Scott's was the first jazz club I ever went to, where legendary saxophonists like Ben Webster, Sonny Rollins or Stan Getz were close enough to touch. The club also seemed like a place that was run almost entirely for the music's benefit - the food wasn't even recommended by the owners, and the staff could be grumpy, but nobody cared much if you didn't spend money. Ronnie's was also part of the exotic Damon Runyonesque world of Soho. To an innocent newcomer, everybody around there seemed to be trying to live their entire lives in one night.
The area's more upmarket now, and the recently made-over Ronnie's has gone upmarket with it, though you can still hear the music's major figures there. But for that seat-of-the-pants feeling that something might happen that wasn't supposed to, there's no substitute for the kind of informality that lets players feel they can just drop by with their horn case and see what's happening. Dalston's Vortex has that, Fulham's long-running 606 Club does, and so, sometimes, does the Dean Street Pizza Express.
The focus in jazz innovation may have shifted from the States these days, but New York can still give you something of the jazz tingle it famously had back in the 40s. Legendary clubs like the Village Vanguard, Smalls and the Blue Note, and shoebox-sized 'prohibition-era dives' frequented by innovators in search of a jam, like Greenwich Village's 55 Bar, are all within a few minutes' walk of each other.
Paris's New Morning is bigger and more multi-generic but retains that elusive sense of devotion to musical values, and so does Copenhagen's famous Jazzhouse - where the music of everyone from Stan Getz to the UK's Loose Tubes seems to have permeated the walls. Though nowadays they follow the jazz set with DJs and a club night, they don't charge you extra for staying on.
Music changes fast, and jazz clubs have to adapt. But creative players always need places to make a new music happen, and the right spaces are a magnet for musicians in search of congenial playing and listening company.
So what's YOUR favourite jazz club?
