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| Kitty Grime / Tony Hall / Rik Gunnell... |
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Kitty Grime Mary (Kitty) Grime was born in Derby on January 21st, 1930. After University and teaching she drifted into the metropolitan bohemia of 1950s Soho. The first time jazz fans read the byline of Kitty Grime was in the 1950s, on concert programmes and sleeve notes for Esquire records, where she worked for Carlo Krahmer. Krahmer was a former drummer and co-founder of the label and she was one of several employees who went on to musical careers. She was one of the few women to write about jazz It was in early 1950s Soho that she found jazz, and joined the circle around modernists Ronnie Scott and Johnny Dankworth and she became a regular at Studio 51 in Great Newport Street. Consumed by bebop, she became a wry and witty observer of the scene. Although Grime sang, played piano and wrote amusing lyrics, she was discouraged from a deeper involvement by attitudes of the time. Record company publicity was an alternative, and after Esquire, she joined Decca in 1959. She was an early enthusiast for the free form of Jamaican alto saxophonist Joe Harriott. With Val Wilmer she collaborated on Jazz at Ronnie Scott's, examining what it means to play jazz. Her Jazz Voices (1983) followed, an inside view of singing through the words of practitioners, including Jon Hendricks, Annie Ross and Ray Ellington. She died from cancer on August 10th, 2007. (Adapted from an obituary written by Val Wilmer for "The Guardian" newspaper in 2007). |
Tony Hall During the 1950s Tony Hall produced many of the classic Tempo recording sessions that became virtually the only recorded legacy of Britain's great modern jazz musicians of the time. These included Ronnie Scott, Tubby Hayes (individually and as the Jazz Couriers, Victor Feldman, Jimmy Deuchar and West Indian Dizzy Reece. He was then an A&R man for Decca, a publicist, producer, nightclub MC at The Flamingo jazz club and general man about jazz in Soho. He did about 20 recording sessions for Tempo and has always said that he never earned a penny out of them. Musicians were paid union rates but there was never money to hire studios for rehearsal time - he just met the musicians in clubs and suggested sessions and possible dates. Often the musicians were not that enthusiastic, Hall feels that some of them had an inferiority complex about being compared with the leading Americans. He worked hard to record Tubby Hayes and managed to get a session with Tubby, Dizzy Reece, Donald Byrd, Terry Shannon and Art Taylor released by the Blue Note label which led to Dizzy Reece making a couple more records in the US and moving there permanently. A long lost recording date by the Tubby Hayes Quartet that Hall produced in 1959 has just been released for the first time in 2011. Tony Hall, now 83, is still alive and anybody who still enjoys the British modern jazz from the 1950s must be grateful to him for recording the music when nobody else was interested. (Aug 2011) more... |
Rick Gunnell | |
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Club owner and entrepreneur Rik Gunnell was born in Germany in 1931. His father was English and worked for a shipping company but his mother was German and in 1937 the family came to London. Following National Service in the Royal Army Pay corps he worked as a book-keeper at the Smithfield meat market in central London, spending his
nights as a bouncer at Studio 51, a modern jazz club. This led, in 1952, to his first operation, the 2-Way Jazz Club, where, in a period when the two jazz factions - modern and traditional - were opposed, he presented modernist Johnny Dankworth's Seven opposite traditionalists Mick Mulligan and George Melly. Later that year, he opened the Blue Room, featuring modernists such as the newly arrived Jamaican saxophonist Joe Harriott. But Gunnell soon ran out of money and vanished. On re-emerging, he announced that he had been in Paris where he had taken fights in order to eat. Such behaviour set the pattern for a life in which good music, good times and booze coexisted with fantasy and lost opportunities. It was when he met Tony Harris, manager at Leicester Square's Mapleton hotel, that Gunnell successfully harnessed the potential audience for jazz. In 1955, with American fashion and style all the rage, the venue became an all-nighter called Club Americana. Ten shillings admittance bought jazz and a three-course meal - tomato soup, chicken'n'chips and ice cream. They were not the premises' only music promoters - Sam Kruger and his son Jeff had started the Flamingo there, but Gunnell pushed them out to open extra nights as Club M. |
With African-American servicemen based then in Britain - and limited social outlets available to them - the Mapleton became their weekend port-of-call. Caribbean and African settlers of the Windrush generation frequented the club, too, as did villains, attracting adverse attention from the press and led to coverage of a kind the club did not need. Gunnell now owned other clubs - the Star in Wardour Street and Club Basie in Charing Cross Road, where, amazingly, veteran Dixieland trumpeter Nat Gonella shared the bill with Ronnie Scott. In 1958, adverse publicity forced Harris and Gunnell from the Mapleton. The Krugers had moved their Jazz at the Flamingo to Wardour Street and Harris and Gunnell headed there. They made peace with the Krugers and launched the Friday and Saturday AllNighter. The music was a mixture, but while musicians such as Brian Auger, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker played modern jazz, by the end of 1961 the twist was in vogue. In 1962, the Gunnells auditioned the young Georgie Fame, and the rest is history as Fames' Blue Flames became the Flamingo's most popular draw. When the Flamingo closed in 1967, Rik took over the Bag O'Nails in Kingly Street. He moved to the US in 1968 but things did not work out and eventually, after a spell in Australia, opened a small bar in Austria. He died in June, 2007. (Adapted from an obituary written by Val Wilmer for "The Guardian" newspaper in 2007). |