Worth: $18.00
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Cast:
Oscar Peterson, Nina Simone, Gilles Peterson, Miles Davis, Quincy Jones
Intro:
... well-rounded and comprehensive ...
Ronnie Scott’s is a legendary London music venue – primarily for jazz – and over the decades, it has been a vehicle for just about everyone who was anyone in the genre, from Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Roland Kirk to Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. This doco – mercifully featuring voice-overs rather than talking heads – tells its colourful and often precarious history well. Even more than that, though, it’s the story of Scott himself, and a fascinating and often poignant saga it is too.
Scott was born into an impoverished Jewish family in the East End in 1927, and a passionate music fan and budding sax player from an early age. He – and his best friend and business partner Pete King – opened the club in the late Fifties after Scott was bowled over by what he saw and heard on a trip to New York City. He comes across in the archival interview segments here as droll, idealistic but undeluded and very unassuming. As well as running the show and booking the acts, he did ten-minute spots as a stand-up comedian.
Most of the gig footage here is nothing short of sensational. There’s Kirk playing three flutes simultaneously… Buddy Rich belting out that rarity of rarities, an exciting drum solo… Van Morrison doing a great version of “Send In The Clowns” … Plus evocative photos of billboards, expressive faces and the like. And some great quotes.
Ronnie Scott died in 1996, and the coroner’s report attributed it to an “incautious dose of sedatives”. Not necessarily suicide in other words, so his death was as hard to pin down as his life. Speaking of endings, Ronnie’s drags a bit in its final part, but it remains a very well-rounded and comprehensive portrait of both the man and his venue.
