I’m not a great believer in synchronicity. However, every so often circumstances combine in a way which suggests events that are on the face of it purely random may, in fact, have some sort of connective thread. What they collectively reveal can, at times, feel especially timely.
Take this week. No sooner have I’ve railed yet again on Facebook about the widespread scourge of phone filming at gigs – and this is such a well-worn rant now that I can reduce it to a couplet stating ‘just stop’ – than I’m confronted with the appearance of something that, had it not been for a bit of audience initiative back in the days when a portable cassette player was the only way in which to capture a live gig you liked the sound of, would not exist at all. This combination of separate and yet somehow interlinked occurrences has utterly thrown me. How to respond? Do I eat humble pie and admit, like a card carrying hypocrite, that when it suits my purposes I’m totally fine with a spot of bootlegging (don’t mention Tubby Hayes); or do I do a volte face and try to expediently dismiss such a thing simply because it concerns not the here and now but something that happened nearly three decades ago?
The something in question was a gig at a then well-known jazz pub, local to me; the Goat in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, at which I was often a paying punter, sat atop a ringside bar stool, drinking lager shandy and trying desperately to look comfortable in an arena which caused me to feel anything but, and, on more than one occasion, a willing but raw ‘sitter in.’ Those who allowed me to do this were variously kind, tolerant and, in only one instance I’m pleased to report, downright hurtful. The kind and tolerant ones included saxophonists like Alex Garnett, Ray Gelato, Duncan Lamont and Vic Ash. The hurtful exception was a small man with a huge tenor sound and an ego to match who told me in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t good enough to play with him or, for that matter, any of the musicians present. In part he was right, but how this observation was couched revealed plenty about the personality making it. Years later, this same individual would turn up at gigs I was doing near where he lived, acting as nice as pie. I never had the heart to tell him he’d been an absolute shit when I first met him.
I digress. The Goat’s audience was full of people I knew; veteran jazz fans who I’d met at other venues in the area, some of whom I got to know better than others. All of them were full of tales of far-off nights in a golden age where Tubby Hayes might rock up on the train and do a parochial pub gig for four quid all in. Even then I knew I’d made something of an impression on these people for my enthusiasm for and knowledge of the jazz scene of their youth. I was a nostalgic anorak, a throwback, an anachronistic refugee from a past not mine but theirs. They liked me for that. My playing, embryonic and over ambitious, they found it less easy to warm to, wrapping it in polite words which, inexperienced though I was, I could still see through. I could sense that they wished I’d get better sooner rather than later. I was in my laborious phase though, digesting Dexter Gordon and Zoot Sims licks like an anaconda might digest a horse. Progress was grinding. I was the class slow coach. And I was frequently embarrassing too, caught out once too often by my overreaching ambition.
The man who booked these jazz nights, a sometime crooner named Terry, tolerated me too, often for no other reason than my former tutor, Vic Ash, would sometimes gig with him, underscoring an obvious desire to be Frank Sinatra (Vic had toured with Sinatra from 1970 to 1992). He dealt with me in euphemisms mainly. Until one day, following what must have been a mildly more successful sit-in than usual, he called me. Or rather he called my parents house as I was still living at home. I can’t even remember giving him their phone number and I suspect he may have got it from Vic.
‘Do you fancy doing May 8th?, he asked outright. ‘OK’ I said, feeling like a weekend five-a-sider who’d just been asked to play in the Champions League. ‘Great. You know the set times. I’ll get Dave Cliff on guitar. It’s £80, OK?’
‘OK’.
‘See you on the 8th. Thanks. Goodbye.’
Click.
It had been the longest conversation I’d ever had with Terry, who I used to think, in the way I used to think about everyone back then, secretly hated me. He didn’t. I was just a nuisance. Indeed, what use was I to a promoter who otherwise booked people who played with Frank Sinatra? The local pain in the arse. I knew my place.
If I’m in any way making this story sound over dramatic, or god forbid self-pitying, let me clarify a few things. This was 1997; a full six or so months after I’d turned ‘pro’, itself a laughable declaration coming from someone still occupying his childhood bedroom and whose gig prospects extended no further than three poorly-paid restaurant residencies a week and the odd wedding booking. I was twenty-two years of age and going nowhere, not fast but at an excruciatingly sluggish tempo. In local jazz circles, by which I mean among semi-pro or amateur players who’d been at it for years. I was like Marmite. Some thought I’d get there. One day. Others told me the hole in my arse was a terminal set-back. Still, I was getting a few gigs and this week in May I recall very vividly as it contained what was, at this time, an unusually rich mix of work of the more attractive kind. On the Tuesday night I’d played another local venue, a social club at which I was more or less a fixture with any band that would have me; on the Wednesday evening before what I was expecting to be my public slaughter before all and sundry at the Goat, I did a gig opposite a band led by Benny Green - broadcaster, author, Broadway song expert, occasional tenor saxophonist, general wit - at a school in his adopted Kings Langley. Ray Gelato was in Benny’s band. It was the first time we’d met. Benny was nice about everything and in between him telling me Miles Davis died of AIDS (something I’ve not read anywhere since nor ever heard corroborated) we talked about Tubby Hayes. I told Ray about the gig at the Goat. ‘Man, you’ll be fine,’ he assured me. I didn’t believe him.
May 8th 1997 isn’t much of a memory for me if I’m honest. The whole thing was a blur. Dave Cliff was lovely, both as a player and a person. I’d never played with any guitarist that good up to this point and, as controversial as this may sound, I’m not sure I’ve come across anyone quite like him since. He knew every tune under the sun – not that I was calling songs that lurked in the shadows; my set-list was embarrassingly trite – and his introductions! I’d grown up loving those Paul Desmond records with Jim Hall on guitar. To my green ears, Dave sounded like he’d stepped off one of them. I think I might have told him this on the night, for shame, but he was very nice about it. Besides that, I recall we had an animated conversation about jazz critics too. He wasn’t a fan. I knew I was in the right company.
On bass was Matt Miles, seemingly ubiquitous in those days; I’d seen him on plenty of other gigs by this point, including at the Goat, where he’d sometime spell the resident bassist Leon Clayton. On drums was a man named Paul Cavacuiti, who I didn’t know. The ignorance was mutual. I was, after all, as I had soon realised, replacing someone meant to do the gig who had pulled out for some undisclosed reason. I never discovered who this was. Probably just as well.
The audience was smaller than the normal Goat crowd, seduced by home comforts this evening as the ‘guest’ was that gawky boy who sometimes played a tune near the end on other nights, usually a blues in F, usually ‘Now’s The Time.’ What he was doing there as a featured player proper was anyone’s guess. The anyone who’d turn up to see him, that was. Still, for all that, the evening ranked as something of a victory. And it was the blues that turned out to be the only thing I can really remember of it, Dave Cliff delighting me when I said I wanted to play ‘Blue Hodge’, a Gary McFarland composition I’d learned from an Al Cohn and Zoot Sims record I loved. It was the sort of theme sleeve note writers like to refer to as a ‘recherché’ choice, a fancy way of saying nobody has played it since it was first put on record. I tried to play it like Zoot. I tried to play everything like Zoot in those days. Dave was nice about things, again.
And then it was over. Terry splayed out some tenners in the palm of his hand and gave me the fee, I took Dave Cliff, Matt Miles and Paul Cavacuiti’s number and never called any of them again. One of the audience gave me a lift home. The house was in darkness when I got back. Mum and Dad were away in Cornwall on a short holiday. I can’t remember what I did when I got in, thanked my lucky stars probably, relieved that somehow I’d got through a night in such high-end company without making too much of a fool of myself. ‘You’ll be fine,’ Ray Gelato had said the night before. Now I knew what he meant; everyone else will be sheer class – all you have to do is not fuck it all up. I hadn’t. Just.
So why all this reminiscence now, some three decades and many changes of musical skin later? Because last week, on a gig at that very same social club I used to haunt back then, a lady came up to me and gave me a cassette of that gig at the Goat. It had been taped by her late husband, an amateur clarinettist and the man who used to book gigs at the same club we were now stood in. He’d been the person who’d driven me home that night back in 1997 too. Dave. I liked him and he liked me, until I had a stupid fit of pique about some minor bit of nothingness and told him to do the physically impossible. Like I said, I was beyond stupid in my youth. We’d seen each other at least twice in the interim, once after I’d won an award and he came to another gig I was doing in Berkhamsted. He was very nice too, as if he’d never come up against the short end of my idiocy. I felt embarrassed and I should have apologised but I didn’t. I didn’t feel I could bring up the past. It was too, well, embarrassing. The next thing I heard, he’d died, and so any sorry I wanted to give would have to be left in the box marked karma, pending later delivery. Dave had actually been a bit of a champion of mine in those early days, talking me up when plenty of others thought I had nothing to offer but arrogance and ignorance. He saw past that, or thought he did, and for this I am now more than grateful. In fact, thinking back, I’m convinced it was he who urged Terry to book me that night. If he didn’t he can still stake that claim by proxy. He sat there all night and all these years later, thanks to him, there is the gig again, on tape for me to do whatever I wish with.
Truth be told, I immediately thought of chucking it out. In a life already crowded with more music than I’ll ever have time to listen to, what on earth would I want with a half-formed fragment of my younger self, blowing bog standard standards in a pub with a band I wasn’t fit to shine the shoes of? Revisiting that would be to admit nothing had changed ever since and that you’d carried on as you begun; winging it, feeling fraudulent, piecing it together without a schematic.
But I didn’t throw it away.
A few days later, getting ready for a sortie down the pub, I looked at the tape box, with its handwritten tune titles and its date – over a quarter of a century ago, in the last century – and it suddenly came to me; this music can’t hurt you any more. It’s done. It’s so far removed from who you are and what you’re doing and all the things that matter to you now that listening to it will be no more engrossing than skimming through old school photos. There you were; here you are. End of.
Yet life likes a sucker punch, doesn’t it. The first tune I heard, ‘Gone With The Wind’ came in at a walking tempo and the tenor – you could tell he had Zoot very much in mind – wasn’t half as bad as I’d worried it might be. It was actually better than I’d hoped it might be at the time. It sounded like me, a me who’d now forgotten a lot of what he was playing, and who, oddly, sounded fresher and more engaged than a man who’d worked up his technique ever since. It didn’t hurt. I actually liked it. And the things that had so concerned me at the time – all manner of instrumental issues and attendant pressures of being ‘hip’ enough – these didn’t seem present at all. All sins were forgiven, in an instant.
There is no need for a blow-by-blow account of the rest of the contents. Dave, Matt and Paul all play beautifully, and we all get those ‘little claps’ that Lester Young used to smile at. The point of all this reflection though isn’t to frame a pub gig decades ago as a personal Dead Sea Scrolls – it’s raw as hell in places – rather it’s to record a sea-change. At the time I did that gig I was a frustrated, easily bruised, frequently confused, hyper-focused and extremely lonely young man. Each of these things combined to convince me I was a fool on a road to nowhere. Yet all roads lead somewhere, even if that destination isn’t the one you wanted it to be, or the route proves far more protracted and gruelling than you’d have liked. Seen now, these things aren’t failings, they’re just feelings. They pass as you go from one thing to the next. The only true fool is the one who considers them essential baggage.
Hearing this music from all those years ago frees something. It also gives a window – re; all those whinges about phones at gigs and clips on You Tube – into what other people might take away from a gig. A bit of footage of a solo seen the day after captures the contemporary emotion of its subject (‘damn, missed that E flat’) and is in reality too close to objectively value. Years later, the feelings that bedevilled you during the moment have passed, and all that is left is the music. Accordingly, maybe my fifty-one year old ears are only now able to hear that gig in 1997 as others did at the time, who knows? All I’m certain of is that revisiting a past I’ve half-denied, half-hidden, isn’t the shaming thing I thought it might be. I never did become Zoot Sims Mk 2. Who could? And does it matter? I never did gig with Dave Cliff again. That matters, of course, as I’d have loved to. And although Terry did book me again a couple of times before the Goat’s jazz events folded, I never did recapture the excitement of that first evening there. Maybe that’s the lesson then: enjoy it, every bit of it, as it won’t come again.
As for the Goat, well, it’s still there. I passed it a few days ago, I often do, and have done so so many times in the intervening years that I no longer think much of what it meant at the time. Perhaps I ought to go in again, just to see what it’s now like, and to make my peace with the place? I think I’ve avoided doing this because, like so many of us, I don’t want to go back. But it’s just a pub, that’s all, and there’s nothing hiding there other than that which I’ve imagined.
‘We shall not cease from exploration,’ T. S. Eliot wrote in ‘Little Gidding’, ‘and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’
So, thanks Dave, wherever you’ve landed up. I’m only sorry you aren’t here to have a pint with me and to talk about how thirty years have led me round in the most enjoyable and enlightening of circles.