Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Farrago is a compilation of features from Jazz at Ronnie Scott’s magazine, the house magazine of the famous London jazz venue Ronnie Scott’s Club in Soho which is still in operation after nearly fifty years.
Background
The magazine was published for over twenty-five years from 1979–2006 producing a total of 159 issues under editorship of its founder editor, Jim Godbolt, acknowledged jazz historian. (Godbolt’s other books include two volumes of History of Jazz in Britain, 1919–1950 and 1950–1970, The World of Jazz and a very entertaining autobiography All This and Many a Dog, which had one journalist describe Godbolt as the P.G. Wodehouse of jazz journalism.)
Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Farrago draws from the vast material in those issues and collates profiles of the Club’s principals and the assortment of memorable characters who were associated with Ronnie Scott’s; facts of jazz history; humorous writing; gossip columns and interviews with famous personalities like John Dankworth, Kenneth Clarke, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Spike Milligan, Charlie Watts, Barbara Windsor and Michael Parkinson and, of course, Ronnie Scott himself. Humour has played a vital role in the magazine, following in the tradition established by Ronnie Scott at the microphone in his own club and is much in evidence in this selection, giving it a unique flavour, very much a part of the jazz ambience. In fact, the articles are a unique record of a club that is a London landmark, internationally known.
In addition to contributions by acknowledged experts on jazz music, the book’s pages are graced by the poems of Ron Rubin and drawings by such artists as Wally Fawkes (Trog), Nemethy, Picton, Pennington and Monty Sunshine and photographs by David Redfern and David Sinclair. George Melly wrote the two-page foreword.