As Ronnie Scott’s Old Place – the original basement club on Gerrard Street in London’s Chinatown – prepared to close its doors for the final time on 25 May 1968, the last musicians to take the stand were the 10 young members of Mike Westbrook’s Concert Band.
Recruited from a variety of backgrounds, they formed the vehicle with which their leader had begun to demonstrate his gift for slotting together elements of jazz from various periods and styles, filtering them all through his own sensibility to produce something thoroughly stirring, definitely contemporary and highly original. A capacity audience had queued all the way from the club’s entrance to Shaftesbury Avenue, and stayed on at the end to applaud the work of a musician on his way to becoming one of the most significant and productive figures in the history of British jazz.
