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All This and Many a Dog

Jim Godbolt

Northway (220pp., Ł12.99)

Any book that features my name in its index next to that of Charlie Parker starts off with an inbuilt advantage as far as getting a favourable review's concerned.

Funnily enough, two books satisfying this description, erstwhile jazzband (and Swinging Blue Jeans) agent Jim Godbolt's reissued memoirs and my old boss Naim Attallah's third volume of reminiscences, Fulfilment and Betrayal (Quartet Books), arrived simultaneously on my doormat; each book contains a pretty accurate account of the heady (for me, anyhow) days in the 1980s when the Quartet jazz list was up and running alongside Wire magazine, each venture attempting to chronicle the jazz world, the list from a mainly historical perspective, the magazine from what I then saw as (and still consider) a somewhat misguidedly fashion-oriented point of view.

But that's enough about me (I mention myself only in an attempt to forestall charges of unacknowledged bias). Godbolt's book begins with his teenage stint as a City office boy, touches briefly on his war experiences, then recounts, in a style that has been likened (by the late Jonathan Abbott) to that of P. G. Wodehouse, his various adventures as manager of George Webb's Dixielanders and subsequently as an agent trying to deal with the likes of trumpeter and hell-raiser Mick Mulligan, and larger-than-life singer George Melly. On the way, Godbolt writes unflinchingly revealing and amusing pen portraits of Humphrey Lyttelton, Bruce Turner, Sandy Brown and his fellow agent Don Kingswell.

He also deals with his life as a meter reader (accounting for his lifelong hatred of the dogs of the title), his attempts to become a self-supporting writer, and his eventual period as editor of Jazz at Ronnie Scott's, a magazine now sadly apparently defunct. Concluding with a blow-by-blow account of the editing and production processes that ushered his two histories of jazz in Britain into the world, this is a witty and perceptive, occasionally somewhat sardonic and waspish (and I should stress that I regard both these adjectives as complimentary) account of a singular obsession and how it played itself out in the life of a man described by George Melly, with characteristically pithy accuracy, as 'thin and tense, his head with its pointed features crouching between his shoulders as though emerging from its burrow into a dangerous world, his eyes as cold and watchful as those of a pike in the reeds'. Recommended to anyone who wants to taste the flavour of a vanished era.

Familiarity seemed to bore him, so his women, his cars, his style of clothes were all regularly shaken out. Music, which was much more important to him than any of those other things, changed around him: no one figure can shift music by themselves, and coming from what was perceived (at least, in a late twentieth-century perspective) to be the marginal area of jazz, he tended to stand quietly in the eye of the storm and make small, telling adjustments.'