Some jazz-club proprietors, past and present, reflect on their calling...

RONNIE SCOTT (1989)

To what would you attribute your success in keeping a jazz club running for 30 years?
Sheer bad luck – no, we present the best jazz in the world. Also, the place has to have a good atmosphere, which I don't find in a lot of places. We're not trendy; because of the very nature of trends, they only last a few weeks.

The club hasn't changed over the years, although we do get the tablecloths laundered and paint the place up occasionally. It has to be the kind of place I feel comfortable in.

That's all you can do: do it that way and hope that other people feel the same way. I mean, getting architects and designers to design a jazz club is a great mistake. It doesn't work. Modern design doesn't lend itself to warmth and a lack of inhibition.

Do you select all the bands playing at the club by the same criteria?
Yes, but it's important to get people into the club. We do hire bands that I don't personally think are the greatest thing in the world, but they're popular and the people who come in to see them may be converted. A lot of the music going round today I wouldn't cross the road to hear, but there's also a lot of music that doesn't get the exposure it deserves, so I try to show that.

Presumably there's a core of people who come to Ronnie Scott's because it's Ronnie Scott's, rather than for the jazz?
Yes, there's always a number of that kind of person. But maybe they'll come back again. It's difficult to achieve a balance between the two sections.

Has the sudden fashion for jazz made any difference to you?
No. In the early 1980s we had a very tough time. Two or three years ago, when jazz got a tremendous amount of coverage – some new player the best thing since sliced bread, guys going round in sharp suits playing what I thought was very superficial music, designer jazz – we ignored it all. Now it's all dying away; people who jumped on the bandwaggon didn't succeed.

Jazz is a minority artform. It's never going to appeal to teenagers in the way rock'n'roll does and it's silly to pretend that it will. My prime ambition is to make some contribution towards gaining wider appreciation of the marvellous music around which my life has revolved for the last 45 years.

PETE KING (2003)

What's your assessment of the current London jazz scene?
It's been stumbling along reasonably for a while; I don't know how it can be improved. For a long period of time I would have hoped that there would be more venues to come on the scene, more music, but you're talking to an old man.

How have you kept going all these years? Do you consciously follow trends?
We've had a fantastic time, Ronnie and I: we were in the right place at the right time; we brought the Americans in and we had all those wonderful old men that were playing – they were old men then – and the younger ones, Bob Berg, bless him, people of that calibre. They were all great.

Then came the freeform period, which was death to the club, but all the forms that have come along – bebop when we were young lads, which left a large chunk of bebop in current music; then freeform, which left not such a large chunk, but something; then electronics – the music isn't as healthy now as when I was young.

All these young guys – particularly the English guys – can go to college now and study, and they play the shit out of their instruments, but jazz music's a self-indulgence to a degree anyway, and I think what's happened now is that it's even more of a self-indulgence: the kids are so amazed that they've produced a technique like they've produced that it's like turning on a tap for them; it pours out. Whereas, some of the older guys, like Ben Webster, they very nicely left some spaces to absorb what had gone on: brilliant, and much more simple.

We've built up an incredible brand name here. I answer the phone a couple of hours a night, and so I get to feel how people think of the club; outside, too, I hear people say: 'Ooh, Ronnie Scott's. I've always wanted to go there.' So we're fortunate to a degree, but I don't know how smaller places exist. We need more people Monday to Wednesday, and more capacity for the larger audiences Thursday to Saturday.

The people who sell well are on the jazz fringes: Nigel Kennedy, Roy Ayers, Flora Purim and Airto. It’s got to a stage with me, personally, in running the club, that I try to go for someone who's a very good performer. I like the Mingus Big Band myself, but when you look at the economics – it's just under £100 per individual per night in a hotel (and that's a special deal), so with a 20-piece orchestra, you're looking at £2,000 per day before you start.

And they're here for seven days. And that's without air fares and salary, and without giving them supper and a few drinks. And the younger players have all got managers, going for the biggest buck they can get, like the footballers. When Ronnie and I first asked Zoot Sims to come, we could afford to pay him $300 for the week, and his hotel…

Do you consciously think about things like 'audience profile'?
I'm not one of those people with a website – I'm still having trouble adjusting from pounds, shillings and pence – if I was running the business correctly, I could press a button and get these answers, but I do know that after Christmas, we get a lot of French for the sales, visitors throughout the year – Scandinavians, Japanese – the brand name does it. But very few clubs have stayed open as long as ours.

Do you see yourself as having a special obligation to British-based jazz?
London jazz musicians are very good technically. I don't think, though, that they can earn a living playing jazz, so when they become that proficient, they take a theatre gig.

Then when some theatre lays out for a while, they do a bit of jazz work, but they have a tough time, so I do my utmost to present, opposite the big names, a good English quintet, to be seen by people who probably haven't seen them before. It’s part of our remit to support British jazz.

I don't like to think of them as support bands, because I happen to think that the 12–1 a.m. set is often the best set of the night. I wish that, in my heart, I could believe that, without going into the areas I've tended to go into – the crowdpleasers (and I don't really see anything wrong with that) – I'd like to think that British jazz was capable of running establishments like this without having to go in that direction, but I don't think it's possible.

A shame, because there are how many people in London? Ten million? Out of that number, you're surely entitled to get 300 people a night.

ROGER HORTON (2003)

How healthy is the London jazz scene from your point of view?
Pretty healthy. My diagnosis is based on the fact that at the 100 Club, we always put on jazz for dancing, R&B, mainstream, even some of the early New Orleans stuff. I always found that once people could dance to the music, they turned up, so the club does very well. The 100 Club is the last of the dance-jazz clubs; the others are mainly sit-down-and-listen clubs.

Over the last ten years, there's no doubt that conservatory training has had a huge effect on musicians. Music has become a compulsory part of school curriculums, as well, so there's been a lot of young players coming through.

I listen to them play, think how talented they are, but worry about them making a living in jazz. People say that jazz is in one year, out the next – it makes not a scrap of difference; there will always be a small core of jazz fans. There'll probably never be another boom in jazz, but it can be pretty healthy nevertheless.

So what makes a healthy jazz club tick?
It's got to be run by someone interested in jazz. The clubs in London now all seem to be run by people interested only in making as much money as they can in as short a time as possible, and that often doesn't involve employing live musicians. Mind you, US musicians love working here because audiences are so appreciative. In the USA, they'll stick a trio in a corner and tell them not to play too loud in case it disturbs the diners' chat.

How would you change things if you could?
I'd try to enlist the help of people who control the music business; they're not interested in jazz. CD sales are lower, so everything works against jazz. It's very difficult to get a new jazz band known nationwide. How many British jazz musicians are earning a really decent living – say £1,000 per week? Martin Taylor, Alan Barnes?

The people who control the industry don't think jazz is immediately profitable. The main thing, though, is entertainment: even if they're playing the music brilliantly, you still have to sell it, make the paying customers enjoy themselves as much as possible. What I've noticed is that these days there's a lot more humour in between numbers at jazz concerts than there used to be…

Who do you think constitutes your core audience?
At the weekend, Londoners, 20–30, are our main audience. They might know nothing about jazz, but be wandering by. 'We've heard of the 100 Club; let's try it.' We give them a great evening – no restrictions; they can dance if they like. I'm sad there aren't more free and easy places like the 100 Club.

Some listen, others dance, but there's none of this 'Please don't chat while the artists's performing.' If they chat, you have to ask yourself why – some people win audiences from their first note. It might be that the saxophone trio/quartet has been done to death; there are too many of them about.

JON DABNER (1994)

To what do you attribute the demise of the Jazz Café?
First, meeting an architect who was the 1980s expansionist type, a bit profligate with our funds; second, the main contractor, who went into receivership partway through the job – the original contract was £400,000 and it eventually cost £760,000.

The Café actually traded profitably all the time I was there on a day-to-day basis, but we couldn't service the debt. The Café pioneered the style of having an eclectic mix of jazz-related musics – it wasn't purist in any sense of the word. The present Café is mostly pop; my new venue [the Rhythmic] won't be a purist venue; we're negotiating for Wilson Pickett, but also world-class jazz stars.

What about the balance between listeners and eaters?
Always a problem. In the Rhythmic, we hope to have raked seating round the stage area where people can sit nursing an orange juice all night. You have to accept that a lot of jazz fans are like that: they'll pay £30 a ticket to see their heroes, then they'll nurse an OJ or smuggle in brandy – I have to admit to having done this at Ronnie's as a kid myself.

We're trying to work out a layout that will give these people a space – leave them there, let them get on with it – and to have a separate bar and restaurant area, so people'll be able to wander in there and shout at the tops of their voices.

My pride is based on the fact that my gigs attract right across the board: hip young people, new school jazzuals, old jazz beards, also women who like to go out alone and not get molested. Places that are all for one sort of person alienate a bit. When I was young I felt alienated in Ronnie's.

What about designing a jazz club? Can it be done?
In retrospect, Camden's Jazz Café always had a good atmosphere, but bollocks to that. The furniture was a mistake; it went rusty quickly. People enjoyed the glitz at first – 'Jazz clubs shed their smoky image' – but it wasn't comfortable enough. I liked the colours – I hate black walls. You're going to spend half the time you're in a jazz venue actually listening to the music; you've got to have something to do the rest of the time.

I do find a lot of venue operators very greedy – the only way to present jazz properly is in a fully integrated club/bar/restaurant where everybody's working together to make sure that people are getting a good food service at reasonable prices, good bar service, proper respect paid to the music. You also have to accept that people are there to enjoy themselves. I'm still trying to perfect it.

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