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Dizzy Gillespie Live At Ronnie Scott's By Doug Ramsey Coming off 30 days of one-nighters in Europe, Dizzy Gillespie arrived in London with his quintet for a two-week engagement at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club on Frith Street in Soho. It was August of 1973. That summer, London was in the throes of the Provisional Irish Republican Army's terror campaign. The troubles moved from Ireland to England in March when the IRA planted four car bombs. Two exploded, killing one person and injuring 180 others. Following a series of fatal explosions and bomb threats, the city was on edge, never knowing when or where the next blast might be. Gillespie, pianist Mike Longo; guitarist Al Gafa; bassist Earl May and drummer Mickey Roker found a city in apprehension. "There was a bomb scare that day," Gafa remembered. "I think a mailbox had blown up. Taking a cab to work, we had to go through police lines. There was a high amount of tension in the club. Everything was really quiet. The place was packed, but it just had a weird feeling." Gillespie's ebullience and musicianship and the quality of his band would dispel the anxiety. In any event, tension was rarely a feature of Scott's club on Frith Street in Soho. The proprietor was as celebrated for his askew humor and laconic stewardship of the club as for his musicianship. His band introductions and asides to the audience were often standup comedy. A typical opening routine: 'It was very quiet last night. We had the bouncers chucking people IN. A guy rang up and asked, 'What time does the show start?' I said, 'What time can you get here?' No, but I really love this place. It's made a very happy man old.' When he was barely out of his teens, Scott was a tenor saxophonist infected by bebop. His first trip to New York, for the express purpose of hearing the new music played by it's creators, was in early 1947. Later that year, he went to work as a cruise ship musician and made several voyages to the US. Bop was in it's ascendancy, and on the New York end of his crossings he wasted none of his 48 hours of turnaround time before he sought out the music. He encountered Gillespie and other heroes he had heard only on records. Scott told of a night on 52nd Street when he listened to Charlie Parker's quintet with Miles Davis. He then went to the club next door, where Gillespie's big band was playing and Davis dropped by to sit in. Even then, Scott dreamed of owning a London club that would present jazz. In 1959, Scott and his fellow saxophonist Pete King realized the dream with the original Ronnie Scott's on Gerrard Street, not far from the club's present location. They opened with tenor saxophonist Tubby Hayes and his quartet plus two others whom Scott identified in the publicity as, "A young alto saxophonist, Peter King, and an old tenor saxophonist, Ronnie Scott. The first appearance in a jazz club since the relief of Mafeking by Jack Parnell.' Scott was 32. In their new club, the pair presented the United Kingdom's best modern jazz musicians. Two years later, King and Scott managed to persuade the American Federation of Musicians to lift it's longstanding ban on it's members performing in clubs in the UK. Until then, jazz exchanges were limited to formal concerts by Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Stan Kenton and a few others. AFM president James Petrillo allowed tenor sax star Zoot Sims to appear in Scott's club in exchange for Hayes playing an engagement at the Half Note in New York City. It was a breakthrough that helped lead to Ronnie Scott's becoming one of the premier jazz establishments in the world. Before long, Ben Webster, Roland Kirk, Stan Getz, Johnny Griffin, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Buddy Rich and Ella Fitzgerald followed Sims in the parade of major artists who have continued to perform at the club. Scott died in 1996 at the age of 69. In 2005, King sold Ronnie Scott's to Sally Greene, a theatre impresario. Recalling the IRA-induced anxiety surrounding the band's opening in August
