Features
Pete King Dies
The man who forsook his own career as a musician to run London’s leading jazz club for 46 years died Dec. 20.
Pete King, 80, ran
It was largely through his efforts behind the scenes, both at the original site in Gerrard Street and its present home in Frith Street, that the club established its reputation.
In his mid-teens King started playing clarinet and tenor saxophone, and his enthusiasm for jazz got him a slot in Jack Oliver’s band by the time he was 18.
His first professional job was in the band led by trumpeter Leslie “Jiver” Hutchinson. He went on to work with many of London’s leading jazz and dance bands of the late 1940s, until he joined Jack Parnell’s Orchestra in 1952.
The following year, he joined the band led by Ronnie Scott, which made valiant attempts to play a jazz repertoire to audiences more used to the dance music of Victor Sylvester and Joe Loss.
King stayed with the group for four years, but when Scott broke up the group in 1957 to form the Jazz Couriers with his fellow saxophonist Tubby Hayes, King put aside his own instruments and became the band’s manager. Two years later King became Scott’s partner, and he never returned to professional playing.
He shared Scott’s vision to overcome what sometimes appeared to be insurmountable commercial odds to present the likes of Sonny Rollins, Buddy Rich, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone and Oscar Peterson in an intimate setting.
Within a couple of decades Ronnie Scott’s grew into a sizeable and well-known organisation, prompting the BBC to broadcast a series of programmes from the larger, more spacious premises it occupied after moving to Frith Street in 1965. In the late 1960s it became a focal point of “swinging London,” where members of rock acts would rub shoulders with movie stars.
Scott continued to lead his own group, which frequently toured and performed away from the club, so it fell to King to run the business consistently throughout Scott’s absences and to attend to everything from booking artists to arranging work permits, as well as managing the kitchen and waiting staff.
He did this successfully, also running a booking agency for the club’s key artists, until the start of the 1980s when the club was presented with a bill for £40,000 of unpaid VAT.
Charles Forte saved the club, despite the fact that the VAT debt forced it into administration. He had originally sold King and Scott the lease, and in it he had included a clause that prevented it from being reassigned.
As a consequence, if the partners could find new backers to buy the club back from the administrators, the debts would be cleared and it could continue.
Island Records chief Chris Blackwell was one of the first to back the deal, with further help coming from the Performing Rights Society, Charrington’s Brewers and the Musicians’ Union.
King, who is survived by his wife Stella and a son, was awarded an MBE for services to jazz and won a lifetime achievement award in the inaugural BBC Jazz Awards, presented to him by Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones, whose own jazz combo often appeared at Ronnie Scott’s.