James Pearson: Artistic director of Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club and musical director The Ronnie Scott’s All Stars…with a pantomime past in York
JAMES Pearson leads The Ronnie Scott’s All Stars on his return to York Theatre Royal tonight.
Artistic director at London’s legendary Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, where his trio are the house band, he has worked with Paul McCartney, Dame Cleo Laine, Maria Ewing, Jeff Beck, Petula Clark, Wynton Marsalis, Dave Stewart, Buddy Greco, Richard Rodney Bennett, Ray Davies, Nigel Kennedy, Robbie Williams, Rufus Wainwright, Gregory Porter, Imelda May and…York pantomime dame Berwick Kaler.
“I’d left the Guildhall School of Music & Drama when Mick Foster, who was the York panto’s saxophone player, from Harrogate, and was at college with me, got me the chance to play keyboards for Mother Goose,” says pianist and composer James.
Subsequently he was the musical director for Aladdin in 1997-1998 and Beauty & The Beast the next winter. “I did enjoy Berwick’s ‘Me babbies, me bairns’ and the Wagon Wheel throwing,” he says. “The atmosphere was a riot! A lot of the music was scored, but you always had to have your wits about you because Berwick would go off-piste.
“The reason a lot of jazz musicians do panto is that you have to improvise. Like if someone walks across in a funny manner, it’s highlighted by the drummer doing a flip-flop sound.
“I particularly enjoyed it as I got to spend ten weeks in York each year. I’m from Hertfordshire but I know York well because my sister, Kate, lives in Sheriff Hutton, and went to the University of York, where she met her husband, Daniel. Now they both teach music there. I must have been coming to York on and off for 30 years.”
James began working at Ronnie Scott’s club in 2006, becoming the artistic director the following year. “I’m largely responsible for its output both in and out of the club,” he says.
Tonight, he is at the piano for The Ronnie Scott’s Story, whose two 45-minute sets by The Ronnie Scott’s All Stars combines live jazz, narration and rare archive photos of Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis and video footage from the 1960s and ’70s. “Putting the series of pictures and footage together really helps it become an accessible show,” says James.
Set among the dive bars and jazz jook joints of London’s Soho, the show recalls the desperate hand-to-mouth finances of the early years and the frequent police raids.
You will hear how Ronnie Scott’s became neutral ground within rife gang territory and their scrapes with gangsters, not least the Krays, who were rumoured to have taken Ronnie and Pete “for a little drive”.
James Pearson, left, performing with The Ronnie Scott’s All Stars
“The Krays tried to take over the club in 1965 when they were looking to get a London venue before they became The Krays as we came to know them. They went to Earl’s Court instead and then tried to get a foothold in the West End. There was always a strange relationship with gangs with their links with the jazz world.”
Life at Ronnie Scott’s is reimagined through tales of the club’s past visitors, from pop stars, film stars and politicians to comedians and royalty, but above all, the musicians.
“The thing about Ronnie Scott’s is, firstly, its history and legacy. Even though no-one has smoked there for years, it still feels smoky.
“Then there’s the intimacy, where the audience are so close to the stage, three feet from Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder…Lady Gaga…Prince.
“When Stevie Wonder came, he was just in the audience and then got on stage to play with the house band. Sting has done that too. That’s one of the great things about jazz: it’s free style.
“After Lady Gaga’s second London show with Tony Bennett had to be cancelled, because she absolutely loves performing, she asked if there was any way she could play here.
“She parked her gold Rolls Royce outside the club, and because you can’t really do a Lady Gaga gig secretly, the press were there waiting for her.”
Tonight’s show is built around music from the jazz greats who have performed at Ronnie Scott’s over its 60 years and more, complemented by stories of old Soho and miscreant musicians.
Look out, in particular, for Natalie Williams performing the songs of Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald and saxophone player Alex Garnett, who likes to tell old Ronnie Scott jokes as the boss was famous for his humour.
James is delighted to be performing in York once more. “We loved doing the Ronnie Scott’s shows in the Parliament Street spiegeltent at the Great Yorkshire Fringe,” he says. “It was such a lovely festival and it’s sad it’s gone.”
The Ronnie Scott’s Story, York Theatre Royal, tonight at 7.30pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.
The poster for The Ronnie Scott’s All Stars, featuring vocalist Natalie Williams and saxophonist Alex Garnett
TWO Big Egos In A Small Car arts podcasters Graham Chalmers and Charles Hutchinson compare notes on their separate interviewing experiences with Marti Pellow, smarty fellow of pop, ahead of his York Barbican greatest hits show on May 3.
Prompted by his Wet Wet Wet exit, Chalmers & Hutch then discuss famous bands’ substitute singers, from Genesis to AC/DC, Black Sabbath to Buzzcocks.
Plus why Kenneth Branagh’s second Agatha Christie revamp, Death On The Nile, bristles with much more than Poirot’s monumental moustache; Harry Sword’s deep dive of a book on drone music, Monolithic Undertow – In search Of Sonic Oblivion… and a Sting in the tail end.
The oh-so Wes Anderson film poster for The French Dispatch
CLASHING arts podcasters Chalmers & Hutch tuck into Wes Anderson’s multi-layered if synthetic cake, The French Dispatch, in Episode 62 of Two Big Egos In A Small Car.
Under discussion too are Joana Vasconcelos’s must-see exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park; Steve Harley’s waspish verdict on Sting’s new single, and Created In York crafts making way for Menkind’s toys-for-grown-up-boys shop in Coney Street, York, but why has that happened?
The Young’uns Michael Hughes, David Eagle and Sean Cooney performing The Ballad Of Johnny Longstaff. Picture: Pamela Raith
MAY 2015. Teesside folk trio The Young’uns have just concluded a gig in Somerset when up comes Duncan Longstaff with two pieces of paper.
On one is a black-and-white picture of a man. “This is my dad,” he says. On the other is a list of achievements that reads like a litany of defining moments of early 20th century working-class struggle. “This is what he did,” he explains.
Duncan hoped the Stockton-on-Tees vocal, accordion, guitar and keyboard group might write a song about his father. One song? They duly wrote 17, whereupon a show about Johnny Longstaff was born.
From tonight to Saturday, The Young’uns – Sean Cooney, David Eagle and Michael Hughes – perform a theatrical version of The Ballad Of Johnny Longstaff at York Theatre Royal, the show now featuring songs from the original album alongside new material and animation.
Young’un Sean Cooney recalls the May 2015 night that spawned their musical celebration of northern working-class activism. “It was really special. Duncan Longstaff, who was in his late-60s/early 70s, had heard us on the radio and knew we were from the north-east, from Stockton-on-Tees, Johnny’s hometown.
“He had this lovely photograph of his dad, this scruffy-looking lad, and as he was aware we wrote songs about real people, with a north-east flavour, he thought we might get one song out of it.
“But it turned out there were six hours of recordings of Johnny at the Imperial War Museum, and once we’d made time to listen to them properly, we realised we had something really special that could never be just one song.”
The resulting show, the true story of The Ballad Of Johnny Longstaff, is billed as a “timely, touching and often hilarious musical adventure, following the footsteps of a working-class hero who chose not to look the other way when the world needed his help”.
The Young’uns singing an a cappella number in The Ballad Of Johnny Longstaff. Picture: Pamela Raith
Johnny’s journey took him at 15 from poverty and unemployment in Stockton, through the Hunger Marches of the 1930s, the mass trespass movement and the Battle of Cable Street, to fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War.
That journey is recorded not only on tape but also in writing. “Duncan kept bombarding us with stuff: Johnny had written his memoirs, but they’d never been published, and suddenly there were these 600 pages, left at my front door,” recalls Sean.
“Then he lent us Johnny’s books, with corrections that he’d written down the side when he didn’t agree with the accounts of what had gone on.
“With all these resources, we thought we’d love to use Johnny’s voice from the recordings and tell his story through song.”
The Young’uns drew inspiration from the ground-breaking BBC Radio Ballads documentaries produced by folk musician Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker in the late 1950s for the BBC Home Service. “They pretty much put working-class voices on the radio, with Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl writing songs to go with those voices,” says Sean.
“For our show, the songs and story are very much interwoven with Johnny’s voice. You’ll hear Johnny talking and then we’ll break into song, and there’s a special sequence at the finale, with our voices, Johnny’s voice, a little bit of narration…and then Johnny singing.
“At the end of those six hours of recordings at the Imperial War Museum, you hear him breaking into song. He’s singing The Valley Of Jarama [also known as El Valle del Jarama], and for those people who know about the Spanish Civil War, that was the song that was always being sung.”
The Young’uns first envisaged The Ballad Of Johnny Longstaff as a radio series, “but then came the touring opportunity to put together something new for the road, with a promoter arranging dates for us for March 2018,” recalls Sean.
“We thought, ‘yes, let’s take it on the road’, but as we sat in the pub at Sheffield railway station [Sean lives in Sheffield] in May 2017, I was thinking, ‘we’ve only done three months’ work on it so far, we’ve only got ten months to go’, and we still didn’t know if we’d just do the songs, with us introducing them, or whether we’d use Johnny’s voice.
The Young’uns incorporate Scott Turnbull’s animation in their theatrical performances of The Ballad Of Johnny Longstaff. Picture: Pamela Raith
“That’s when we came up with the idea of doing the show as ‘gig theatre’ with a backdrop image of Johnny behind us. It felt exciting and trepidatious at the same time, but the reaction we got was so great that what was originally going to be a side project, diverging from our main work, became much more than that.”
The album recording ensued and then came a show in Toronto where “we became really pally with the team there, and they said, ‘Have you heard of Lorne Campbell at Northern Stage’, as they’d worked with Lorne on Sting’s shipbuilding musical, The Last Ship, so they had a connection with him,” says Sean.
The Young’uns met up with artistic director Campbell in September 2019. “We knew we had a show that was so personal and special to us, and we wondered, ‘what would they want to do with Johnny, with us?’, but Lorne was great, saying he just wanted to heighten it, to bring it to bigger audiences,” says Sean.
“The key, he said, was to ‘make you as comfortable as you can be, and no, you won’t have to act’. Because the backbone of the show is Johnny’s voice and the songs, we’d never thought about the visuals, but Loren brought in an animator, Scott Turnbull, from Teesside, and now these beautiful images are built into the songs and there’s a lot of movement in the show too.”
From tonight, Johnny’s voice and Sean’s songs will unite and resonate anew. “We never strive to make links with today, but it’s clearly obvious,” says Sean. “He was fighting for the future in the 1930s, and the biggest parallel now is the fight to deal with climate change.”
Like The Young’uns, Johnny was a young’un when he started out on his adventures. “He was 15 when he walked from Stockton to London; 17 when he crossed the Pyrenees, but though they’re now seen as huge politically charged events, when Johnny lived through them, he didn’t grab that significance,” says Sean.
“He went on the Hunger March to look for work, and when he was told he was too young at 15, he followed them in secret until he was discovered, and they then said he could join.
“He went on the Cable Street march because he’d met a Jewish refugee. He didn’t understand Fascism’s doctrines; he just wanted to make human connections.”
At 17, The Young’uns made their under-age way into singing in the back of The Sun Inn pub in Stockton for the first time. “We stood up and sang unaccompanied, and it just felt natural,” Sean says. “As we were 40 years younger than anyone else there, we got called ‘The Young’uns’, and unfortunately the name stuck, but we realised we had a voice and it connected with people.
The Young’uns with an image of Johnny Longstaff behind them. Picture: Pamela Raith
“It felt welcoming, it felt ordinary, because as a kid I couldn’t access music at school, where it felt like it was for someone else, for other people, as I couldn’t play an instrument.
“But once we discovered that world of folk music, where everyone is encouraged – big voice, little voice, in tune, out of tune – this group of people who met in the back room of a pub, sharing songs and stories – wondered why we had never been taught this at school.
“Learning sea shanties that everyone could sing, we found the audience singing along with us, and from that moment, we wanted to keep doing it.”
Twenty-one years down the line, with three BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards to their name, The Young’uns are not so young’uns at 36, but their return to the stage after the pandemic lockdowns has had the same exhilarating impact on them. “For so many people in our world, it’s been incredibly emotional to get back out there,” says Sean.
Even more so, when spreading The Ballad Of Johnny Longstaff. “In many ways there’s potential for people, when they see a show poster or hear a story of Johnny, to pigeonhole it in our divided land, but we want to stress the humanity in that story and in what other people did in the 1930s.
“Johnny became a member of the Labour Party, but in the Spanish Civil War, people came from different backgrounds to fight Fascism, from public schools too.
“When people hear Johnny’s voice, there’s great respect for that voice and what he’s saying. It’s a different kind of story, that’s not well known, but…”
…thanks to Duncan Longstaff’s two pieces of paper, The Ballad Of Johnny Longstaff is now being sung loud and proud.
The Young’uns in The Ballad Of Johnny Longstaff, York Theatre Royal, tonight to Saturday, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm, Saturday. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.Further Yorkshire concerts by The Young’uns: Square Chapel Arts Centre, Halifax, December 11, 7.30pm; The Greystones, Sheffield, December 12, 3pm and 8pm; The Coliseum Centre, Whitby, December 17, 7.30pm. Box office: Halifax, squarechapel.co.uk; Sheffield, ents24.com/sheffield-events; Whitby, eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-younguns.
