Meet me at Ronnie’s

I FIRST WENT TO RONNIE SCOTT’S when I was seven or eight years old. My father Benny had played with Scott and his partner Pete King, and had helped them set up the “Old Place” in Gerrard Street. They were old friends, and the older they got, the more likely my father was to purposefully meander through Soho down to Frith Street when he had finished recording a programme at the BBC.

The club’s narrow entrance opened out into a broad cave, not unlike one of those neolithic caverns in the south of France whose walls carry traces of the first human art, only with red lamps on each table instead of wicks and tallow, and the faces of our hearth gods on the wall: Ella, Dizzy, Oscar. My father climbed onto the empty stage and disappeared into the back office. The woman at the table by the door went behind the bar, and I sat at a table in the empty