BRIAN PETE RONNIE

With the death of the final member of the partnership, Pete King, RON SIMPSON tells the story of BPR, the agency that grew out of Ronnie Scott’s Club.

When Pete King, co-founder of Ronnie Scott’s Club, died in December 2009, aged 80, the obituaries paid tribute to him as tireless administrator and enforcer, the eminence grise behind Ronnie who was the public face (as well as the name) of the club. It seemed ironically appropriate when the story circulated that one of the broadsheet obituaries was accompanied by a photograph of the wrong Peter King – well, both saxophonists, I suppose! However, there was a third member of the business triumvirate who was even further behind the scenes, Brian Theobald, whose partner Ina Dittke still runs BPR as a highly successful international business today.

How Pete and Ronnie got together to found the club in 1959 has been well recorded. In his preface to the 2004 edition of Ronnie Scott’s Some of My Best Friends are Blues (Northway Publications), Pete told the story of how he was sacked from the Jack Parnell Band because Jack wanted to hire a girl singer who insisted that her tenor sax playing husband came along as part of the deal. ‘To this day,’ wrote Pete, ‘I feel a tremendous glow of warmth remembering that five musicians, including Ronnie Scott, immediately resigned at what they thought was an unfair dismissal.’ As a result Ronnie Scott formed his co-operative nine-piece band, Pete was reckoned the most sensible of the nine and therefore took over as business manager, and, when he and Ronnie set up the club in Gerrard Street, Pete virtually gave up playing.

But where did Brian Theobald, a decade or so Pete and Ronnie’s junior, spring from? Pianist Brian Dee remembers him working as a waiter at the Downbeat club, with a day job as an accountant at a hairdresser’s, and being ‘a real character, an extrovert London lad’. Brian Theobald’s son, Grant, modifies that respectable-sounding day job (‘he wasn’t a qualified accountant, he just did accounts’) and chalks up mini-cab driver and cloakroom attendant at Ronnie’s among his other occupations. Mick Eve, who later worked with him at BPR, remembers Brian as ‘a cheeky waiter at the Downbeat – you had to buy a stale sandwich, curled up at the edges, before he’d serve you a drink after 11.’

Meanwhile, upstairs at Frith Street (where Ronnie Scott’s had now moved) there was an agency known as Ronnie Scott Directions, then Ronnie Scott Promotions, with Jack Higgins booking acts into the club, booking out Ronnie Scott’s band and arranging gigs for a few other acts such as George Melly. Some time after Brian moved upstairs from the cloakroom in the late 1960s or early 70s (my informants were seldom precise on dates!) the name was changed to the initials of the three partners: according to Mick, the agency was getting hit for any unpaid bills involving the club, so the three decided on a rapid name-change, so rapid that Mick, returning from a weekend in Scandinavia, found himself unexpectedly working for BPR.

As the club and the agency forged different identities, with BPR moving out to Hornchurch in the 1980s, apparently in response to another attempt at raising the rent by Paul Raymond, a blueprint for their working together evolved. As described by Grant, ‘BPR would bring in some jazz great, say Zoot Sims or Stan Getz, he would play one week or more likely two at the club, probably do a concert at somewhere like the Festival Hall, then Brian would tour him round Europe in clubs and at festivals. Sometimes the tour would be booked out by someone like Norman Granz and Wim Wigt, then BPR would just slot in UK dates.’

BPR was thus a key part in the functioning of Ronnie Scott’s in the great days: one of Mick’s first memories of working there is of fixing flights and visas. For all that the two were separate and BPR was not there just to serve the interests of Ronnie and the club. For instance, according to Mick, ‘there was no pressure to prioritise the Ronnie Scott Quintet. It was expected that we’d slot in a few dates for them every month, but not as a priority.’ When Grant fondly recalls the 1980s, his nostalgia also centres on BPR’s work for the Capital Radio Jazz Festival, but he reckons those were the days of the last of the giants:

‘The great players were dying off and the new generation of stars, like Wynton Marsalis and Arturo Sandoval, are wonderful musicians, but they’re not the same – and they don’t play ordinary club dates any more! I decided to get out after four years with BPR, but my father stayed on board – jazz was his life.’

It’s easy to understand Grant’s feelings, but I’m not sure the evidence supports his view of a sudden passing of the giants. After all, to take the tenor saxists who were (coincidentally, no doubt) such frequent visitors to Ronnie’s, Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins had gone before Grant’s time; admittedly such greats as Zoot Sims, Lockjaw Davis, Dexter Gordon and Stan Getz died between 1985 and 1991, but, of musicians booked at Ronnie’s in the 1970s, Sonny Rollins, Illinois Jacquet, Johnny Griffin and Houston Person were among those to survive that era.

And Ina who joined BPR as late as 1987 certainly recalls giants in the land:

‘Before I joined BPR was responsible for pretty much any major jazz artist in the UK, from Oscar Peterson to the Count Basie Band, Joe Pass, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Ella – just name them. One of Brian’s main artists was, of course, Buddy Rich with whom he not only started a great friendship, but represented him exclusively in Europe for many years. Then for me, the Dizzy Gillespie United Nation Orchestra was the most special in my early career and then, of course, my and our relationship with James Moody who is just not from this planet and now, at 84 years young, plays better than ever.’

How did Brian, Pete and Ronnie, all three strong characters, work together? Grant, asked if it was all sweetness and light, responded instantly with ‘Never!’. Ina put it neatly and precisely: ‘The relationship between Pete, Ronnie and Brian was very tight, but also, at times, stretched’. Grant elaborates:

‘They were all very different characters. That’s why it worked – BPR was founded on mutual respect. Ronnie was a practising musician, working all the time, on the road all the time. Pete was the administrator, manager, leader and businessman who ruled the club with a reasonably iron fist. The agency was Brian. He loved listening to Ronnie’s music right up to the end. Ronnie and Pete were involved in the agency, but by the time I worked there in the 1980s they were more investors and shareholders – it wasn’t quite as simple as that, of course, because jazz is a small world and Pete had input into who the agency booked and so on.

‘I thought the headline that summed Pete up best was in one of the national papers: ‘KING OF FRITH STREET’. He certainly was in his own mind, but in reality, too, he was able to walk down that street as if he owned it. Pete was always Pete, unashamedly Pete, and he lived life very much on his own terms. He was a strong character and, naturally, like all strong characters, he was disliked by some people.’

Mick remembers Pete as ‘a lovely chap’ for two main reasons. One was his straightforward honesty (‘You always knew where you stood with him’) and the other relates to his generosity towards Mick’s band Gonzales:

‘I was running this band Gonzales which was something like a 12-piece and that’s how I got involved with the agency. They reckoned that, if I could cope with a 12-piece band, I could help with the agency, so I was summoned upstairs. The band had very little to do with jazz except for some collective improvisation – it was loud Latin dance music, the sort of thing that Irakere did better later on – but Pete would book us in and sometimes he would give us the second and fourth sets when you had a quieter group like the Bill Evans Trio. So Gonzales got to play the final set and Bill got to bed earlier.’

Of course Pete’s input was not just administrative, as Ina Dittke reminded me:

‘He was in charge of the club, but he also developed a love for Cuban music and became an emissary for groups like Irakere, Los Van Van and especially Arturo Sandoval.’

Interestingly, given Pete’s ground-breaking promotion of Cuban music and the succession of American greats brought into the club, Grant joins Mick in applauding Pete and Ronnie’s support for British jazz.

Of course not only the partners had their little quirks; Ronnie Scott’s has played host to some of the more eccentric – and occasionally dangerous! – musical geniuses around. Ina, however, thinking through her own recollections and Brian’s stories, comes up with only a couple of rather sweet tales:

‘Joe Pass was one of Brian’s favourites, also Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy, then there was Rahsaan Roland Kirk who amazed him the most with his multi-instruments AND a tape recorder in his pocket playing a Charlie Parker solo. Once Pharoah Sanders left Ronnie gaping when he asked him how he continued with a note while already taking his lips from the mouthpiece and received the answer, “Don’t worry yourself about that.”’

There is no longer the close affinity between Ronnie Scott’s Club and BPR, though, as Ina says, ‘we still have a friendly relationship with the club and some of the bands that BPR tours appear at Ronnie Scott’s.’ Of course, neither BPR not Ronnie Scott’s is the same, 2006 being a key year for both of them. In that year Brian Theobald died and the refurbished Ronnie Scott’s reopened under new ownership. In the event BPR has changed less than the club, though it could have been very different, as Ina Dittke explains:

‘When Brian passed away in August 2006, at first I wanted to change the name of the agency, but I got so much positive support from everybody, promoters and artists alike, that I decided to keep the blue oval logo that was so well known throughout the world. Then, when Pollstar wrote a lovely article about Brian, finishing with me continuing the big band tradition and top-class jazz bookings, I decided to keep the name. After all I’d been with the company for almost 20 years by then and felt I couldn’t stop something that was so much Brian’s life.’

Now BPR, with offices in Miami as well as in the UK, still represents James Moody, the Dizzy Gillespie All Stars, the Charles Tolliver Big Band, Pee Wee Ellis with his various groups, Georgie Fame and many others. The great South African singer, Miriam Makeba, was also represented by BPR until, sadly, she died after a concert in November 2008.

And what of Ronnie Scott’s? The club has successfully carved out a new identity for the 21^st century, but Mick finds a different atmosphere these days. He has happy memories of the place, but has only been a couple of times under the new regime. The music’s good, of course, despite the absence of the giants of yesteryear, the food’s much better, the introductions are less insulting, but the old informality has gone. There is no modern equivalent of the infant Grant left in the cloakroom while his father books a band on a flight from Cuba or Mick sleeping over in the office because it’s not worthwhile bothering to go home – and somehow you can’t imagine the current management playing the sort of trick on their clientele that Mick remembers from Pete and Ronnie, such as insisting that cash was no longer acceptable at the club and nobody could be admitted without a credit card. Not that it would spread much alarm in today’s plastic society!

Published courtesy of Jazz Rag (www.bigbearmusic.com)