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Steve's Interview with Chris Parker for Boz Magazine
Like the Vortex in north London, Chelsea’s 606 Club is a “jazz lifeblood” venue: more than just providing a display case for established musicians, it actively and enthusiastically nourishes the local jazz scene. Proprietor Steve Ruby, who has guided the club from modest beginnings in the King’s Road (“a tiny room holding thirty people at six tables round an open fire”) to its present premises at 90 Lots Road, Chelsea - capacity 165 - defines the 606’s role in two ways, one musician-oriented, the other concerning listeners.
Characteristically - Ruby is a passionate proselytiser for all forms of UK jazz, believing that “the standard of musicianship in London is as high as anywhere in the world outside New York” - he begins with the former. “Our aim at the 606 is to provide a solid platform for British-based musicians, so there’ll always be somewhere for them to perform, try stuff out, do a gig every two or three months. They can also hang out, sit in, mix with other musicians.” With this in mind, Ruby operates what must be an exhausting booking policy: “I always book at least one new band every month - this month it’s four - to prevent the club getting cliquey. I’m always looking out for fresh jazz talent; I listen to every tape I’m sent, although the sheer numbers mean it can take a while. I book forty bands a month and I still can’t keep up.” To encourage younger musicians, the club also hosts the Perrier Young Musician of the Year semi-finals - “now there’s a company that puts its money where its mouth is” is Ruby’s comment - and gives over the late set on one Monday a month to musicians from the Royal Academy of Music.
As far as listeners are concerned, Ruby is committed to “provide a punter-friendly venue, where people aren’t frightened by the word ‘jazz’. It’s a fine line: step too far one way and people think it’s too exclusive, that they don’t know enough to be comfortable here; go too far the other way and you just get the place full of people in suits talking so loud no one can hear the music.” To accomplish this balancing act, he not only operates an eclectic booking policy - “I try to give every sort of jazz a crack of the whip: latin, R&B, soul, straightahead” - but also attempts to showcase the music in a relaxed and unpretentious manner: “Jazz is very accessible if it’s presented properly and unfussily; lots of people tell me they don’t like jazz, but love the club!”
Such commitment to the music and its practitioners would, in a perfect world, be frequently trumpeted in the music media; unfortunately, as Ruby is the first to point out, we live in a world far from perfect: “The way the media in general treat jazz in this country is simply awful, characterised by ignorance and disdain. Only two jazz journalists have ever interviewed me, for instance; many quite prominent reviewers have never even set foot in the place, and probably couldn’t name a single UK-based pianist under twenty-five. It’s really upsetting and frustrating and makes life very difficult.” About his brief exposure on BBC TV via the series of gigs filmed at the club in the late 1990s, Ruby is equally disappointed: “We made mistakes, OK, but we learned from them and our proposal for a second series was very different - Claire Martin was to have been the presenter and all the funny stuff was to be cut - but we weren’t given a chance, though the viewing figures weren’t disastrous.” TV’s attitude to jazz, Ruby feels, can be summed up by a remark made by a technician on a forthcoming jazz-centred drama filmed at the club; asked why he’d employed a smoke-machine to fill the 606 with fumes before shooting, he replied: “It’s supposed to be a jazz club, isn’t it?”
This downright ignorance and prejudice concerning jazz is, Ruby feels, shared - not to say instigated - by the Great and the Good who sit on arts funding bodies and the like. “They’re all managed by middle- and upper-middle-class types who think only of subsidising rich people’s art: opera. The result is that, whereas the Opera House alone can be given £52 million of public money, jazz receives £750,000 annually for the whole country. It’s simply class-based ignorance. We’ve got great, world-class, jazz players in this country and there’s no official recognition of them at all.”
Ruby’s struggle, however, continues unabated. He’s just had air-conditioning installed, continues to keep his head above water financially - “with the help of friends of members and Andy Knight at the Musicians’ Union” - and is determined to soldier on, “always changing things with a view to improving, providing excellence in ambience, food and, above all, music”. |
