Jeff Merrifield

So Jeff, are you a musician yourself?

 

Um, freeform musician yes, I never learned how to read music but I can blast away with the best of them. So up here we formed the Shetland Improvisers orchestra just so that I can have a blow!

 

And what is that playing?

 

I play trumpet, and sax actually. I've just got a tenor and I'm learning how to play tenor sax without knowing a thing about what the fingering does.

 

Well ok, that's true improvisation! OK so you started the legendary Hermit Club, now…

 

The legendary Hermit Club was long before I went there, but what we started there there was a project called ‘Monkeys’ which was primarily a Jazz club.

 

But the venue’s called Hermit though isn't it?

 

The venue is called Hermit, but the project was called Monkeys and that happened on a Sunday night.

 

Had you done much promotion before at the Hermit?

 

No, sort of Monkeys was my introduction to the Hermit. It was a project that I started and then I went to work there afterwards you see.

 

Oh, ok, so when did you start Monkeys?

 

Probably. I think it was about ’83, something like that, but…

 

What made you think about starting Monkeys?

 

Well John Maynard was the guy who was in charge of the Hermit at the time and we were both interested in Jazz and we both had some Jazz things and we thought how best we could introduce Jazz in to the Hermit and we sat around one night and drank 5 bottles of wine and at the end of it we had the Monkey manifesto!

 

I'm surprised you didn’t end up having a punch up after 5 bottles of wine!

 

The Monkey manifesto said we'll present the best in Jazz, not just any old Jazz, we'll go for the top stuff. So we opened it with Ronnie Scott, being that he ran the best Jazz club in the country. Well he could come and play at our one then! And it sort of went on from there, we sort of dreamed about people that we might have and slowly but surely we booked them. John Etheridge became a sort of an icon. We used to use a silhouette of his image on all the publicity, you know, because he played there that much. He played with all sorts of outfits did Etheridge.

 

Was the Jazz policy kind of Modern Contemporary Jazz? You didn’t go into the New Orleans Trad area?

 

No, I mean sometimes, but I mean my own passion for Jazz began with sort of George Lewis when I was 9. When I was 9 you had to be George Lewis to play Jazz, if you were anybody else you couldn't play it you know? Louis Armstrong had sold out long ago. So I was very much a New Orleans purist when I started out but it was interesting for me because I grew up through Jazz, like when I was about 10 Be-Bop was rife and I got very interested in Charlie Parker obviously and all those guys, and then Miles came along with Coltrane and that was just phenomenal. Sadly I saw Miles, I saw Miles at the Free Trade Hall in about 1960 but John Coltrane had just left a fortnight before. The band came without him, so that was a sadness for me because I never got to see Coltrane, but then beyond that you know it was Ornette Coleman and beyond that it was Albert Ayler for me, I was a big fan of Albert Ayler.

 

Blimey, so you were really going for the heavyweight kind of 'free' stuff?

 

Yeah. And so I have a broad spectrum of interest and I think the Hermit reflected that, although we didn’t have a lot of Trad, but we didn't not have it.

 

Did you find much competition in the area for Jazz?

 

No, completely opposite, in fact we started with a bit of a splash you know, we put a very big programme together that ranged from Fay Weldon doing the Puffball Suite which was based on her novel 'Puffball', a music played by her son, Nick Weldon. And it ranged from that right through, we had a wonderful big band called Happy End who played wonderful music and all sorts of stuff like that, I think John Etheridge was on the early programme. And we had enough leaflets printed to go in every copy of the Brentwood Gazette and so we started with a bit of a splash like that and we had a reasonable audience from the start and it built over the years. I mean there were times when people just turned up on a Sunday night and they said “What’s on tonight?” and that's a wonderful position to be in.

 

Was it every week Monkeys?

 

Yes, every Sunday. The other interesting thing that happened was that there was a woman lived just down the road in Hornchurch, and she was called Enid Ditkey and she used to book into the Ronnie Scott club and they didn't operate on a Sunday night then, it had just moved into the new Scott club on Frith Street and they didn’t operate on a Sunday, so I used to get things from her, you know, that were in the Scott club the rest of the week. I mean we had people like Red Rodney, and he turned up with Chris Potter who was a young lad at the time but is now one of the best saxophone players in the world. And we had all sorts of people like that, Tal Farlow and Teddy Edwards, you know, real good old time Jazzers.

 

Dear oh dear, that’s amazing isn’t it, that's amazing.

 

So you know if you look at the list of people who’ve played at Monkeys it's phenomenal you know? And for that reason it was long remembered.

 

That’s right. How many years did it run for then?

 

Probably about a decade. And then we hit the first of the recessions and it was bizarre because I mean we were so confident that we used to book up a whole year’s programme and we had a whole year booked up and the audiences stopped coming, just like that. And you know that was a really bad year, for us and for the Hermit and everything. John said “Well it just doesn't carry it any more” and we had to pack it in.

 

The problem is that these artists are not going to come cheap.

 

That's right, yeah.

 

So, can people afford £12 - £14 every Sunday night? Most people can't.

 

Yeah well there is a time when they could, well actually we never used to charge that sort of money then, it was sort of around about £8-£10 you know. The only time I charged £15 was…John Schofield came over with Joe Lovano and I noticed on the advertising that they weren’t doing a gig on the Saturday, they were somewhere on the Friday, there was a Royal Festival Hall on the Sunday and no Saturday gig so I rang John Cummin up at Serious Music and I said “Why are you not doing a Saturday gig?” and he said “Well Joe Lovarno has a gig in Geneva, so he's gone off there”. So I said “Does the trio want a gig?” he said “I don’t know. I’ll ask them” and he asked them and John Schofield came with his drummer and bass player and we charged £15 for that one and it's the only Jazz gig I've made a profit on! We paid him £900, which was a fortune for us then, and we took £1,500 on the door.

 

Because the thing is I've been to the Hermit and that’s a….I mean what's the capacity? It’s a tiny capacity there isn't it?

 

Yeah, it was 100 really, but at a push you could squeeze in another 20, but that was it. I think we once got 150 in for Roy Harper but that was building a stage that was about 2ft square that sat on and everybody rammed around him, you know.

 

Yes that’s right because when you consider the size of the venue and when you think of the artists that you’ve had in such a small venue that’s incredible.

 

But Schofield said he loved it. He said blow these big old concert halls, he said he loves venues like this.

 

I think all musicians feel the same, I mean that's why you get artists like The Rolling Stones or Prince or these kind of people, once in a while they’ll do a secret gig in a small club won’t they, like the 100 Club because they want that feeling, because you never forget that small gig feeling, and that's the real McCoy.

 

Yeah, and I’ll tell you who was very sweet on us as well was Bill Bruford with his Earth Band, and he'd ring us up and say “Look, I have a gig at Festival Hall tomorrow night, can I do a warm up at your place?” and he did it for free and we got to keep the door, you know, so it was for guys like that that helped keep us going you know?

 

That’s incredible isn't it?

 

Yeah, and he did that, you know not just once, but two or three times.

 

Yes that's good because it helps, it keeps the guys from sitting around twiddling their thumbs in the hotel room and also it kind of helps break new material in and there's all kind of reasons.

 

Absolutely, yes, and it gives some of those guys the small room experience as well which some of them never get because they only play stadiums and things.

 

I know, which is soulless really. I mean I've been fortunate enough to play a lot of those kind of places and you never really get much atmosphere really coming back from the audience because they’re so far away.

 

No it was brilliant, the atmosphere in the Hermit.

 

What other highlights have you had there out of the hundreds?

 

Oh yes, hundreds of them, yeah, Red Rodney was a big highlight. He came three times and the last time he came he told us about a film, he said “I've just been involved in a film with Clint Eastwood and it's all about Bird” and we were like “Wow, Cling Eastwood made a film about Bird!” And he said “Yeah, and the freaky thing was that what they'd done was they'd extracted Parker’s alto out of the mono mixer somehow and we went into the studio and Parker was in our cans as if he was in the next booth”. He said “I was playing stuff that I'd played with him 40 years before you know?” So that was freaky, and like I say he brought this young Chris Potter with him and it was a sensational gig. The Teddy Edwards gig was superb. I loved him because he was one of the sort of laid-back Be-Boppers you know, Tad Dameron and all those sort of people.

 

That's right. Did you ever use many local people at all because these are all quite huge artists aren’t they?

 

Yes, from time to time we did yes. We’d put local people on as support you know and we formed a little band ourselves out of local people. Young Martin Hathaway (who runs Essex Youth Jazz Orchestra) was around then. He was still a young lad and on his way then. And he used to play with us in a little band we had called M&M - Maynard and Merrifield. We did a few things: Lol Coxhill came and did a guest appearance with us and it was fun having people like that in, I mean the people that came to Monkeys sort of used to say “We don’t always agree with what you've got on, you know, we don’t absolutely love everything but it's always interesting”. And we had a few bands that Lol played in like The Rescedants and he used to play with Bob Cobbing the sound poet and Ewan Metcalf this mad guitarist who’d worn away the fret hole on a guitar he'd worn away the hole underneath so it was like a letter ‘q’ and he'd worn the wood away with his fingers. Incredible stuff. He used to fit into a gas mask and…you know they, I mean it was a very varied programme, we’d put a lot of very avant-garde stuff on alongside some more mainstream stuff and then some top quality American stuff. I tell you another big highlight as well, this wasn’t exactly at the Hermit but it was a Monkeys gig and we contributed this gig to the Clacton Jazz Festival, that Joan Morrell was putting together, and Digby Fairweather, and this was our contribution and we booked one of the very last gigs that Billy Eckstein did, and that was fantastic. What a guy! And I had the honour of driving them from London. They were staying at the Savoy, again it was something we got through Scotts and they were staying at the Savoy, so I drove them up from there, him and his pianist to Clacton and man the stories they told on the way. It was just wonderful. And then he went back to America and died! So there you go!

 

So one of his last gigs.

 

One of his last gigs yeah.

 

You really achieved a lot in those 10 years, which is a relatively short length of time I guess really.

 

Yeah it was. They were wonderful years and it’s funny because I went to a forum up here run by the Scottish Jazz Federation and this guy was sitting next to me and he said “Jeff Merrifield?” and I said “Yes?”, he said “You used to run Monkeys Jazz Club!”. And it was a guy called Rob Adams who’s a journalist and he used to work down our neck of the woods down there and had moved to Scotland.

 

So you think it was the recession then that really killed it off then?

 

Oh yes, for sure, audiences just went down like that. And consistently so in that year. I mean stuff that we would have been packed for, we were getting hardly any audience.

 

Because afterwards obviously at the Hermit Spike Robinson did something there didn’t he?

 

That’s right, that’s when…it was Sue May actually who, when we stopped doing Monkeys, she approached John and said “Well look, we're being thrown out of these premises in Basildon (or somewhere near Basildon) and could we run our project there?” and John said yeah. But that was a very different kettle of fish wasn’t it.

 

Yes it was more Mainstream.

 

It was more Mainstream and Trad stuff. But you know it kept a bit of Jazz there.

 

She's still doing about 5 different Spike’s places a week at the moment which is all over Essex and Kent now. She's gone into Kent with it. She’s certainly kept her husband’s name alive for sure. What was the time difference between you finishing there with Monkeys and then them coming in there with Spike’s Place?

 

It was a very different audience for a start, because our audience had drifted away and got used to not coming, and weren’t very into Mainstream Jazz anyway, but she sort of brought an audience with her who’d been with her in Basildon. I mean, a few of the Brentwood people used to go but it was mostly an out of town audience, whereas it was the other way round for us.

 

Because there was a bit of a thing going on down the road in Margaretting as well wasn't there at the Red Lion that was quite an established…

 

Oh yeah there was stuff all over and there was a time when we did a lot of Blues as well, when Denny Newman was…we made Denny the music manager at one point and he brought a lot of Blues in. I mean people like Manfred Mann played there, because he used to play in Manfred Mann’s Earth Band did Denny. And so they played a couple of times and Denny started a Blues festival as well, in Brentwood Theatre and when Denny left I sort of continued that for a bit and used to get Jazzers to come and play Blues, you know. I put Derek Nash together with some Blues players and he did a Blues set and it was really good. And then I introduced people like the Blockheads you know, into the Blues festival as well and they did a couple of gigs.

 

You can understand why they would be accepted in that can't you?

 

And they were very popular whenever they played. They were astoundingly popular.

 

Well my sax player, Gary Plumley, he said to me once that 50% of Charlie Parker’s repertoire was Blues, which was quite…

 

Absolutely. The other guy that I got to know quite well through Monkeys and through the Blockheads was Gilad Atzmon.

 

Brilliant saxophonist!

 

I've used him a lot up here, he’s become a mate has Gilad, you know. His mind is incredible.

 

So when Monkeys stopped did you carry on doing any other kind of promotion elsewhere?

 

No. Well I did other things you know. I got moved out to Loughton because they didn’t know what to do with me when Eric Otwood left.

 

Did they own another venue out there in Loughton?

 

Yeah, it was just a Youth Centre based in a college, based in Loughton College, but one of the first things I did there was ran a Philip K Dick weekend and we had people from all over the world coming to it and it had a whole page review in the Independent. So you know they sent me out to run a youth project!

 

So was that what you were originally then, you know, involved in youth projects?

 

Yeah, yeah. My role originally. We had this wonderful man in Essex called Eric Otwood and he was the sort of guy who if you had an idea he'd let you run with it, and so I ran the Arts programme for the county, the Youth Arts programme for a number of years. I mean I was in Thurrock for a while and then I worked at a place called Brooklands near Chelmsford in a residential centre and we used to do lots of arts stuff there, and we used to do music there as well. We used to do music workshops like Rock School sort of things but with a Jazz flavour. I remember David Croft did one for us from King Crimson and that was a really good week, a week of people learning instruments and having a bash.

 

And here you are running things in the Shetland Islands which is incredible!

 

Well I came to Shetland to write and get away from all that sort of stuff but there you go. The Jazz club here was on its knees and we managed to get it back up and running again.

 

That’s amazing because it's not like you can have people travelling a distance to come, like regularly to the islands, so you’re basically preaching to the same flock each time.

 

But it's like anything else, if you bring them interesting things they’ll respond. They love interesting music up here, of all sorts and all manner. And there's some good musicians as well on the island. A guy called Brian Nicholson who’s a really good guitarist.

 

I bet there's some incredible Folk players on the island as well, with all the traditional songs and stuff.

 

Yeah. I mean the Folk Festival is in its 33rd year now.