Talking Jazz

Although he turned out to be fine, the collapse of the septuagenarian singer Jimmy Scott on stage at Ronnie Scott's last week brought home all too clearly the issue of death and the jazzman. A distressing number of the generation of rock heroes from the Sixties go on and on, strutting their emaciated stuff, their grizzled visages scowling as they receive the adulation of fans young enough to be their children - and teenage brides. They, however, are but striplings compared with the elder statesmen of jazz. Sex may have begun, according to Philip Larkin, in 1963, but as the poet knew, the breakthrough for the music form that he loved was the Forties (even if, as a furtive taker of pleasures who kept his adventurous side under wraps, he did not welcome it).

The advent of bebop marks the beginning of the New Testament for jazz, with the gospels of Bird, Diz, Monk and Powell followed by the acts of the apostles - Trane, Ornette Coleman, Shorter, Hancock et al. If we broaden the generational boundaries to include those who came to prominence in the Fifties and simplified the harmonic language of bebop into the more instinctive hard bop, we define what many enthusiasts would think of as the most important era in jazz history. But our prophets are dying. Gone are Miles and Diz, and I can remember the occasions when I was told that Dexter Gordon and Stan Getz had died. The passing of Gordon, whose warm, reassuring tone reached beyond the turntable to offer a friendship of oak-like support, was particularly sad.

How often that trite phrase "We shall not see their like again" is trotted out. But with these musicians, the cliché is true. Every time someone like Scott, or Sonny Rollins, or James Moody comes to town it may be the last chance to see them, however lively they may be on stage. When I saw Ray Brown at Catalina's Bar and Grill in Los Angeles a couple of years ago, the double bassist could not have been more relaxed and in possession of his powers. "Tell them it's for me!" he cried when a mobile phone went off next to the stage. A month later he was dead. My thought at the time - that I had really wanted to catch the much younger Michel Camillo, and having missed his residency was making do with Brown instead - seemed very ignoble in retrospect.

It cannot be long before the survivors are but a tiny band, and where will we be then, orphaned by the disappearance of a generation that all can look up to? With jazz growing ever more divergent, what ties will remain to bind us? We may not realise how much we miss them, those who we allow to come here and face near empty venues, as Jon Hendricks did not so long ago at the Jazz Café. Forget "I'll catch them next time". There may not be a next time.