More on the New Orleans Club by John Taylor and Peter Gascoigne

The New Orleans Club was run by ex coal minor Jurich Namashinsky. (not sure on the spelling) A little before the club closed Jurich moved away and someone told me that he died a few years ago. I started going to the New Orleans Jazz Club on the recommendation of John Saxelby who was playing at the Portland Hotel with Clem Avery in Ashington in the 60s. For a while we went to the NOJC every Friday to listen to the V.C. After I got married I could no longer afford to do much jazz. A pal of mine liked the Django stuff, but had not been to the club. I said I had seen that Diz Dizley was guesting and we arranged to go along. The club was raided by the police that night and closed down.

The article that follows was copied from Jazz Times (six old pence) - February 1967 and was written by the late Peter Gascoigne ('Gassy'.)

John.

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North East Scene by Peter Gascoigne Most of the jazz to be heard in the North East is to be heard, as one might expect, in the principal town in the area, Newcastle. Most of the activity centres on the New Orleans Club, but I shall leave this club and it’s programme until later. The eight bands in the area provide almost a complete picture of jazz ranging from the New Orleans style of the Vieux Carre Jazzmen through the more Anglicised New Orleans style of the Clem Avery Jazzmen and the Phoenix Jazz men, the Dixieland jazz of the Ronnie McLean All-stars and Sheila Giles’ Band, culminating in the avant-garde of the Joe Young Band, Of the other two bands I haven’t mentioned, the River City Jazzmen are a team of fine musicians who are very much jazz-based, but also include a fair amount of comedy, both spoken and musically, in their programme. They run sessions at two pubs in Newcastle. One at the Bridge Hotel on Mondays, and one at the Corner House Hotel, just in the suburbs, on Wednesdays. The remaining band, Albert’s Hot Six, are a group of young musicians led by a veteran Newcastle trumpeter. Eric Miller, although I don’t suppose he’ll thank me for the use of the word veteran: The word is purely relative to his other musicians, but it gives a fair representation of the set-up in Newcastle. There are very few up and coming young musicians in the area, which is probably where we differ most from London. The people who would most likely have turned to jazz had they been born a few years earlier have in fact succumbed to the money and ‘glamour’ of playing pop. As it is, the nucleus of Newcastle Jazzmen are in their thirties and forties and although they play to audiences who are in their late teens and early twenties, there doesn’t appear to be any new recruits to the ranks. The audiences anyway don’t seem to have any deep knowledge of jazz. There are plenty of people in the North East who do love and understand the music, but not many of them seem to turn up to hear the local bands. The concerts presented by an organization called ‘Jazz North East’ are very well attended by appreciative audiences, but these have been concerts by Ed Hall, Earl Hines and other visiting Americans. Local bands get quite a large crowd, but ninety percent of these are indifferent to what the bands play. Still, as one famous British jazzman is reputed to have said……..”As long as there’s just one person listening – it’s all worth while”.