Once again, sorry to take up a lot of space but I thought you guys would enjoy reading an interview with a cantankerous old member of the British jazz community. A great musician and a fine storyteller. The interview is in today's UK Guardian in a weekly column ostensibly about record collections. Its just a quick grab of the text so apologies for any errors. Richard Gardner ______________________________________ Home Entertainment Stan Tracey Interview Will Hodgkinson In 1960, Sonny Rollins played with Stan Tracey in London. The US tenor saxophonist believed that he had found the unsung master of British jazz. "Does anybody know how good he is?" Rollins asked the audience about the pianist, composer and arranger. Forty three years later, his question remains unanswered. Tracey and his wife Jackie live in a small flat in St Albans, in a residential sprawl of cul-de-sacs and Barratt homes a world away from the smoky Soho jazz scene they inhabited for so long. There are stacks of records in the hallway that give evidence of Tracey's six year stint as the house pianist at Ronnie Scott's, while the living room is dominated by a large television that currently provides him with much of his inspiration. Tracey's 1965 musical setting of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood has been cited as the best British jazz album ever, a 90-minute documentary on his life goes out on BBC4 on April 18, and he has an OBE. But Tracey has been at the coalface of jazz performance since his first professional gig aged 16, and at the age of 76, it's too late for him to start playing the role of the master talent now. "Yeah, well," he sighs, upon being reminded of Sonny Rollins's comment. "He was a friend, we worked on that film Alfie together, and Rollins was the one who changed the game musically. Don't ask me to explain how, he just did.' When Tracey started at Ronnie Scott's in 1960, the British government operated a one-for-one policy: for each American Jazz great that played, England, the US got a British pop star: John Coltrane for Cliff Richard, for example. ("Serves them right," says Tracey) As a result, Tracey worked With Rollins, Coltrane, Roland Kirk Yusef Lateef, and pretty much everyone else on the scene at the time. Any British records they made tended to feature the Stan Tracey Quintet. was he intimidated? "Some of them tried to intimidate, which you don't do if you want the best out of people;' says Tracey, mentioning no names until memories of Stan Getz bubble to the surface. "But 1 was never intimidated. They're just geezers, aren't they? They all piss and shit the same." "How do you know?" counters Jackie. "I found out," replies her husband. Tracey was so deeply steeped in the subterranean jazz world of early-1960s London that he had little idea about what was going on beyond the walls of Ronnie Scott's. He was completely unaware of the Bay of Pigs until after the event, and maintains that he was happier that way. His only practical concern from those days, besides turning up each night at the club and taking his two small children out for a walk during the afternoon, was to nurse a heroin addiction. "You get very focused with a habit," says Tracey. "Everybody at Ronnie's was at it, and I played there seven days a week for six years. You took it a) because it was there; b) because it helped you get through the night; and c) because you plain old enjoyed it." Tracey discovered music at the age of eight, with a swing record called Scratching in the Gravel by Andy Khan. 'My father's friend had a radiogram, a huge beast that incorporated a radio and a record player for 78s. Every Sunday the parents would go out drinking and the son and 1 would stay in the house. I just couldn't stop playing it, although I have heard it since and 1 couldn't recapture the feeling." From the mid-1950s, Tracey heard jazz at its source after getting a job with a house band on a cruise ship, so that he could travel to New York and see names that had until then been a world away. "Birdland hadn't long been open. You could pay a dollar and see Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker ... I saw Duke Ellington up at the Harlem Apollo. In England back then, jazz was a dirty word. It certainly wasn't respectable - still isn't.' Ellington and Thelonious Monk were the musicians with the biggest influence on Tracey. Elsewhere in his record collection there is some western classical - "Stravinsky, Ravel, Shostakovich and Bartok, that's about it - and a lot of Indian classical. "The link between jazz and classical is improvisation," he explains. I did concerts in Bombay, Calcutta ... In 1977 we went to play at a temple in a small suburb of Bombay. it felt like we were the first westerners there. Then the priest told us that Charlie Mariano had been there the week before. " What about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones? "What about them? Charlie Watts is a lovely man, but musically, what is there to say?" Jackie warns us not to get him started on Paul McCartney, but the temptation proves too much to bear. "He's a shit. You know he's vegetarian? His entire crew have to be as well. I heard he found out that two of them had eaten a meat pie on the sly. Gave them the bullet." What about his musical achievements, his virtuosity? "Have you seen that thing with him on the BBC?" asks Tracey, referring to a trailer for Radio 2 featuring McCartney in the studio performing Band on the Run with a variety of strange instruments. "He's playing every instrument ever invented, and some that are about to be invented. He's mastered them all, of course. It's quite touching!'