Jamie Evans takes an affectionate look back to his years playing with Alan Cooper and others at the Rumboe pub, Old Bailey, London.

My connection with the Rumboe all started in the early 60s when I met that great character, the Scots pianist and trombonist Bert Murray.

I was an eager and industrious (well, at the start anyway) piano-player with the Scottish trad band, the Clyde Valley Stompers. I disliked the music but to be a sort of pop star and earn pretty good money and not have the drudgery of sitting in an office or factory all day was a form of paradise.

Bert was playing piano for the Alex Welsh band and we were booked along with them and another band for a specific form of torture known as an “all-nighter”. Starting at midnight each band played a two-hour session until 6am when most of the audience were asleep anyway.

I made myself known to Bert and we inspected the piano provided, a vile-looking ancient upright.
“Good show,” said Bert gleefully, “it’s not miked up so we won’t have to do any work on this gig. No one will hear it anyway.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Here was a jazz musician who didn’t want to be heard or actually do anything. But as I later discovered Bert certainly wasn’t unique but one of a breed of jazzers who delighted in doing as little as possible, starting as late as they could and finishing as early as they could get away with.

Bert and I became friends over the years and round about 1976 I started getting calls from Bert to dep for him at the Rumboe pub on a Friday night. The format at the Rumboe was usually a trio, clarinet, piano and drums and the front man on a Friday was Alan Cooper, another eccentric and, to me at first, intimidating figure.

I wasn’t used to working without a double bass so doing the Rumboe was good practice for my left hand and I started to get called for deps on other nights too, backing some pretty high-class clarinettists like Forrie Cairns, Dick Charlesworth and Will Hastie
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One of Bert’s more famous alcohol-fuelled exploits at the Rumboe was to do the entire session with the piano lid closed and eventually the management, like many before them, lost patience with Bert and fired him. I got the job thenceforth.

Anyway on Friday nights, Cooper and I formed an unlikely but reasonably popular combination. He was far more catholic than his Temperance Seven and trad band background suggested and our repertoire ranged from all the usual trad warhorses to more modern tunes, even Monk and Rogers and Hart.

Picture: The Clyde Valley Stompers in 1963. (L to R) Roy Pellett (clt), Jamie Evans (piano), Matt Peyton (bass), Ian Hunter Randall (tpt), Ernie O'Malley (drs), Les Muscutt (bjo}, John Howlett (tmb). The band broke up at the end of that year.

Continued on Rumboe 2