A key figure of British jazz, Coleridge Goode worked with the likes of Stéphane Grappelli, Django Reinhardt and Ray Ellington. He performed frequently and his double bass playing graced countless London jazz clubs. He kept diaries in which he noted his bookings, at venues like the Marquee and Ronnie Scott’s – names redolent of incandescent evenings and brilliant sounds.

Music permeated Goode’s early life in Jamaica, where he was born in 1914. His father had a studious interest in classical music, was a choirmaster and played the organ, whilst his mother was a chorister; he was named after the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Goode became an accomplished violinist. When he moved to Glasgow to study engineering, he led the university orchestra’s second violins.

As a student, he also came across a new kind of music – music with a rhythmic swing. He heard it on the radio, visited the city’s dance halls and collected records by Count Basie and Duke Ellington. He started to contemplate a career in jazz but, being classically trained, found that he couldn’t switch styles on the violin. He duly took up the double bass which, to the vexation of his landlady, he practised for eight hours a day. ‘Other studies eventually got left far behind’, he wrote. ‘But I felt I had to make sure I was capable of mastering this instrument.’

He began working as a musician in Glasgow, then moved to London in 1942, and quickly got to know the city’s clubs. One of these was the Panama, a venue he played at with Johnny Claes and his band. When the Panama closed for the evening, he would go on to another job, at the Slip In near Regent Street. Goode recalled the Panama’s clientele of ‘well-heeled people who lived around Knightsbridge’. In contrast, the Slip In was ‘a haunt of gangster types’, its name fittingly hinting at the clandestine. He fondly remembered the Caribbean Club in Piccadilly, where he started working in 1944. This was ‘small and compact’ and ‘a genuinely mixed club in terms of race and class.’

These quotations are from Goode’s autobiography Bass Lines: A Life in Jazz. Its illuminating details of people, places and events help to contextualise the appointments jotted down in his diaries. His diary from 1958 is on display at the British Library in the exhibition Beyond the Bassline. Its pages, open on the week commencing Sunday the sixth of July, show the names of venues along with other particulars, like time of performance and time of rehearsal. The Star Club, the Marquee and the Flamingo are amongst the bookings entered that week.

Coleridge Goode’s diary for 1958, open to show the days for 6-12 July © British Library Board. Used with kind permission from Coleridge Goode’s family.

One of Goode’s major affiliations was with saxophonist Joe Harriott. It was at the Star Club on Soho’s Wardour Street where the two first met; this was probably in March 1958. ‘Sitting in’ on performances was commonplace at the club, and one evening Harriott dropped in and played alongside Goode, pianist Alan Clare and drummer Bobby Orr. That evening, Harriott asked Goode to join the band he was forming. They would go on to collaborate for years in the Joe Harriott Quintet, first playing bebop, and later exploring Harriott’s pioneering concept of ‘free form’ music.

The Marquee was originally located below a cinema on Oxford Street. The space was a ballroom before it was a jazz club, and its interior incorporated a striped, canopy-like design. In 1958, Harry Pendleton, who headed up the National Jazz Federation, started programming events at the Marquee. The Joe Harriott Quintet would rehearse at the venue and performed there regularly on Saturdays. Goode recalled that Harriott secured this slot for his group ‘even before the band had been unveiled… or the personnel had been fixed’ – such was his standing. The Marquee Club – as it became under the auspices of Pendleton – moved to Wardour Street in 1964.

The Flamingo opened in 1952 below a restaurant on Coventry Street. An upmarket venue with plush surroundings, it hosted the big names of British jazz, and counted Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan amongst its star American guests. The Flamingo moved to Wardour Street in 1957. The Don Rendell Jazz Six and the Tony Kinsey Quintet were two of the many bands who played at the Wardour Street venue; the Joe Harriott Quintet were regulars there on Sunday afternoons.

Whilst Coleridge Goode’s diaries are illuminated by these histories, they are intrinsically informative, too. They chronicle the engagements of their keeper and, as compendia, record venues which shaped the history of British jazz. They also possess an evocative and an emotive quality, written in Goode’s hand, intertwined with his life on the scene.

Quotations in this article are taken from ‘Bass Lines: A Life in Jazz’ by Coleridge Goode and Roger Cotterrell. The British Library Sound Archive holds a collection of Coleridge Goode’s diaries and a significant collection of his recordings.

Coleridge Goode’s diary for 1958 is on display in the British Library exhibition Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music, which runs to 26 August 2024.

Blog written by Jonathan Benaim, researcher for the exhibition Beyond the Bassline.