Yet another post in my jazz series!

Since attending a couple of great gigs at the London Jazz Festival (here, here), we visited Ronnie Scott’s, still the most delightful London jazz venue of all (for its heyday, see under Ray Man: Cantonese music and jazz in Soho), to hear Lee Ritenour (b.1952—guitar) and Dave Grusin (b.1934!—keyboards), on tour with Melvin Davis on bass and Lee’s son Wesley on drums, accompanying his father sensitively since he was 13.

Delighting in constant invention, their rapport is wondrous—Ritenour and Grusin * have been making sweet music together for fifty years. Their set encompassed funk, Brazilian, and a rendition of Grusin’s song from Tootsie. Here they all are live in 2018:

And a big jazz hand for Melvin Davis’s solos—here’s one from 2013:

Jazz clubs—particularly somewhere like Ronnie’s—make such a conducive ambience for focused listening. À propos my Buildings and music, Western Art Music pays a heavy price for its move to large impersonal concert halls. Note also What is serious music?!.

* On Grusin’s wiki page, a passage like this always broadens the mind:

Grusin’s family originates from Gruzinsky princely line of the Bagrationi dynasty, the royal family that ruled the Kingdom of Georgia in the 9th-19th centuries. In Slavic languages, “Grusin” is an ethnonym for Georgians. Grusin’s father, who was a violinist, was born and raised in Riga, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, from where he emigrated to the United States in 1913.