Sammy Rimington Quintet
Sammy Rimington Quintet

It was in the pub hall which twice a week became the St Louis Jazz Club at Elm Park on the fringes of Dagenham, on a Friday night in 1960. All the groovers were in an excited hubbub before the music started. Their favourite band, ever-faithful to the New Orleans sound, Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen, were due to play and the guvnor had a new clarinettist.

Rumours flew around that he was only 17 and he was a hot player.

Then he stepped onto the small stage alongside the bearded Colyer carrying his trumpet and Derby mute, with his other new bandmates. Off they went with Willie the Weeper and Sammy Rimington was blowing with fire and the blues, just like his Crescent City clarinet heroes, Johnny Dodds and George Lewis, unperturbed by his listeners in their long pullovers and corderoys who peered at his newly shaven face and schoolboy features. As I took their duffle coats, macs and donkey jackets, I could see that they couldn’t wait to hear him close-up.

That’s about 55 years ago now, and at the height of the “trad” boom. Rimington had been born in Paddock Wood, Kent — a long way from New Orleans — in 1942. After his five years with Colyer he decamped to the US to play with Big Bill Bissonnette’s Easy Rider band, and like the guvnor, he headed for jazz’s birthplace, playing with some of the city’s great surviving musicians like Captain John Handy (who inspired him to become a powerful alto saxophonist), trombonist Louis Nelson and the arch-trumpeter Kid Thomas Valentine, with whom he played in the rampaging December Band. He has spent his life playing and living New Orleans music, with an interval in fusion during the 1970s, and is still blowing its message.

The reissuing of Rimington’s 1981 Quintet album features him with four prime New Orleans stalwarts, playing mainly standards and songbook ballads. The pianist was Jeanette Kimball who was a bandmate of the legendary Oscar “Papa” Celestin in the ’20s. On guitar and banjo was Emanuel Sayles who had recorded with the Collins Astoria Hot Eight in 1929 and was a riverboat musician through the ’30s. Bassist James Prevost was a confrere of Valentine in his Algiers Stompers and on drums was Chester Jones, a regular in the bands of Kid Sheik and Sweet Emma Barrett.

As the fivesome saunter into The Best Things in Life are Free in the New Orleans studio, its message sings out through Sammy’s liquid clarinet tones and the gentle swing of the veterans. Kimball’s enigmatic intro to Gershwin’s They Can’t Take That Away From Me prefaces some lyrical alto from Rimington and Cheek to Cheek — which the Colyer band used to play with a rampant ensemble gusto, has a beautiful alto melodic line from Sammy and a sprightly Kimball solo.

Sayles’s guitar chords introduce Rimington’s tender notes in Red Sails in the Sunset before he suddenly switches passionately to higher register as if those sails will not return. The chords of Sayles’s guitar tell a lonesome story too.

Always a favourite, Over the Rainbow is blown exquisitely by Sammy on alto. Kimball has an empathetic chorus before Sammy returns, as if playing a lullaby. Sayles takes a vocal in Chicago, the destination of so many great early New Orleans jazz virtuosi. Rimington’s alto is juicy and Kimball’s solo travels well too. Prevost has his moment with his own springing interlude.

Do you remember the 1954 film Davy Crockett and its theme song telling how “he killed himself a bea-a-ar when he was only three”? The “king of the wild frontier” is turned into an amiable blues by Sayles’s vocal, full of humour and nostalgia, before Sammy’s George Lewis-inspired version of If I Ever Cease to Love also gives Jones a drum solo opportunity.

Unexpected but entirely appropriate for a Kentish musician is Sammy’s moving and balmy rendition of White Cliffs of Dover, cut in a Louisiana studio room, with Sayles’s strummed guitar sharing the emotion. And as the quintet sign off with a rhythmic and freewheeling Down in Honky Tonk Town, it all seems a world away from the side hall of the Elm Park Hotel and Rimington’s teenage debut which I heard lucidly from a room full of hooks and coats. It sounded beautiful then as it does now on this record, half a century later.