Ealing Jazz Club was a music venue in Ealing, west London, England, which opened in 1959. It became London's first regular blues venue, with performances by the Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies band Blues Incorporated. Now commonly referred to as the Ealing Blues Club, the venue is now a nightclub called The Red Room.
Ealing Jazz Club opened at 42A The Broadway, Ealing, in January 1959. The manager was Teheran-born student Fery Asgari who ran the venue for fellow students of Ealing Technical College. Asgari had been using Ealing Town Hall, then the upstairs ballroom of The Feathers, a pub opposite the Ealing Club, before taking on the premises, where he ran jazz nights on Thursdays and Fridays, and R&B on Saturdays. [1] [2]
In a basement opposite Ealing Broadway station, it is reached by descending the narrow steps of the alley that leads to Haven Place. Korner and Davies moved their blues club at the Roundhouse pub in Wardour Street, the London Blues and Barrelhouse Club, to Ealing on 17 March 1962 after it was ejected for going electric. The Ealing venue had been suggested to them by Blues Incorporated singer Art Wood.
Korner recalled: “The club held only 200 when you packed them all in. There were only about 100 people in all of London that were into the blues and all of them showed up at the club that first night”. [3]
The club is noteworthy as the place where, on 24 March 1962, Charlie Watts first met Brian Jones then, on 7 April 1962 Alexis Korner introduced Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to Brian Jones, and the nucleus of the Rolling Stones first came together. [4]
And it was where, nearly a year later, the classic line-up of the Rolling Stones, with Charlie Watts on drums played for the first time in public, on Saturday, 12 January 1963. [5] [6] However, it was not until an Ealing gig on 2 February 1963 that Watts became the Stones' permanent drummer. [7]
Eric Clapton has recalled that occasionally he stood in for Mick Jagger at the club when the novice Rolling Stones singer had a sore throat. [8]
The regular musicians at the Saturday night blues sessions during 1962-65 included Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, Eric Clapton, Charlie Watts, Graham Bond, Long John Baldry, Rod Stewart, Malcolm Cecil, Dick Taylor, Dick Heckstall-Smith and Paul Jones. Manfred Mann (originally the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers) also played there. The Who appeared there early on in their career (when they were known as the Detours), like James Royal (who was born in Ealing). Eric Burdon, lead singer of the Animals and John McLaughlin also frequented the club. [9] [10]
Burdon has written about hitchhiking to London from Newcastle upon Tyne to visit the Ealing Club, where he and 'tall, skinny, short-haired schoolboy' Mick Jagger were picked out of the crowd by Korner to sing together. [11]
The future TONTO's Expanding Head Band synthesizer pioneer and Stevie Wonder producer Malcolm Cecil who played double bass with Blues Incorporated recalled: “A young Mick Jagger would sit in sometimes when we played at the blues club in Ealing. On one memorable occasion, Mick asked Cyril if he could bend notes on guitar and Cyril quipped If you gimme some pliers, man.” [12]
After a visit to the Ealing Club, Harold Pendleton owner of the then-struggling Marquee Club switched its programming from jazz to R&B when he hired Korner's band for a weekly Thursday night residency in 1962. [13] [14]
Another early visitor to the club was John Mansfield who decided to set up the Ricky-Tick club in Windsor as a blues venue.
The Ealing Club also played a part in the sound of rock. A Sunday night in 1963 saw the first public performance ever to use the classic 'loud' Marshall JTM45 guitar amplifier. The band assembled to test a pre-production version of the amp included future Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell—who worked in the Marshall shop in Hanwell—and saxophonist Terry Marshall, the 'T' in 'JTM'. [15]
Since then, the venue has been operated as the Broadway Casino Club [16] as well as a disco under various names including Tabby's, The Nutmeg, Chequers, Madocs and Club Azur. These days, as the Red Room, the premises consist of two small bars a dance floor/performance space and a seating area that occupies the space where the stage was in the 1960s.
In 2011, a community group of Ealing residents, musicians and music fans known as The Ealing Club initiated a campaign to bring back live music to the venue and highlight its important contribution to the development of British blues and rock. The group's first three events were held on the nights of 18–20 July 2011, with proceeds going towards the installation of the blue plaque unveiled on 17 March 2012.
Suburban Steps to Rockland, a feature film documentary about the story of the club, premiered at the Doc'n Roll Film Festival on 4 November 2017 at the Barbican Centre. The film includes interviews with many of those who played there including Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, Don Craine, Eric Burdon, Paul Jones, Terry Marshall, John Mayall and Dick Taylor, as well as club manager Fery Asgari. [17] In 2019 Sky UK acquired broadcast rights to the film, which received its first screening on 8 September.
The nearest rail and tube station to the club is Ealing Broadway.
Alexis Andrew Nicholas Koerner, known professionally as Alexis Korner, was a British blues musician and radio broadcaster, who has sometimes been referred to as "a founding father of British blues". A major influence on the sound of the British music scene in the 1960s, he was instrumental in the formation of several notable British bands including The Rolling Stones and Free. Korner was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the musical influence category in 2024.
The Rolling Stones are an English rock band formed in London in 1962. Active across seven decades, they are one of the most popular and enduring bands of the rock era. In the early 1960s, the band pioneered the gritty, rhythmically driven sound that came to define hard rock. Their first stable line-up consisted of vocalist Mick Jagger, guitarist Keith Richards, multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones, bassist Bill Wyman, and drummer Charlie Watts. During their early years, Jones was the primary leader. Andrew Loog Oldham became their manager in 1963 and encouraged them to write their own songs. The Jagger–Richards partnership became the band's primary songwriting and creative force.
Lewis Brian Hopkin Jones was an English musician and founder of the Rolling Stones. Initially a slide guitarist, he went on to sing backing vocals and played a wide variety of instruments on Rolling Stones recordings and in concerts.
Electric blues is blues music distinguished by the use of electric amplification for musical instruments. The guitar was the first instrument to be popularly amplified and used by early pioneers T-Bone Walker in the late 1930s and John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters in the 1940s. Their styles developed into West Coast blues, Detroit blues, and post-World War II Chicago blues, which differed from earlier, predominantly acoustic-style blues. By the early 1950s, Little Walter was a featured soloist on blues harmonica using a small hand-held microphone fed into a guitar amplifier. Although it took a little longer, the electric bass guitar gradually replaced the stand-up bass by the early 1960s. Electric organs and especially keyboards later became widely used in electric blues.
British blues is a form of music derived from American blues that originated in the late 1950s, and reached its height of mainstream popularity in the 1960s. In Britain, blues developed a distinctive and influential style dominated by electric guitar, and made international stars of several proponents of the genre, including the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Yardbirds, Eric Clapton, Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin.
Charles Robert Watts was an English musician who was the drummer of the Rolling Stones from 1963 until his death in 2021.
Ian Andrew Robert Stewart was a British keyboardist and co-founder of the Rolling Stones. He was removed from the lineup in May 1963 at the request of manager Andrew Loog Oldham who felt he did not fit the band's image. He remained as road manager and pianist for over two decades until his death, and was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with the rest of the band in 1989.
Jamming with Edward! is a 1972 album by three Rolling Stones band members accompanied by Nicky Hopkins and Ry Cooder.
Cyril Davies was an English blues musician, and one of the first blues harmonica players in England.
The Crawdaddy Club was a music venue in Richmond, Surrey, England, which opened in 1963. The Rolling Stones were its house band in its first year and were followed by The Yardbirds. Several other notable British blues and rhythm and blues acts also played there.
Guitar Boogie is a blues rock compilation album featuring Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page together with the Allstars and members of The Rolling Stones.
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Giorgio Sergio Alessando Gomelsky was a filmmaker, impresario, music manager, songwriter and record producer. He was born in Georgia, grew up in Switzerland, and later lived in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated, or simply Blues Incorporated, were an English blues band formed in London in 1961, led by Alexis Korner and including at various times Jack Bruce, Charlie Watts, Terry Cox, Ginger Baker, Art Wood, Long John Baldry, Ronnie Jones, Danny Thompson, Graham Bond, Cyril Davies and Dick Heckstall-Smith.
British rhythm and blues was a musical movement that developed in the United Kingdom between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, and reached a peak in the mid-1960s. It overlapped with, but was distinct from, the broader British beat and more purist British blues scenes, attempting to emulate the music of American blues and rock and roll pioneers, such as Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. It often placed greater emphasis on guitars and was often played with greater energy.
The All-Stars were a short-lived English blues combo active in the early-mid 1960s. Originally known as the Cyril Davies (R&B) All-Stars, their later recordings are often credited to the Immediate All-Stars due to their releases on Immediate Records. In 1999, the group reformed as the Carlo Little All-Stars.
Geoffrey Frank Bradford was an English guitarist who played alongside British blues musicians in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Long John Baldry and Alexis Korner.
The Stones in the Park was a free outdoor festival held in Hyde Park on 5 July 1969, headlined by the Rolling Stones and featuring Third Ear Band, King Crimson, Screw, Alexis Korner's New Church, Family and the Battered Ornaments, in front of an estimated audience between 250,000 and 500,000 spectators.
The London Blues and Barrelhouse Club ran between 1957 and 1961 at the Round House public house at the junction of Wardour Street and Brewer Street in Soho, London. Established by Cyril Davies and Alexis Korner, it hosted many visiting American blues performers and was an important catalyst in developing British blues music, R&B, and ultimately British rock music.
