Written by After a year of centenaries for Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Tony Bennett, the next one belongs to London. Ronnie Scott was born in Aldgate on 28 January 1927, and on his 100th birthday the club he founded will take over the Barbican Hall for Ronnie Scott’s 100th Birthday: A Celebration In Concert, presented by Ronnie Scott’s in association with Serious. It is the centrepiece of a programme of events running through January 2027.
All three of 2026’s big anniversaries were American, and for most of this year the tributes have looked across the Atlantic. Scott’s centenary brings the focus back to Europe and to one of the few jazz clubs whose name is known far beyond its own city. The celebrations open at the club itself on Wednesday 27 January, with an intimate party for Ronnie Scott’s Members. Only 100 guests will be admitted, and the evening will feature a live band and special guests, with further details to be announced later this year.
The following evening, Thursday 28 January at 7.30pm, the Barbican concert will be led by Ronnie Scott’s Artistic Director James Pearson and members of the Ronnie Scott’s All Stars. The specially curated ensemble brings together musicians from several generations with close links to the club, among them Art Themen, John Etheridge, Orphy Robinson, Camilla George, Daniel Casimir, Mark Kavuma and Joe Webb. Mica Paris, Curtis Stigers and Omar Puente join as special guests, and further artists are still to be announced. The one-off concert will combine live performance with historic film and archive material, drawing on music associated with Ronnie himself and with the artists who shaped the club over more than six decades.
Ronnie grew up in Aldgate with music already in the family. His father, Joseph Schatt, was a dance band saxophonist who worked under the name Jock Scott, and although he left the family when Ronnie was a small child, it was that professional surname the son took onto the bandstand. By 16 Ronnie was playing in small London jazz clubs, and he went on to tour with trumpeter Johnny Claes in 1944 and 1945 before joining Ted Heath’s band in 1946.
He heard bebop at the source. Like a number of young British musicians after the war, Scott took work in the bands on the Cunard liner Queen Mary, and the regular crossings to New York let him hear the new music in the city’s clubs and made him one of the first British players to take on the language of Charlie Parker. Back in London he put it into practice. In 1948 he was among the founders of Club Eleven, a musicians’ co-operative with a rehearsal room on Great Windmill Street, where he and Johnny Dankworth led the two house bands. It was the first club in Britain given over to modern jazz, and a police raid closed it in April 1950. The idea of a London club in the mould of the venues on New York’s 52nd Street stayed with him, and nine years later he opened one.
Ronnie was an icon of the UK jazz scene as a player long before he was known as a club owner, and two parts of his career show why. In 1957 he formed The Jazz Couriers with Tubby Hayes, a quintet that put two leading British tenor saxophonists at its front and became one of the defining groups of the UK’s late-1950s modern jazz scene. His playing also won respect abroad. Scott was regarded as an outstanding tenor player with an inventive style of his own, and when he took his sextet to the United States in 1957 he was among the relatively few European jazz musicians of his era who could draw audiences in New York. A decade later, from 1967 to 1969, he played in the Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland Big Band, the orchestra that brought American and European players together and toured the continent with Johnny Griffin in the reed section.
Ronnie Scott with Sonny Rollins | Photo Credit, Freddy Warren
The club came in the middle of all this. Scott and fellow saxophonist Pete King opened it on 30 October 1959 in a basement at 39 Gerrard Street in Soho, and in 1965 it moved to larger premises at 47 Frith Street, where it still stands. Over the years the stage has hosted Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone, Herbie Hancock and Oscar Peterson, and later Wynton Marsalis, Pat Metheny, Robert Glasper, Jamie Cullum and Gregory Porter. The club has also given successive generations of British players a home, from Scott’s own contemporaries through to Ezra Collective, Jacob Collier and Nubya Garcia. After Scott’s death in December 1996, King ran the club for another nine years before selling it in 2005 to theatre impresario Sally Greene and philanthropist Michael Watt.
Dexter Gorden at the club in 1962
I’ve been to the club on many of my visits to London, and for me Ronnie Scott’s is not only an icon for London but also for the global jazz scene. During the clubs long history it has hosted almost of the greats of jazz, and that continuity is what the January programme is out to celebrate.
Fred Nash, Managing Director of Ronnie Scott’s, said: “Ronnie Scott’s was built on a love of music, musicians and the extraordinary experience of hearing great artists perform live, and that spirit remains at the heart of the club today. Ronnie’s 100th birthday is a wonderful opportunity to celebrate his life and contribution to music, as well as the incredible community that has grown around the club over the past six decades. We’re delighted to be bringing together so many extraordinary musicians for this very special concert at the Barbican, alongside a wider programme of events throughout January.”
Tickets for Ronnie Scott’s 100th Birthday: A Celebration In Concert are now on general sale from the Barbican, with standard tickets from £44 and Young Barbican tickets for 16 to 29 year-olds at £18. Details of the wider January centenary programme will be announced in due course. Here at Jazz In Europe, we will mark the centenary in January with an extended three-part series on the history of the club and of Ronnie himself.
Last modified: September 27, 2026
