Back in Port Street

Club 43, the place to hear modern jazz in Manchester from the early fifties to the late sixties, is returning to its original home, the newly-reopened Stage and Radio Club at 43 Port Street, a thoroughfare between Piccadilly and the Northern Quarter best known now as the location of Port Street Beer House.

Club 43 was owned and operated by jazz promoter Eric Scriven, first at Port Street, then from the mid-fifties in a building on Oxford Road later demolished to make way for the Mancunian Way, and finally, with business partner Ernie Garside, on Amber Street off Shudehill. Pairing British jazz musicians including drummer Phil Seamen and local bebop pianist Joe Palin with such stellar American names as Hank Mobley, Sonny Rollins and Max Roach while the latter were on tour in Europe, its closure was the result of a crackdown on late-night music clubs in the late sixties and early seventies by one James Anderton, later a hugely conroversial Chief Constable of Manchester. 

Most of what I know about Club 43 are things I've learnt from fellow members of Manchester Jazz Society who patronised it, played or worked there, including Bill Birch whose book Keeper of the Flame: Modern Jazz in Manchester features photographs, programmes and maps of it.

The relaunched Club 43 kicks off at the end of this month with a session featuring Matt Nickson, of Matt & Phreds jazz club on Tib Street, whom I filmed performing with Mancunian blues legend Victor Brox last year at the Smithfield Market Tavern on Swan Street.