Although, as its name suggests, Manchester Sports Guild was primarily an amateur sports club, many of its members were only nominally there for athletic activities, as throughout the sixties the cellar of its social club on Long Millgate near the Cathedral hosted some stellar jazz artists.
Champion Jack, who picked up his nickname as a professional boxer in the thirties, was also an accomplished cook, a skill which saw him become a US Navy chef in World War II. He left New York in the early sixties and travelled to Europe, moving between Scandinavia, Switzerland and England, where he lived in Ovenden, a village on the edge of Halifax, before ending up in Germany, where he died in 1992.
His 1966 set spans humorous material (The Sheikh of Araby, Income Tax) and more traditional blues standards (How Long Blues, Going Down Slow), interspersed with some well practised banter with the audience.
The album's liner notes mention that "Manchester Sports Guild at the time was home to Manchester Jazz Society. Each Wednesday the society held meetings in the clubroom at which guests would give talks or recitals." Since then, the society - which I've been a member of for the last dozen years or so - has met weekly at various pubs around the city centre, most recently at the Unicorn and Britons Protection.
Manchester Sports Guild's social club closed in the early seventies - along with numerous other jazz venues whose late night licences, and supposed licentiousness, offended the morals of Manchester police chief, and sometime Methodist lay preacher, James Anderton - and was demolished a few years after that, with the site now occupied by the National Football Museum. I will think of Champion Jack the next time I pop in there.
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