Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ron Rubin was born in Liverpool, London, England on July 8, 1933, to David and Louise Rubin. Music was important to the family and he learned piano from an early age. Becoming interested in jazz in his early teens while attending Liverpool College school, he was suspended for playing jazz on the school piano. Not being put off, he studied law under his uncle but it wasn’t for him and he signed up for the Royal Army Service Corps for a two year stint.
In the army he played piano with the Rhine River Jazz and Germany Rhine bands in Germany where he was stationed. After his service, in 1953 he picked up some gigs around Merseyside, London where he was playing guitar and clarinet at this time. Ron practiced hard on the piano and found solo work at clubs in London’s Soho. Taking up the double bass in 1955 and within a few weeks he was playing gigs with Ralph “Bags” Watmough and Tony Davis’s Gin Mill Four. In 1957 he played opening night at the Cavern Club with the Merseysippi and Watmough bands.
Moving to London in the 60s Ron played with a wide variety of bands on piano and double bass with Glyn Morgan, Dick Williams, Brian Leake, the Fairweather-Brown band, Mike Taylor, Group Sounds Five, the Ronnie Selby Trio, Fat John Cox and Bruce Turner. He accompanied visiting musicians Bill Coleman, Henry “Red” Allen and Ray Nance and with groups like those of Long John Baldry and the Hoochie-Coochie Men, and Manfred Mann.
Through the 1970s Rubin toured with the Lennie Best Quartet, Sandy Brown, Keith Ingham, Alex Welsh, Colin Purbrook, and accompanied Billy Eckstine. He had his own band at the Roundhouse Bar and was with the John Picard Band for three years and recorded regularly. The Eighties saw him touring with Wild Bill Davison and playing with Fatty George, Geoff Simkins, Keith Smith and Oscar Klein, George Howden, Brian Leake and Earl Okin.
By the end of the decade he was playing bass with the Bruce Turner Quartet before joining George Melly and John Chilton’s Feetwarmers. The following decades he played with Campbell Burnap’s band, then joined George Melly and John Chilton again and continued playing and touring. After surviving cancer in 2001 he slowed down to playing occasionally. In his later years Ron spent many happy hours writing his Jottings From A Jazzman’s Journal, a record of his life as a musician.
Pianist, bassist and poet Ron Rubin, who for many years was at the centre of the British jazz scene, transitioned on April 14, 2020 at the age of 86.
