Club Eleven was a nightclub located in London between 1948 and 1950. Despite being in business for only two years, the club played a significant role in the early history of British bebop, a form of modern jazz.
The club was so named because it had 11 founders - business manager Harry Morris and ten British bebop musicians. It was first opened at 41 Great Windmill Street in Soho in 1948, and had two house bands, one led by Ronnie Scott and the other by John Dankworth. Scott's sidemen included Tony Crombie, Lennie Bush, Tommy Pollard, and Hank Shaw, while Dankworth's included Leon Calvert, Bernie Fenton, Joe Muddell, and Laurie Morgan. When Scott toured the U.S., Don Rendell filled his spot. Denis Rose organized many of the activities at the club. In 1950 the club moved to 50 Carnaby Street, but shuttered a few months after the move as a consequence of a police raid.
In 2009 Club Eleven was named by the Brecon Jazz Festival as one of 12 venues which had made the most important contributions to jazz music in the United Kingdom.
Famous quotes containing the words club and/or eleven:
“I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.”
—Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971)
“Seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder.”
—Leonard Cohen (b. 1934)