The Concorde Club

The Concorde Club was launched in 1957 in Southampton by jazz aficionado Cole Mathieson, and is the oldest jazz club under the same management in the United Kingdom. Its standing in the UK jazz world has been recognised by the August 2009 award of the inaugural (Kind of) Blue Plaque, following a nationwide vote among jazz followers and musicians organised by the Brecon Jazz Festival

The award, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Miles Davis classic album ''Kind of Blue'', is to honour the jazz establishment considered to have done most for the development of jazz in the United Kingdom. On August 8 2012, the club celebrated its 55th anniversary with a concert featuring the Alan Barnes All Stars during which Barnes presented an illustrated history of the Concorde. He told the capacity crowd: "There are very few businesses, let alone a jazz club, run by the same person for 55 years. Cole has done more than most to promote jazz."

Mathieson, a former jazz drummer, started the Concorde in a converted restaurant at the back of the Bassett Hotel pub in Southampton in 1957, two years before Ronnie Scott launched his club in London. Among the major jazz musicians who played at the Concorde Club in the Bassett were American masters Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Buck Clayton, Bud Freeman, Wild Bill Davison, and home-grown giants of the genre including Nat Gonella, Vic Ash, Tommy Whittle, Tubby Hayes, Joe Harriott, Kenny Baker, Tony Coe, Allan Ganley, plus the bands of Humphrey Lyttelton, Chris Barber, Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball and Alex Welsh.

The Concorde widened its tastes to take in rhythm and blues, called "a cousin of jazz" by Mathieson. The resident band in 1962 was the then unknown Manfred Mann, and other little-known artistes who made early appearances at the club included Eric Clapton, Robert Plant, Georgie Fame, Rod Stewart, Ginger Baker and Elton John when he was still known as Reg Dwight.

In 1970 the Concorde had to find a new home when the Bassett Hotel was turned into a steak house. Mathieson moved the club to a run-down Victorian-age schoolhouse in North Stoneham, near Eastleigh, Hampshire. During the following 30-plus years Mathieson slowly developed the Concorde into an all-round entertainment centre. The old schoolhouse has been enlarged to take in a restaurant, a wine bar (the Moldy Fig), a 300-seat concert venue and a 35-room hotel called the Ellington Lodge, with each room named after a jazzman who has featured at the club.

The club has a 4,500 membership, and a waiting list of hundreds. It now features tribute band nights, a wine society, corporate dinners and presentations, supper and dinner clubs, but jazz remains at the heart of the Concorde. A list of the jazz artistes regularly appearing there reads like a Who's Who of post-war jazz, including Sir John Dankworth, Dame Cleo Laine

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