Coleridge Goode
Photo: Jak Kilby / ArenaPAL
15 Oct 2015
Coleridge Goode, who has died
aged 100, was a double-bass player who featured with distinction on the
British jazz scene for almost 70 years; he was universally admired for
his musical abilities, but equally for the grace and good humour with
which he pursued the often trying career of a freelance musician.
Coleridge George Emmerson Goode was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on
November 29 1914, the son of a church organist and choirmaster. He was
named in honour of the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whose work,
Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, his father had recently conducted. As a child
he studied the violin, but had no ambition to become a full-time
musician.
At the age of 19 he
travelled to Glasgow to study electrical engineering at the Royal
Technical College, and went on to read for a degree at Glasgow
University. There he first encountered jazz, any hint of which had been
forbidden at home. He took up the bass in order to join in with local
bands, and was soon in such demand that, in 1942, he abandoned his
studies and set off for London.
Jazz thrived in the dives and clubs of war-time London. “The war got rid
of all the stuffiness,” Goode wrote in his autobiography, and he was
never out of work. Among the bands he played with was a trio consisting
of the pianist Dick Katz, the guitarist Lauderic Caton and himself on
bass. The group later became part of the original Ray Ellington Quartet.
In 1944 he married Gertrude
Selmeczi, a Jewish refugee from Vienna whose family were of Hungarian
origin. Their marriage was to last 70 years, until her death in June
this year. It was the subject of a Radio Four programme in a series on
long and successful marriages.
In 1946
Goode played for the reunion of Stéphane Grappelli, who had been in
London throughout the war, and Django Reinhardt, who had been in
occupied France. He remembered Django carrying on an animated
conversation in French with Gertrude, while sitting on their sofa and
dandling their two-year-old daughter, Sandy, on his knee.
Always
a dedicated tinkerer in matters electrical and electronic, Goode built
his own television set from scratch and constructed one of the earliest
effective bass amplifiers. This he combined with a microphone, which
enabled him to sing and play simultaneously, after the style of the
American bassist Slam Stewart.