At last year’s London Jazz Festival, there was a concert to celebrate the 100th birthday of the double-bassist Coleridge Goode. In 60 years, he worked with the jazz pianist George Shearing and the French violinist Stéphane Grappelli. He played with the Ray Ellington Quartet of Goon Show fame. And he was the last surviving member of the Quintet of the Hot Club of France (and its only ever Caribbean member) having played on Django Reinhardt’s immortal recording of Nuages. Reinhardt was a visitor to Goode’s flat in London, where he cradled Goode’s daughter on his knee.
Arriving in Britain aged 19 from Jamaica, Goode only took up the bass while studying electrical engineering in Glasgow. His technical skills never left him — he later built television sets for his friends and constructed his own amplification system. On the bass, he used an unusual technique, involving pizzicato high up the fingerboard. It gave him a light style at a time when most bassists opted for the simple and ponderous. His solos were often played with the bow, to which he sang through a throat microphone of his own design.
Born in 1914, Coleridge George Emerson Goode grew up in Jamaica with his two sisters. His father, George, was a choirmaster and organist and kept a room lined with poetry and books on music; his mother, Hilda, had a soprano voice and encouraged her husband’s concerts. The boy’s first name celebrated the black composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor; “Emerson” came from the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The young Coleridge learnt the violin and attended Calabar High School. He bought a motorbike to ride to school and was quickly able to strip it down and rebuild it. He chose the University of Glasgow because his father corresponded with the head of the music department.
Arriving in Bristol after a voyage by ship, Goode was shocked to find cobbled streets and, in Glasgow, that he was the only black face. He joined the university orchestra but in his final year he discovered jazz. Realising that he found improvising on the violin to be difficult, he picked up the bass. The sweet-toned, 19th-century instrument that he bought stayed with him throughout his life. It survived having its neck smashed by falling off a tram and its front split by a collapsing microphone stand.
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By the time the Second World War broke out, Goode was determined to be a professional musician. He moved to London and joined the popular band the Claepigeons, led by the Anglo-Belgian trumpeter and amateur racing driver Johnny Claes. Goode regaled friends with stories about how he and the band’s blind drummer, Carlo Krahmer, transported their bulky instruments during the Blitz on the underground.
He also met Gertrude Selmeczi, a Jewish refugee from Vienna. Wed within six months, in January 1944, they remained together for 70 years until Gertrude’s death in June and were the subject of a BBC Radio 4 documentary about successful marriages. They had a daughter, Sandy, and a son, Jim, an actor, who both survive him. Gertrude brought up their children in their flat in west London, while Goode toured.
He was in demand as one of the best bassists on the London jazz scene. He encountered Django Reinhardt in a London nightclub and they became friends, recording together with Grappelli. Goode then joined the quartet led by the ebullient drummer and singer Ray Ellington. It brought him wider attention, although he quit on the day of its successful audition for The Goon Show. This followed a disastrous gig in Milan, to which he had driven, with his wife and daughter, in a car so packed with suitcases and amps that it broke down. Other band members were held up by immigration and Gertrude had to beg a music agent for enough cash to return home.
Goode always regarded his work with his next major bandleader, Joe Harriott, as the pinnacle of his career, exploring free jazz and making the revolutionary records Free Form, Abstract and Movement. The pair also joined forces with the Indian violinist John Mayer to form indo-jazz fusions. In the 1960s, with the pianist Michael Garrick, he took part in concerts with children’s choirs.
He practised in the music room of his flat from where, with the window closed, he could not hear the noise of traffic. Until his mid-90s, Goode played most Sundays at the King’s Head in Crouch End, where he jammed with several generations of musicians.
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Coleridge Goode, jazz bass player, was born on November 29, 1914. He died on October 2, 2015, aged 100