CHARLIE JAZZES UP ALL THAT HANGING ABOUT
Sunday June 24,2012
By Paul Sexton

When the Rolling Stones reached halfway on the epic journey that culminates in the band’s 50th birthday next month, Charlie Watts said that his time had consisted of five years of playing and 20 years of hanging around. As the Stones do what the Stones always do and make us wait endlessly for news of their return to active service, the perennial rumours of a Glastonbury headliner have recently resurfaced.
But during the extended hiatus since they last stepped off a stage together in 2007, Charlie has found a new way of filling some of his time very happily.
Watts, an avowed jazzer who has sometimes suggested that he fell into a life with the biggest rock ’n’ roll band in the world by mistake, has made several side projects before on stage and in the studio. Now he sits at the drum kit with one of the most tasteful jazz quartets you could imagine.
The ABC&D of Boogie Woogie take their title from the first names of its four protagonists, with the splendidly-handled Axel Zwingenberger on one grand piano, Ben Waters on another as well as vocals and Dave Green on bass. They play a sedate schedule of perhaps 20 dates a year when all of their diaries align and tomorrow will release an elegant album recorded at gigs last year in Paris.
In the virtual unreality of the Twittersphere, the answer to how Waters made the project a reality is refreshing. “I cheekily wrote to Charlie because I knew he’d played with Axel and Ian Stewart [Stu, the Stones’ beloved early road manager and a mean keyboard player himself] was a friend of my aunt and uncle’s. Axel and I were doing a concert and I said: ‘Could you come and drum?’ and he did, it was amazing. We had not sold many tickets and then on the day Charlie said he’d do it, we sold out in two hours.”
It all makes a septuagenarian drummer, the jazz devotee with the best suits in the business, very happy. “When Ben asked me I had nothing to do,” says Charlie, “and it was time I got out of the house, according to my wife. This band is the nearest thing to a 1939 night at [the famed New York nightspot] Café Society, for me. That’s my ideal of what it should be like.
“People love this music when you get going. They probably don’t like the look of the old farts playing it but it’s fun music, it’s not at all pretentious and it’s straight ahead. It’s wonderful to play. We’ve never been in a world where we’re competing, you know what I mean? It’s like a pickup thing we play in clubs and I like it like that.”
Therein lies the contrast with what you might call Charlie’s day job. “With the Stones we have our own level that we have to play at, that’s one of the annoying/not annoying, nerve-wracking things about it all,” he muses. “If you go and play, it’d better be as good as the last time. It should be and we’ve done it now for ... 50 years! So it’s a bit of a pressure in that way.”
Charlie, who at 71 is the senior Stone, looks in rude health after his cancer scare of some six years ago. After our many meetings over more than 20 years, what is sometimes interpreted as a diffident demeanour emerges as shrewd sincerity and his deadpan delivery is often wonderfully funny.
“We played in the Dolomites,” he tells me of an ABC&D gig. “It was really weird, right up in the mountains, with the church and chirping birds and snow and you sit there and think: ‘Who’s going to come to this?’ We’re playing in a concert hall with a slope, nobody’s there, two old women are walking down to get a loaf of bread and by the time seven o’clock comes, it’s completely packed. They love it.”
A boogie woogie quartet may sound far removed from the Stones’ big-boned rock sound but there are connections. Not least on the Paris record, when ABC&D perform Route 66, the Bobby Troup classic that was a key part of the Stones’ early concerts and, in 1964, was the first track on their first album.
“The Stones one was Chuck Berry guitar-based, with Stu trilling over the top or rumbling underneath,” says Charlie. “This is piano-based, totally, with a jazz swinging bass, which gives a whole different feel.”
Watts has known bassist Dave Green even longer than he has any of the Stones: “65 years,” says Charlie, “I think we were five when we first clapped eyes on each other. We lived next door to each other, so up to when we were 10, we’d be playing in the garden.
“Our mums and dads were friends. Then he started to play with skiffle groups and so did I, we played in our first jazz band together, played our first records together and I always use him if I do anything outside of the Rolling Stones. I would not encumber him with them.”
If that sounds just a mite disparaging about his main employment, Charlie is actually in almost nostalgic mood as the birthday comes around.
“The anniversary starts next month but it goes into next year because Bill Wyman and I joined on January 2, 1963, I think it was, but the Stones actually played in the Marquee on July 12 1962.
“Alexis Korner’s band, of which I was the drummer, we did a radio broadcast that day and I remember coming from Broadcasting House and going down to the Marquee, and standing in the doorway looking at Brian Jones, doing his Elmore James stuff with the slide guitar.”
As for those rumours? When I saw Charlie last autumn, he told me that it would be good to mark the Stones’ anniversary with some gigs, if not another of the megatours of recent times.
“It would be a nice thing to do, to finish it off, or to start a new venture,” he said. “Well, we’re a bit old to be starting new ventures but...”
This time, he plays a straight bat. “I don’t know, we haven’t got that far,” he says but wherever the next gig comes from, he is relaxed about it. “My job is playing with the Rolling Stones, that’s become my life. This? I love playing with Dave, Ben and Axel and you can’t want for more than that.”

[www.express.co.uk]

Bill and Charlie joined on Jan. 2? That's my birthday, my fifth to be exact. Very cool to share it with the Rolling Stones.

nice article.
thanks
jeroen

yes, very much appreciated.

Looking forward to seeing the quartet in just six days!

Thanks for posting this article.

Quote
71Tele
Bill and Charlie joined on Jan. 2? That's my birthday, my fifth to be exact. Very cool to share it with the Rolling Stones.

Very cool indeed!

Quote
71Tele
Bill and Charlie joined on Jan. 2? That's my birthday, my fifth to be exact. Very cool to share it with the Rolling Stones.

Another winterchild ? I'm a capricorn from jan. 3 . .