David Nicholson

Being computer-illiterate and thus slow in joining The Baron’s roundup of tributes to the late Dave Nicholson, I can only assume that most of the many-sided Dave’s more obvious qualities have already been singled out for resounding salutes in the emails about him pouring in from Reuterians around the world. I have many vivid memories of this extraordinary character, not least in the musical sphere.

Dave’s fascination with jazz was well known and he himself played a mean piano as well as possessing a knowledge of the jazz genre worthy of a regular patrol of Ronnie Scott’s in London’s Soho. But he had a keen sense of the lowliest, non-jazz pop that hit the charts as he advanced through and beyond adolescence. Confessing his shortcomings in moments of retrospective conversation, he’d suddenly break into a tearful ballad like “I’m Sorry, So Sorry!” or, recalling the days when light-music radio helped pass lonely nights for young dreamers in wintry Halifax, Nova Scotia, he’d start up the sign-off song of his native city’s chief jukebox station vintage 1955, CJCH. Or, at the sight of myself (a radio geek even late in life) approaching him street or pub, he’d melodiously whistle the few bars of a Cold War station theme I’d once hummed to him, that of the CIA’s RIAS Berlin. A long-lost radiophonic curio!

Yet, gripped though he was by the jazz likes of Oscar Peterson (an imposing Canuck as he himself was), Nicholson was hugely versed in classical music. It was in that capacity, one night in the mid-1970s down at his family apartment in Crystal Palace, that he entertained me after a dinner lavished on us by diligent wife Marilyn (herself a church organist). Dave had a seldom-noticed passion for the clarinet and, on this occasion, he thought he had just the thing to serve as a rarefied but galvanizing nightcap to our feast. It was a piece I’d never heard of by a Danish modern master I knew vaguely from years before, Carl Nielsen. It was Nielsen’s Clarinet Concerto, which turned out to be a ghostly, haunting exploration of - so it seemed - a musical region eerily reaching just beyond the grave. The evening had turned into a kind of compelling seance, compliments of the spellbinding maestro Neilsen, on whose music (compliments of Dave Nicholson) I remain hooked to this day.

But in the Nielsen concerto, the clarinet-loving Dave could find a certain conjunction with the world of high-level swing, since a prominent performer of the great Dane’s composition happened to be the versatile Benny Goodman. And Nicholson’s clarinet enthusiasm drew him to other masters also - Mozart among them. And one day, after he’d driven me to a South London station for my train ride north, we sat in his car for a goodly time while he played a scintillating tape of a clarinet-and-orchestra masterpiece by Beethoven contemporary Carl Maria von Weber. I gladly missed the train.

Still, Nicholson relished the less lofty run of musical life. There he’d sit solo in, say, a Penge pub of Irish Republican orientation, puffing on his pipe and reading his Guardian, quietly savouring not only the House brew but also the offerings of its music box – notably “The Men Behind the Men Behind the Wire” and “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing”. At leisure, as often at work, Dave was the steady centre of a roaring vortex. ■