STRANGE to think that on Dean Street, up and alongside this Soho basement, Karl Marx walked to the reading room of the British Museum early every morning, contemplating Das Kapital. Shelley lived around the corner and just through St Anne’s Court almost opposite, William Blake was born and lived his early years.

And along the parallel road, Frith Street, there is Ronnie Scott’s, where in the 1960s the greatest US jazz musicians had opened up London with their sounds.

Now I find myself listening to the clarinet and alto saxophone of 82-year-old Sammy Rimington, who I first heard 64 years ago in the side hall of the Elm Park Hotel, eastwards on the District Line, when he was an 18-year-old debutant in Ken Colyer’s New Orleans Band, as I worked taking coats in the cloakroom of my local St Louis Jazz Club.

I was a 16-year-old schoolboy then, studying for my O levels and Sammy was two years older, embarking on a career playing New Orleans jazz that would take him around the world, including spending many sojourns in the Crescent City where jazz was born, playing alongside and being tutored by some of its greatest musicians, including clarinet virtuoso George Lewis and the revolutionary alto saxophonist Captain John Handy.

As he took the stage alongside a band of veteran British New Orleans devotees and soared into Weary Blues, I heard the same notes and beautiful wooden tone of his clarinet that I had heard over six decades before, and as he dived into the lower register for Red Wing, struck out lucidly on What a Friend We Have in Jesus and blew the prime blues of Careless Love, I could have been back in Bourbon Street, in the sweat and sweet music of its masters.

He swapped his clarinet for alto and out came the beautiful joy and sorrow of Corrina, Corrina “like a bird that whistles, like a bird that sings,” taking me back to that world of duffle coats and donkey jackets, and as I caught the Tube home my mind was both re-living those postwar years of optimism and nuclear fear, and thinking of my family, friends, teachers and heroes, with Sammy’s evocative notes deep in my blood and brain and sparking the future: what about the next 60 years? Music will tell its tales too.

Sammy was born in 1942. His mum and dad had a greengrocer’s shop in Plumstead, south-east London. His dad played country guitar and loved Jimmy Rodgers. “I remember him playing TB Blues,” Sammy told me.

At school he learned guitar, loved Django Reinhardt and formed a skiffle group called The Paragons. He remembers passing a house in Woolwich and seeing a set of drums through its front window. “We wanted a drummer to replace the washboard, so I knocked on the door and asked whether whoever played drums wanted to join our skiffle group. His name was Keith, and he had a brother Brian, who played trumpet in a New Orleans band.

“Keith played me a George Lewis EP with Willie the Weeper and Bugle Boy March on it. I immediately loved the sound, I’d never heard anything like it before. I found something in that music that I’d never found in any other music. They had a clarinet in the room and they let me borrow it. I began to teach myself how to play, playing along with George Lewis records.”

After a while he began to sit in with the Ken Colyer band at the 51 club. “I was working for the GPO, delivering mail in April 1960, when Ken phoned me and said his clarinettist, Ian Wheeler, had left the band and he needed an instant replacement, as the band with George Lewis as guest was starting a tour of Europe the next week. Could I fly to Switzerland and be part of the band?

“What an invitation!” he said. “Something emotionally powerful drew me to George. I wasn’t nervous even though Ian was a fine player. I was young and I wanted to go forward. It was a wonderful start to my five-and-a-half years with Ken. He taught me a lot too — how to be a good bandleader. He looked after his bandmates, always treated us well and paid us when we were sick.”

In 1962, during the band’s three-week holiday, he went to New Orleans to further his craft — a 20-year-old white musician from London. “The only person I knew there was George. I didn’t know what to expect and I was shocked, terribly, at the situation there. Complete segregation, an absolute colour bar. I couldn’t play publicly with black musicians, only in their homes. But they still accepted me.”

He was invited to play alongside the great trumpeter, Kid Thomas Valentine, at a private wedding in the predominantly black suburb of Algiers, across the Mississippi River. “The musicians were very flattered to see me, and moved that I loved their music so much. They were such great players. They were surprised that I could get their records in London. George invited me to his house and gave me lessons in his fingering technique.

“But I felt guilty. I had been playing their music in the Colyer band all over Europe and making good money, yet their lives were impoverished. I remember visiting the great banjo player, George Guesnon, and on his shelf he had a framed press cutting calling him the greatest banjoist in the world, yet his house was very small, almost like a shack, really just one room and a back kitchen.”

“And at the house of George’s drummer, Joe Watkins, his wife was so tired and shattered, she collapsed on the floor when I was there. Life was very hard and poor for them and I’ve never forgotten it.

“Yet Joe Robichaux, George’s pianist, organised a farewell party for me at his house. We had a big dinner, with the whole band there. They were so kind and generous to me, treating me like a friend from afar.”

In 1965, Sammy left the Colyer band — with KC's encouragement. “He knew how important it was to work with the authentic inventors of the music, he’d done it himself in the early ’50s.”

He got a visa to live in Connecticut and play with local bands like the Easy Riders and December Band — who invited up New Orleans musicians to play with them like Valentine, drummer Sammy Penn, trombonists Big Jim Robinson and Louis Nelson, and the alto saxophone ace Captain John Handy. It was Handy who inspired Sammy to take up the alto sax.

I asked him what was it in this music that affected him so deeply that he has spent his entire life playing it? “It’s the emotional power of the sound that holds so much love and respect. The whole heritage of the musicians’ lives is in their ears and in their notes. You pick up all their suffering, struggle and love.”

And he’s still doing it, 64 years later.