IT WAS the summer of 1973. The Victoria and Albert Museum in plush South Kensington was showing Val Wilmer’s powerfully evocative exhibition of jazz and blues photographs, Jazz Seen: The Face of Black Music.

There too for a rare and final London recital was the veteran virtuoso New Orleans clarinettist Albert Nicholas, who was to die that year. In his younger days he had been tutored by the master Crescent City clarinet genius Lorenzo Tio, and had played in the bands of King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong.