Venue: Ealing Jazz Club
Town: London, GB

Ealing Jazz Club was a music venue in Ealing, west London, England, which opened in 1959. It became London's first regular blues venue, with performances by the Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies band Blues Incorporated. Now commonly referred to as the Ealing Blues Club, the venue is now a nightclub called The Red Room. Ealing Jazz Club opened at 42A The Broadway, Ealing, in January 1959. The manager was Teheran-born student Fery Asgari who ran the venue for fellow students of Ealing Technical College. Asgari had been using Ealing Town Hall, then the upstairs ballroom of The Feathers, a pub opposite the Ealing Club, before taking on the premises, where he ran jazz nights on Thursdays and Fridays, and R&B on Saturdays. In a basement opposite Ealing Broadway station, it is reached by descending the narrow steps of the alley that leads to Haven Place. Korner and Davies moved their blues club at the Roundhouse pub in Wardour Street, the London Blues and Barrelhouse Club, to Ealing on 17 March 1962 after it was ejected for going electric. The Ealing venue had been suggested to them by Blues Incorporated singer Art Wood. Korner recalled: “The club held only 200 when you packed them all in. There were only about 100 people in all of London that were into the blues and all of them showed up at the club that first night”. The club is noteworthy as the place where, on 24 March 1962, Charlie Watts first met Brian Jones then, on 7 April 1962 Alexis Korner introduced Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to Brian Jones, and the nucleus of the Rolling Stones first came together. And it was where, nearly a year later, the classic line-up of the Rolling Stones, with Charlie Watts on drums played for the first time in public, on 12 January 1963. However, it was not until an Ealing gig on 2 February 1963 that Watts became the Stones' permanent drummer. Eric Clapton has recalled that occasionally he stood in for Mick Jagger at the club when the novice Rolling Stones singer had a sore throat. The