Can This Possibly Be True?

I've just seen the website of the pub that's about 40 seconds walk from my front door. It's been newly relaunched as a club called 'Tufnells' - apparently there'll be comedy, music... all kinds of shenanigans. I'm pleased, but that's not the whole story.

I'm mainly aghast. Because if you look on their website (which you can do if you click here) the first thing it tells you is that Tufnells is:

"steeped in music history... the venue has played host to some of world's most famous musicians and singers - Miles Davis and John Coltrane..."

Miles Davis?! John Coltrane?!?!

Could they really have played at the pub at the top of my road? When? Why? What possible combination of fateful mishaps led two of the greatest musical visioniaries of the 20th century to even be in Tufnell Park, let alone playing at the local pub?

Were they even... perhaps... possibly... playing there together? I know they did play together a lot, but that was in places like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Paris and, yes, probably London as well - but surely Central London. Surely Soho.

Is Tufnell Park the Soho of North London? (And doesn't that sentence sound like a parochial jazz version of the voice over from Sex and the City? Possibly a new show called Jazz and the Neighbourhood.)

There is of course the other possibility - that I have been shockingly misled by the website of a newly launched club night at a local pub. You'll notice they don't say 'including Miles Davis and John Coltrane'. There's just that enigmatic elipsis, allowing the over-eager local jazzer to join the dots and come to his own conclusions.

So I'm aghast and sceptical at the same time.

But then again, if it is just plain old hokum, why did they choose Miles and Coltrane? If you're going to mislead, why not let people think that Prince played there? Or Ray Charles? For god's sake, why not The Beatles, Marvin Gaye and Engelbert Humperdinck?

Why not claim that the heart of Frank Sinatra is buried under the cash till?

If anybody has any knowledge or evidence that could corroborate (or otherwise) this jazz conundrum, you have to share it with me.