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Music / Afro-Caribbean community
For over three decades, The Coleherne was celebrated for its Sunday lunchtime music sessions, cutting across barriers of race, class, age and sexual orientation in a way unique in London. Starting with traditional jazz in the mid-1950s, followed by modern jazz, the seal was set in 1962 when pianist Russell Henderson arrived with two young students, fellow Trinidadians, to play their own brand of calypso-flavoured Latin jazz.

Henderson soon formed a regular trio with Stirling Betancourt on timbales and a succession of double-bassists. He created a Caribbean-oriented atmosphere and instituted what became one of London's most popular jam sessions. He played solo piano on weekend evenings, and, for the next 35 years, The Coleherne was the focus for dozens of musicians in search of a gig - much to the delight of brewers Bass Charrington. The 1969 Guide to London Pubs described how The Coleherne 'really comes into its own as a musical pub on Sunday mornings, with the appearance of a dynamic West Indian band'. The rich rhythmic mix involved percussionists including Errol Phillip aka "Blocker", and double-bassists Brylo Ford, Irving Clement and David 'Happy' Williams, followed by Clyde Davies who soon switched to electric bass guitar.

International jazz figures such as Johnny Griffin, Walter Davis Jr. and Philly Joe Jones contributed to this most democratic of jam-sessions, while locals included Eric Allandale, Graham Bond, Dave DeFries, Malcolm Griffiths, Rannie Hart, Joe Harriott, Shake Keane, Mike Osborne, Terri Quaye, Ernest Ranglin, John Surman and Olaf Vass. In the 1970s, the virtuoso folk guitarist Davey Graham was a regular. Audiences included rock and pop musicians such as Eric Burdon, Georgie Fame and Mick Jagger, actors Norman Beaton, Ram John Holder, Danny 'Pressure' Jackson, Horace James and Bari Jonson, poets Pete Brown and Michael Horovitz, publisher Peter Owen, and calypsonian Lord Kitchener.

In 1966, Henderson, Betancourt and Max Cherrie were recruited from The Coleherne to play steel-drums for the children's event organised by social worker Rhaune Laslett that became the first Notting Hill Carnival.

In 1973 The Coleherne's Sunday sessions were the subject of a documentary for the BBC-2 TV programme Full House, directed by Horace Ove and transmitted on 3 February 1973.