NOW here's a funny thing.

A man asks a friend for a loan of £12,000 because another friend borrowed it to undergo plastic surgery and now he doesn't know what he looks like to get it back.

John Gibbon still laughs at the joke, even though the man who told it to him, jazz musician Ronnie Scott, died after overdosing on barbiturates five years ago.

John, like countless others in the jazz world, misses Ronnie dreadfully. He was his idol. He was also one of the very many musicians who considered John good enough to join them on stage in the band.

There are a few admirable go-getters in this life, people who achieve much in far-flung places while not losing contact with the area where they were raised.

John Gibbon is one of them. Merthyr-born and just turned 48, he came to Abergavenny as a young boy and still lives in the house at Old Barn Way his family bought in the 1960s.

It's a modest, unadorned abode, mainly because John has been too absorbed in a musical milieu that involves being out of the house a lot and keeping late hours.

He has earned his living playing drums in North London theatre pit orchestras for pantomime, providing the rhythmic crest of a wave for such jazz notables as Scott, Henry Lowther, George Melly, Mornington Lockett and Dick Pearce and running two Welsh jazz clubs in his home town and in Cardiff.

"I like pantos because they are fun but when I look back at the summer shows and the time I had at the nightclubs I feel it is great to have done all that," he said. "But my true interest is playing jazz.

"If you are not good enough in jazz and panto, there is no escape. People simply won't work with you again.

"The first modernist I played with was the great Art Themen. You have to perform with men like that to learn the tricks.

"All jazz musicians are mad - some are extremely nice but others are very difficult."

This is said by a man who has never had a drum lesson in his life and learnt a lot from listening to records. His early 'kit' consisted of a suitcase and sundry pots and pans.

Last week's Jazz in the Park extravaganza at Pontypool owed much to the interest he and others have helped generate in the music here, especially at the Coach and Horses in Abergavenny, his second home.

He is the guide and mentor of Abergavenny youth band Kool Kats and teaches percussion to adult special needs students in the town.

When I arrived at his house, the dog next door started barking, a signal for John to appear. This distant canine substitute doorbell seemed like the supreme example of parsimony.

John would probably not quibble. The kind of jazz life he lives does not weigh down a man with riches, though he looks supremely fit and sanguine for a someone who belongs to a profession in which the Grim Reaper crops the young and prodigiously-talented.

The kitchen of his home opens straight into his office, a little box-room decked with books and plastered with posters of the concerts he's promoted and played in.

There was a time when jazz for this former art college student was played far away. Now, John Gibbon's home is where everything that interests him is on his doorstep.