Gums and willow trees along the river and the sunlit river path from the highway bridge. This is where we came in, thirteen years ago. In the Melbourne Age and the Sydney Morning Herald of that year, I noted the superb roses, the churches, the brick from two now inactive quarries; that the courthouse was an art deco classic and the river vistas of willows and silvery gums were pure Streeton. I also said recklessly that this was Australia’s greatest jazz festival, though it was tiny at the time.
The river is the Ovens, which meets the King off through the trees to the east. I saw a platypus here in 1993, and, two years later, so did the Dutch drummer of legend Han Bennink, who returned this year.
I was sure that this was the greatest jazz festival because it was the only one that made an intense effort to present both the present and the past, and indeed possible future paths of the music, at the highest levels. Also music—the amount varies from year to year—that, in guitarist Ren Walters words, ’struggles to fit the category ”jazz”—or any other category for that matter’. By these criteria it still wins. While I don’t agree that it has got better and better each year in a smooth and steepish curve, I would say that this year was one of the very memorable ones—thirteen years later! That is a considerable achievement, in Australia or anywhere else.
My time was limited this year, but I heard two full days of music, much of it inspiring. First call was to hear Graeme Bell. I believe it is his intention, in his 89th year, to lead his Revival Band on special occasions, such as this festival, and to present Australian compositions from the rich field of local traditional jazz. Some of his own, and of course tunes by John Sangster, Roger Bell, Ade Monsbourgh, Dave Dallwitz and others. Two that I heard were by musicians who died not so long ago: Sangster and Dallwitz. The band is Bell, trumpeter Bob Henderson, reed players Jack Wiard and Paul Furniss, bassist Deiter Vogt and drummer Len Barnard.
The strength and elegance of Bell’s piano playing are undimmed, in an ensemble role or in lovely solo interludes. The band displayed the inherent musicality of traditional jazz: the lightness of touch where necessary, the superb balance of contrasting sonic elements, rough, smooth, sinuous or martially blasting, and the oddly relaxed yet trip-hammer release of the inimitable storm—tiered and shouting—of le tout ensemble.
Bob Henderson’s powerful, clear yet sometimes intriguingly angled trumpet lines, are more distinctive, or even original, than has been acknowledged. Paul Furniss is roundly acclaimed on all his instruments, but we might sometimes forget the tenor saxophone. This instrument is the one on which he pushed me back in my seat. It came weaving, swelling in volume, out of the ensemble. It felt as if Coleman Hawkins or Lucky Thompson or Don Byas was in the house.
From this inspiring recital in St Patrick’s Hall, where Bell had played on tours decades ago, I went to the Town Hall for Eric Boeren’s quartet from Holland. In many ways this was an extension of what I had just heard. They played four Ornette Coleman tunes and some by Boeren that just might (but not really), have also been written by Coleman. Where Boeren’s tunes were like Coleman’s, they most reminded me of a couple with eastern overtones from Ornette’s album Science Fiction.
An extension of Bell’s band? Of course. It swung in the unique Ornette way—one of the great contributions to the rhythmic language of jazz. It broke into joyful collective improvisation—sometimes lightly, sometimes with an explosive starburst effect. Sometimes it achieved real counterpoint, sometimes just startling instants of simultaneous exclamation. Boern played a long narrow cornet, rather like the first trumpet that Louis Armstrong played after changing from cornet, and he got an exceptionally clean bright sound—so clean and bright that it sounded silvery, like the plating of his instrument—which was deployed at times in the kind of pond-skipping skittery interval jumps we associate with the late Don Cherry. It jumped at times to impressive heights and seemed to glance down at us from up there for a moment, like a mirror flashed in the sun.
Dimension is what the music shared with Bell’s band; a forward swing and an expansion in space. Sean Bergin, looking like a huge rude farmer from the veldt, played brilliantly lucid and powerful alto saxophone lines. The rhythm section of bassist Ernst Glerum and drummer Han Bennink kept everything both up and really ’down’, which is true to the Ornette spirit.
You may think that references to the balmy paradisial aspects of a rural city like Wangaratta are redundant to a festival review, but they should make us wonder whether all the positive, or in truth negative, ions, or charged particles, make us receive music in a less jaded, perhaps even a more spiritual way. Wangaratta has from the very beginning showed that jazz styles after the Marsalis cut off point, and even up to this instant, can draw and please a range of people. Perhaps those blue skies are not due to the diffusion of blue light waves through water droplets – on which Romantic poet Shelley was in accord with science – but are, as claimed by the lunatic Willem Reich, in fact ’blue orgone energy’!
Anyway there was excitement in the air. Boeren’s band was joined by trombonist Joost Buis next day in St Patrick’s Hall in a recital that, following a fantastic partly composed and partly free-form fanfare that had the crowd yelling, used more pre-Ornette swing idioms, plus some powerful African feels. This was wonderful too. Needless to say, Han Bennink’s constant play of comically exaggerated facial expressions, plus his propensity to requisition all surrounding surfaces, hard or soft, to augment his drum kit, helped make this band extremely popular with young and old.
In the Town Hall I then heard Andrea Keller’s Aria Award-winning Bartok Project playing pieces heard on their album Mikrokosmos. As the name implies, these are piano miniatures by Bartok in each of which some technical exercise or didactic principle of 20th C music is imbedded. Bartok recorded a number of them. I have him playing 19 of the tiny pieces on side 2 of an album on which he also plays his Contrasts with violinist Joseph Szigetti and clarinettist Benny Goodman. Of these, numbers 128, 120 and 153 are in Keller’s repertoire, giving a good idea of how much she has extended and rearranged the pieces, distributing material among trombonist Adrian Sheriff, saxophonist and bass clarinettist Tim O’Dwyer, bassist Anita Hustas and drummer Danny Fisher.
The more I hear the album the more I like it, although the horns are recorded thinly when they play together, a common Australian failing. The fact that some virtually new melodic material is not exactly Bartokian worries me not at all. She has wedded Bartok to the present in a surprising way. Yet in concert I began to feel a remoteness after a while, until I moved from well back in the Town Hall to the front. It was a very acoustic experience, best heard close up, which is true of all chamber music if you ask me; specially chamber music with drums which, however lightly and brilliantly played, take a little colour off the other instruments when heard from a distance in a hall. A highlight for me was Sheriff’s sotto voce trombone on No 60. This was worthy of the great Juan Tizol.
Someone asked if Bryce Rhode was on Prozac. Now that’s not nice, but it is true that if Rohde and George Golla played off for the ”Most Laid Back” crown, it would be a savagely fought contest. With his detached and slightly arch manner and his beautiful silky suit with pale window pane pattern, Rhode gave the curious impression of being both larger than life and invisible. Like a great butler.
He is 80. Have people no mercy? In the 1950s his piano playing at Sydney’s El Rocco—before he went to live in laid back California—was very important, not least because it offered an alternative that put lyrical and harmonic beauty before the funkiness and hard swing that many younger men were presenting. But it did swing, certainly with a bit more percussive energy than now, especially on the records with Charles Munro. Yet, as Peter Rechniewski remarked, there is a kind of internal swing in his current playing.
Rohde got perhaps the most beautiful sound from the piano at the festival. One chord, and there it is, as recognizable as, say, George Shearing or Bill Evans, which means quite distinct from either, though having a family resemblance. It is a milky, pearly sound, yet very cleanly defined. The familiar tunes with their distinctive bass lines (played almost fearfully by Bruce Cale, who hadn’t had a crack at them for a long time), their piano and bass unisons, their brief contrapuntal interludes, occasional time changes and implications of two times held simultaneously, tap some quite magical feelings. The solo lines run immaculately, yet have many surprises. American drummer Lee Charlton was perfect, clean, shimmering, tactful yet energized and inventive.
At a contrasting level of energy next day, yet also presenting much sonic beauty, was Guthrie-Magnusson-Wilson. Apparently these fellows have made sport of me in the notes for their new CD because I said that tenor saxophonist Julian Wilson and drummer Will Guthrie had prematurely won the saxophone and drum competitions respectively here at Wangaratta some years back. You boys will pay for that. You cheated! You, ah, umm…PUT YOUR AGES UP!
Nothing like settling a score.
Before I ever heard Bill Frizell, Steve Magnusson had been ushering an orchestral range of guitar sounds into a musical flow whose logic might only grip you at the last moment. Some of these sounds are hard and electrically clanging, some have a dreaming effect. Sometimes he produces notes that seem to come out backwards. That is to say, the waves created by the initial attack form at the end of the note and vice versa. They are ribbons of sound, bolts of bright cloth pulled open in the air.
Using tape loops, electronic distortions and a beautiful range of acoustic tenor saxophone sounds, Julian Wilson, and a charismatically concentrated Guthrie at the drums, joined Magnusson in creating opiated sonic fields, before setting up irresistible rhythm patterns. The solos were alternatively hypnotic and explosive. This also made me feel very good, and the rest of the audience responded in kind.
As well as Graeme Bell and Bryce Rohde, we had another great statesman in master drummer in several styles, poet, matchless artist in spontaneous prose, Allan Browne. Last time I saw him, he did not seem long for the world and played with an oxygen bottle beside him. With a new lung, he looks younger than before. One of the bands he led, his New Orleans Rascals, played on Sunday afternoon in Holy Trinity Cathedral. They were trumpeter Eugene Ball (second behind Phil Slater in this year’s brass competition), clarinetist Chris Tanner, guitarist John Scurry, Browne—drumming and singing wonderfully—and bassist Howard Cairns.
This band played both Ornette Coleman’s Ramblin’ and a tune, Panama, first recorded by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. Playing acoustically, as Browne said, at the level of Scurry’s acoustic guitar, they also demonstrated the virtues of clarity and lightness. Just beautiful. Perfect for the church acoustics.
A great deal louder were Elliott Dalgliesh’s trio and Scott Tinkler’s band Drub in the Playhouse. While I could hear that both were in many ways fantastic, I was pretty much full of music by then. I have Elliott’s forthcoming album, on which he plays some of the same material, and it is a landmark in Australian music. Playing live with drummer Simon Barker and bassist Phillip Rex, he showed signs of not having exercised the concept in recent times. His lack of interaction with the other two meant that the point of his extremely high, hard, stark and severe playing on sopranino and alto sax was largely lost. To me at any rate. In this space there should have been no amplification of the saxophones. Not when played with that force.
The same drummer and bassist were joined by guitarist Carl Dewhurst in trumpeter Tinkler’s band. All thundered mightily in much greater accord. Next time I’ll take a break before hearing them. The Bennett’s Lane Big Band was much less demanding, and I enjoyed them a lot.
The spirit of free form duets at Wangaratta was upheld by Paul Grabowsky/Han Benninck (sensational by all reports) and Fiona Burnett/David Jones, which could hardly have failed to produce some great stuff. Unfortunately I missed both, one being on a day I wasn’t there.
I also failed twice to get in and see the sold out Town Hall concerts of American alto saxophonist Gary Bartz, but I caught him two days later at Sydney’s Basement. Reports from Wang were that one Bartz concert was excellent and the other pretty much transcendental. The first set at the Basement was both charming and exciting despite poor sound. It was loud and yet the piano, played with a unique drive by ex-Melburnian Barney McCall, was muffled. The second set was louder, oppressively so, and muddier. I left just before the level of excitement suddenly rose frighteningly, so I was later told.
On the Saturday night I had my yearly beer and a very pleasant conversation at the Pinsent Hotel with Eugene Ball, Grabowsky, Julian Wilson and other Melburnians while the jam session raged and foundered and raged again in the background. Anyone who might doubt that there is something a little different about Australian trad jazz would surely have been convinced if they’d been there to hear a Melbourne trumpeter singing, to the tune of the ancient song Manana, ’Bin Laden, Bin Laden, Bin Laden is good enough for me…’ I can’t think of anything to say about that.
The number of new and established things that I wanted to hear but couldn’t in my limited time, coupled with the quality of my core sample, tells me that this is still a very special festival.
Now, some very pretentious people are still bashing away at jazz for unknown reasons. Could it possibly be a threat to them. This is not conceivable. They are rewarded and encouraged by our institutions as much as seems reasonable, and perhaps beyond. But jazz is a whipping boy for them, although they don’t actually turn up and hear any. Recently an editor asked me to write a story about a famous jazz club. After he told me no less than four times that he didn’t want ’a jazz story’, I pulled out, believing I was not up to the feat. Does anyone get stuck into country music in this way? Strange.
Well, the spirit at Wangaratta is who cares about any of that? Not once did I hear anyone wasting their time criticising some other form of music. It seemed perfectly natural for some young Melbourne musicians to incorporate contemporary sounds and rhythms one day, then play some traditional jazz the next. After all these years, Wangarrata is still like that!