The Permanent Underground: Australian Contemporary Jazz in the New Millenium
Platform Papers: Quarterly Essays in the Performing Arts,
No 16, April 2008
(Currency House)
By Peter Rechniewski
Peter Rechniewski’s essay The Permanent Underground has generated considerable debate about the state of jazz in Australia and the steps that might be taken to improve the situation of the art form in this country.
A number of prominent people in the music community were asked to review the work and their responses are below.
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John Clare
The Permanent Underground does not purport to be a history of Australian jazz from a musical point of view. As a history of arts politics in relation to jazz, it concisely describes the successes and failures of jazz in trying to find a place within the spectrum of arts that are seriously considered and, where it is deemed necessary, assisted. Rechniewski believes that the stream of modern and contemporary jazz in Australia has reached successive peaks of creativity that have not been met adequately by support systems which might have better exploited and sustained them. In this he allocates blame to organisations within jazz, including SIMA, for their failures in strategy and presentation.
Factors beyond the control of the arts world – except through lobbying – are also described. These include licensing laws in New South Wales of course. A brief overview of festivals is here – their triumphs (notably Wangaratta) and their inadequacies and missed opportunities.
Moving to the aerial view, Rechniewski also charts and analyses allocations of funding across the arts. This is not unfriendly. I should point out that politics is not something I am drawn to. I take an interest in politics generally out of duty. If you are going to vote, you ought to take an interest. Whether jazz should have proportionately more funding I will leave for others to debate. My input here is pretty much in the area of direct experience.
Where the book is most trenchant is in its regretful comparison of the importance acknowledged and support given to jazz in Europe with its exposure in Australian media and, hand in glove, the patronising attitude toward jazz found within the extremes of high art and pop culture millieux here. Rechniewski notes that when I was jazz critic for The Sydney Morning Herald I was given generous space. Unfortunately, my successor, John Shand, has been more meanly treated.
The time to which R (from here on we will adapt the Russian form – or is it French? – although the fellow is Polish) refers was an unusual one for coverage of the arts. Nor has newspaper space devoted to the arts contracted to the levels that preceded it. I contributed at that time on diverse topics (including sport) to the SMH, the Review section of The Australian Financial Review, The National Times and Nation Review. When I wanted to write a piece on jazz I was given plenty of space. Editors at that time respected my judgment as to what was important in the area, and what we should cover. Other arts writers were similarly treated.
Jazz had never been given so much space before. In fact all arts reviews had been considerably fewer and shorter before that. Since papers bulked up unmanageably with magazines and supplements, arts coverage has been increasingly trivialised, according to R. We will return to that. R notes that jazz in that period enjoyed a surge, which declined as promoters jumped on the bandwagon and brought out too many artists – some poorly chosen – in too short a space of time. The boom became a glut. The recent triumph of Ornette Coleman showed just how successful jazz at the highest levels can be. If we had one such event every month, people would look ever more carefully at their budgets.
The question of media exposure to international events is secondary in my view. Ornette was given reasonable exposure, and I note that Lynden Barber has published a long interview in The Australian with Sonny Rollins, prior to his unexpected forthcoming visit. There is a local scene of remarkable vitality right now. It is sometimes very well attended, sometimes not. This is what should be encouraged, because it is much less expensive for prospective audiences, and therefore more capable of being sustained. But it is very difficult to convince editors that this phenomenon is worth an article of comparable size to those given, for instance, to the reunion of a classic rock band.
My main journalism these days, apart from writing on this site, is in the form of book reviews for The Sun-Herald. This I very much enjoy, but when I am asked write on jazz there are editors who always insert a caveat that I should not treat the subject too seriously. How else am I to understand the editor who twice asked me to write on jazz topics while warning me that, “I don’t want a jazz piece.”? On the second occasion he repeated this four times during our conversation. It seemed absurd, and I declined the commission. On the matter of attitudes to jazz, you may find some interest in my piece The Great Jazz Renunciation on this site.
Shand has complained to me, quite understandably of being given far more space to write about a mildly amusing cocktail novelty band than to review Ornette Coleman or Dave Holland.
R seems to think these attitudes can be changed. I am far more pessimistic and have long treated it as a joke.
Rechniewski (I’ve given my wrists a rest – and here is indeed an illustration of a parallel silly attitude to long names with syllables we may not be sure how to pronounce that is not going to go away soon either) has presented the general outline of grand plan (and perhaps invited K Rudd comparisons) for uniting the efforts of jazz organisations to present a case for the recognition and encouragement of this still evolving form. It involves the dissolution of much Melbourne/Sydney rivalry. I see signs of this much to be wished for boon. Once again you may find some interest in my piece Melbourne & Sydney: The Tone Of Two Cities on this site. Also A Few Words About Wada. That R has created a site on which you can write in essay form and, however self-importantly, refer to your own work knowing it is still there, is one of his many achievements.
Rechniewski points to the advantages of the now non-existent jazz coordinator position. That had its problems too.
This is a valuable book, neatly written, that will serves as a reference point for all future discussion of the area.
John Clare is the author of Bodgie Dada and the Cult of Cool (UNSW Press). He writes on music and culture for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sun-Herald.
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Mark Isaacs
After reading The Permanent Underground, I had several telephone chats and email volleys with the author as well a five-hour conversation when we met recently at a Sydney football club.
I have several interests that must be declared at the outset. As a jazz artist the vast majority of my performances in Sydney over the last 22 years have been as a result of Peter’s artistic direction of the Sydney Improvised Music Association (SIMA). Peter engaged my trio in 1986 in a double bill at The Basement along with the first Sydney performance of Ten Part Invention. I’ve played for SIMA since then and up to the present day, although there were a couple of periods where I voluntarily eschewed SIMA performances due to disputes between Peter and myself. Some years ago I – along with others – publicly criticised SIMA and also challenged the former NSW Jazz Co-ordination Association which auspiced the National Jazz Development Office. Peter was Vice-President of the Association for many years and I stood against him – unsuccessfully – for that position in 1999.
It would be fair to say that there’s some complex history there – personal and political tensions coupled with the inevitable interdependency that occurs in a small scene between established artists and administrators of presenting organizations. When I accepted the invitation to respond to The Permanent Underground I wondered how credible my piece might be viewed as being, given all the above. All I can say in that regard is that I remain committed to Australian jazz music beyond my personal ambitions as one of the artists it has spawned. And I firmly believe that Peter is likewise committed to the music beyond whatever aspirations he may have to continue to influence the development of its infrastructure. It is upon that common ground – and it alone – that I write this piece. And it’s from that place that I declare without hesitation that without Peter’s voluminous energy and commitment, Sydney contemporary jazz – and some aspects of the scene nationwide – would be not so much “underground” as long ago dead in the water.
The Permanent Underground starts – as good history often does – with a story. In 2003 Melbourne-based saxophonist Jamie Oehlers won a prestigious international saxophone competition at the famous Montreux Jazz Festival. He had come second in the same competition a year earlier. Moreover the year Jamie won, another Australian, Willow Neilson, came third while yet another Aussie, David Rex, was amongst the 12 finalists. As Peter compellingly remarks “I can find no evidence of any other international music competition in which Australians have made up a quarter of the finalists, let alone provided two of the three place-getters, including the winner” before going on to document the paucity of coverage this received in the media (Oehlers’ performance in Sydney upon returning from the competition was not reviewed and only a “very observant reader” would have noticed the “tiny item” in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age announcing his win). From this specific example of no featured celebration of an unprecedented achievement appearing in the arts pages of the broadsheets or on the ABC arts or current affairs TV programs (who hasn’t already given up on a place for the arts on commercial television?) Peter builds his general case regarding media marginalisation of jazz.
The essay goes on to recount the recent history of the modern jazz movement in Australia starting in the late 1950s with the El Rocco Jazz Cellar in Sydney and Jazz Centre 44 in Melbourne to the present day. Peter takes us through the art form’s rising and falling fortunes as clubs opened and closed and private entrepreneurs came and went. Government-funded jazz organisations appeared in the 1980s only to have many of the positive effects they brought militated against by external factors, such as Sydney’s punitive licensing laws (only recently repealed).
Peter’s potted history has already been the site of some inevitable dispute over detail – no doubt it’s not without flaw or fully comprehensive – but the essay is not without subtlety. Emerging as the salient point to be gleaned from what seems initially intended as a historical account for its own sake is above all the deep inconsistency of tenure that jazz has experienced over the decades, which – coupled with the media’s laconic interest – leads Peter to postulate his view of the solution to this “permanent underground”.
Before doing so though, Peter tackles head on the high-handed idea often heard that jazz is in fact dead as a “site of innovation”, an argument that has been refuted by some international commentators who have observed that the site of innovation has not shifted away from the art form so much as geographically away from the USA. Peter extends their largely Eurocentric argument to encompass Australian jazz and goes on to analyse its state at the current time, including a more detailed appraisal of its media coverage (or lack thereof).
From there Peter proposes his tripartite solution:
(1) increased Government funding
(2) the formulation of a national plan for jazz which Peter offers up a first draft of for discussion
(3) the formation a new national advocacy body to consult on the plan and lobby for the artform on an ongoing basis.
These points can all be boiled down to what Peter views as the antidote to his essay’s title (if I may be permitted to weakly pun upon it): permanent infrastructure.
Though Peter’s rather sanguine view of the previous national jazz
organisation and plan could easily be disputed, even its fiercest critics (and perhaps I could be counted as one of those) should not draw from this specific instance a general argument against any kind of national service organisation and a concomitant plan for jazz. I readily welcome Peter’s initiative to start a process to create both. I also hope that there will be a vast improvement on what resulted from the efforts of the past.
Peter says “the jazz community must not allow personal agendas or slow consultative processes to destroy another opportunity to take control of its future”. The language is uncharacteristically porous here. Does he mean that the jazz community must accept slow consultative processes as inevitable and not become self-defeatingly fractious over them, as in the past (in his view)? Or does he believe that it is in fact these same slow (or indeed non-existent) consultative processes that themselves destroy trust in the community (and hence all else) and that therefore the leadership must pledge to stringently avoid this paradigm? From talking to Peter I have a sense that it is the latter and this is to be welcomed. It is easy to impute the motivation of “personal agendas” to those who lobby on behalf of what affects them directly, but this must never be used as a blunt instrument to attempt to shut down debate since individual experience is almost always reflected in whole sectors of a community. And finally, it is paramount that governance be impeccably constituted and at all times transparently accountable.
Regarding “consultative processes” the web offers a practicable way for informal consultation across a national community to take place, and the new national service organisation (which is at interim committee stage I believe) should ensure that the constituency feels enfranchised and can take ownership of the plan as it evolves. Leadership needs to take decisions of course, but it should nonetheless listen to all available and reasonable views and respond to them in a timely way even if only to explain why certain views cannot be incorporated. It could be jazz’s 2020 Summit.
On the matter of funding, Peter gives too little emphasis to sources other than government. Corporate sponsorships and the seeking of private philanthropy (even at modest levels) remain under-developed in jazz compared to classical music. Peter specifies an objective to raise “public funding allocated to jazz to a total of $2.4m [per annum]” from its current level which he has analysed at $1.3m. While funding to jazz clearly needs to increase – and that would include Government funding – it would have been better to ascertain the total of public and private funding and set a benchmark for this aggregate figure to rise to. This would allow for a possible change in the mix between public and private funding within an overall total funding goal.
Further to this, though it does not detract from his overall argument, it is unfortunate that there is an arithmetical error in one of Peter’s tables that understates the total Australia Council core jazz funding to principle jazz organisations for 2002 by $26,000. To careless addition, add the incidental matter of less than rigorous proofreading: “classical music and operate [sic] predominate”
Better research would have revealed that Peter’s clear implication that ABC Radio National’s The Music Show only interviews international – and not Australian – jazz artists is wildly incorrect.
Australian jazz artists interviewed on the program include Alister Spence, Matt McMahon, Phil Slater, Andrea Keller, Paul Grabowsky, Mike Nock, Bob Sedergreen, Julien Wilson, Tony Gorman, Sandy Evans, Barney McCall, David Theak, The Necks, Judy Bailey, Cathy Harley, James Greening, Andrew Robson, James Muller, Bernie McCann, Bob Barnard, Michelle Nicole, Gai Bryant, Tim Stevens, Aaron Choulai, Alan Browne, Tony Gould, Colin Hopkins, Peter Knight and myself.
The show’s reviews of jazz CDs, by Andrew Ford and Jessica Nicholas, though “occasional”, are nonetheless regular – broadcast every three months, as is the case with classical reviews.
None of these errors or omissions weaken Peter’s argument about media marginalisation, but it is nonetheless important to give credit where it’s due.
As one would expect, the book is well written, though some abrupt changes of tone and style make for a somewhat bumpy ride. One tone – which appears only momentarily – is unfortunate. Peter refers to vocalist Kristin Berardi being the subject of an item on the 7:30 Report and tells us that “some say that that only happened because, behind the scenes, ‘there was a friend who had a friend’”. The jazz scene, like any other, is rife with unsubstantiated gossip but none should be reproduced in a serious essay of this kind.
Later in the book Peter discusses the Australia Council cutting all funding to the NSW and national jazz co-ordination programs in 2001 and says “Despite assurances by Music Board officers that the decision was made ‘on the points’, suspicion remains that the Board, desperate to find money for new clients, saw in the jazz community’s disunity an opportunity it could not ignore”. Such a serious suggestion regarding the Board’s motivation should not be couched this way. If “suspicion remains” we need to know who other than Peter is suspicious or otherwise he should be bold enough to attribute the suspicion only to himself and not include invisible others. And one wonders how he can say without attribution that The Necks and Paul Grabowsky “have both been careful to construct their public profiles by distancing themselves from the jazz scene”. In the case of Paul Grabowsky it is odd to presume such premeditated PR spin in the activities of a genuine artistic polymath.
Despite these flaws I believe the essay to be timely and one of the most commendable achievements (other than the music itself) that the Australian jazz scene can point to in recent times. It – and the energy Peter will undoubtedly bring to the new national jazz advocacy body and in formulating the consultative plan – will go a long way to redressing the situation that Peter eloquently laments at the close of the essay.
“As American critic Gary Giddins puts it, ‘Jazz musicians have virtually no access to the machinery of capitalism’. In Australia, at present, they have no more than a small, uncomfortable and precarious seat at the table of subsidised music. They deserve much better”.
Australian jazz is lucky that 40 years ago Peter Rechniewski as a schoolboy wandered into El Rocco Jazz Cellar and clearly fell in love with the music, and that this passion has endured all the intervening vicissitudes.
Mark Isaacs is an internationally-acknowledged pianist and composer in jazz and classical music. He has received an Australia Council Fellowship and other awards. He served for two years on the NSW Ministry of the Arts Music Committee and created and maintains the jazz discussion website Ozjazzforum, now in its eighth year. Mark has curated the jazz program at the Brisbane Powerhouse, including the Brisbane Jazz Festival.
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Bruce Johnson
This is one section of an overview I have been invited to write on the publication. The other will appear in the July 2008 edition of Platform Papers in the ‘Reader’s Forum’ responses to No 16. They complement each other, and will be most effectively understood if read together. While there is inevitable overlap, I have tried to shape each section according to the more likely respective reader profiles. For readers with a specific jazz focus, it is useful to say that the Currency House’s Platform Papers series invites and stimulates discussion of contemporary issues in Australian performing arts. Its 16 quarterly issues have so far addressed such fields as theatre and film as well as more general questions relating to arts policy. It should be a source of satisfaction to the Australian jazz community that the importance of jazz is thus recognized in this way, and it would be encouraging to believe that that community as a whole should at the very least be aware of the publication, and that every person who holds some jazz administrative position will read it closely. For reasons that will become apparent, however, Peter’s arguments are consistent with other recent jazz commentary that suggests that the publication will receive only erratic attention from this constituency.
That I refer to the author throughout by his first name reflects an interest that should be declared. He and I worked together for about a decade on the committee of the government-funded Jazz Co-ordination Association. When I stepped down as its president, I published a tribute to my colleagues in Jazzchord, and it has a bearing on this review. Along with the NSW and National Jazz Co-ordinator Eric Myers, Peter was one of group of whom I could say that we knew how to conduct the most robust disagreement without ever falling out personally or compromising our ability to work together constructively. We continue to be friends, with a respect that I hope is mutual. We can disagree, as I will sometimes do here. But that disagreement does not reflect any hidden agenda or long-harboured secret grievance. For me it is a model of the whole point of collective activity. Any committee that agrees on everything is superfluous. And I emphasise this because, as Peter implies, one of the besetting problems in certain sections of the jazz community as an effective political lobby is its inability to argue constructively with itself.
This monograph is not a ‘who’s who’ of current Australian jazz. It is welcome sign of increasing maturity in the jazz scene, that this goes beyond the jazz version of the ‘great artist’ attitude to cultural history and policy. Ultimately, Peter’s interest is in how that scene interacts with arts policy and its programmes. It is about political engagement in the public sphere – and by ‘political’, I mean here in the wider sense of power relations. He opens with a brief overview of developments in those relations since the 1950s, primarily as they have been mediated and quantified through economic support not simply of performance, but of infrastructure. This is a welcome update of my own study that brought us up to its year of publication in 1995 (“Jazz and the cultural politics of Australian music”, Context 10 (Summer 1995), pp.11-26), and comparisons are most instructive, though I won’t pursue them here. In the intervening years a number of contextual changes have taken place. Peter’s observation that internationally, the centre of gravity for jazz has arguably moved towards Europe (p. 23), is of fundamental importance in an era of highly mediated globalization. To illustrate in the most practical terms, this affects career choices regarding international ‘apprenticeships’, ‘sabbaticals’ publicity and touring schedules. The shift is part of a changing international dynamic in which a fixation on funding local performance activity is simply inadequate. All expressive forms require service organizations, not simply to publish journals and mail-outs, but to resituate their cultural locations in a powerfully mediatised age. Peter finds ‘no advocacy or service organizations operating at a national level’ in Australia (p. 27). I would point out that in fact there is one, that is the Australian Jazz Archives, housed in the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, though I also recognize that this is a bit peripheral to the centre of his horizon, in which the enforced current dormancy (at the very least) of the National Jazz Co-ordination programme and its national journal Jazzchord, is the most lamentable ‘vanishing act’. I use the term to allude to the recent State and Commonwealth funded study Peter refers to on the decline of live music opportunities in NSW (Bruce Johnson and Shane Homan, Vanishing Acts: An Inquiry into the State of Live Popular Music Opportunities in New South Wales. Commissioned by the NSW Ministry for the Arts, and the Australia Council. Published May 2003). Like that study, The Permanent Underground recognizes that the problems jazz has with securing recognition and support, go well beyond questions of music, to explore much larger changes in the culture.
Subsidising concerts series, tours and compositional projects simply is not enough. Major arts organizations have well-paid administrators. Jazz is the poor relation here (p. 44). And even those we have are over-burdened with the kind of routine office work that prevents something absolutely essential in a twenty-first century cultural infrastructure, from academia to the arts. Creative administration requires time allocated for just thinking, for making and developing visions, and never more so than now, when technological change proceeds at such a rate that we need monthly ‘refreshers’. A jazz association that has no time for anything but typesetting its magazine, taking letters to the post office, and organizing the next of its long-unchanged series of music events, is basically the cultural equivalent of a third world economy. I will develop some of these issues in the companion-piece to this review, but for jazz readers, it seems to me the basic lessons in Peter Rechniweski’s monograph are the need to engage with imagination and determination with the funding bodies, and in ways that require a broader and longer-term imagination than just organising succession of performances.
Bruce Johnson is the author of The Inaudible Music: Jazz, Gender and Australian Modernity (Currency Press, 2000) and The Oxford Companion to Australian Jazz (Oxford University Press, 1987), among many other publications.
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Lynette Irwin
Peter Rechniewski’s paper provides an overview of the history of Australian contemporary jazz, the media’s neglect of the art form and the successes of Australian jazz artists in the national and international arena. It also highlights the limited infrastructure and government funding for jazz, and the challenges facing the jazz community in the new millennium. Finally, it proffers suggestions for increasing the profile of, and generating growth for, the contemporary jazz sector.
Within the limits for arguing his case in this essay, Peter has identified a number of valuable points that conceal the Australian jazz scene in a permanent underground.
Peter correctly states that the coverage of jazz in Australian newspapers is “shameful” given “the growing impact of Australian modern and contemporary jazz … widely acknowledged overseas”, an impact enhanced by touring ensembles and the successes of our jazz artists at international competitions. This acute and woeful fact relegates the jazz art form to an almost zero presence in the public sphere in our country.
The reasons why there is only limited coverage of jazz in the print media and non-commercial radio (“…ABC Radio…cut jazz broadcasting by 35%…” in 1991), and why commercial stations exclude jazz altogether, are debatable.
Peter writes that serious coverage of the arts in the Australian press has been pushed aside by “pop culture trivia and celebrity gossip”. Is jazz too un-groovy, unfashionable to report on? Are arts writers ignorant of the national and international jazz scene and limited by time to research it? Do jazz musicians hinder their own promotion by not transferring information to those willing and/or available to support them? Do our jazz musicians have the skills to write a media release and or the time and resources to distribute these to media outlets?
Certainly jazz musicians have limited financial resources to pay for the cost of a publicist to announce to the media their achievements, gigs, CD launches and tours. In Melbourne, the Australian city Peter identifies that “…can boast a jazz scene with the highest profile …” jazz musicians fees for “…four to six performances …. may still only generate a total of $350 – $500.”
Jazz artists spend their time creating and rehearsing mostly for no pay and often play for door deals and meals when venues choose to engage a jazz band. Time and money are in short supply. Musicians usually need an extra job to buy reeds, strings, drum heads, manuscript and other equipment necessary to create and play their music, as well as to feed themselves and their children, pay their rent or mortgage and bills. This all adds to the difficulty of paying for a publicist or doing their own publicity in order to actively promote their work.
“Lacking the financial clout that comes from having a mass audience like that enjoyed by pop/rock music, and without the cultural prestige of classical music that attracts relatively generous levels of funding and corporate sponsorship, jazz finds it hard to acquire the public profile it deserves,” is an honest observation.
Peter correctly advises that national touring of jazz ensembles “…is rarely profitable, and in too many cases the musicians themselves end up out of pocket.” This is also the case for international tours where funding from the Australia Council allows for up to $20,000. Given the cost of international travel, accommodation, freight, ground transport and meals, other expenses plus contingencies and, excluding rehearsals and composing fees, a
five-piece jazz ensemble travelling to Europe, for example, would need to generate a substantial amount from other sources to break even or, god forbid, make a profit! Without a benefactor (government or private), a jazz musician would not consider leaving their stable place of employment unless money was no object. I suggest that this is the exception rather than the rule.
In Australia, jazz has been fostered not only by non-profit jazz organisations but also by individual teachers who feel it is important to share their love of the music and inspire their students to pursue jazz within secondary schools. This is particularly the case within the Western Australian and Queensland public education systems that have many jazz ensembles, and also within tertiary institutions that support a jazz department.
Having intimate knowledge from my work in Melbourne of the many jazz artists who supplement their living by teaching, I am aware of the private education system in Melbourne that supports jazz ensembles, though I lack information on the public education sector.
Peter writes that “at present only Melbourne’s jazz scene (and perhaps Brisbane’s) seems to have consolidated all the gains made in the last decade, learnt from the failures and is enjoying a period of stability and development.” I suggest that what distinguishes these flourishing scenes is the ability of dedicated and passionate musicians and organisers to work together to foster development and raise the profile (although not always successfully) of contemporary jazz.
The affordable cost of liquor licenses in Victoria has increased venue numbers and made it possible for owners to deliver live music to patrons. Other states need to lobby their governments to replicate Victoria’s astute decision.
These circumstances however do not achieve for Melbourne, or for that matter any place where contemporary jazz music is performed in Australia, a successful outcome or income for jazz artists or for the organisations supporting jazz performances.
Peter’s essay rightly highlights that “…the Australian jazz sector is… financially unstable, with a frail jazz culture and weak infrastructure.” I understand him to mean that the contemporary jazz scene is in a weakened state that can be easily broken or damaged, and that its potential is unlikely to be realised. In my view he is correct in his thinking.
The quandary for all jazz artists whether they be emerging or established within the Australian scene is how to financially survive and continue to create within a society that has limited performance opportunities and infrastructure, diminishing funding, less access to jazz broadcasting and a media that considers jazz a negligible art form.
For those too young to have knowledge of contemporary Australian jazz history or those new to the art form, Peter’s understanding of the scene (particularly in Sydney and Melbourne) is insightful. Pertaining to the rise of Brisbane’s jazz profile, the Music Arts Club initiated a contemporary jazz movement and the legacy continued with the Pinnacles Music Festival from 1993 to 2002.
Peter’s information regarding the demise in funding of infrastructure for New South Wales and Victoria is intriguing and interesting. His suggestions to rectify the insufficient funding of the sector are timely considering the collapse in performance opportunities and neglect by media and government to fully recognise the valuable contribution of Australian jazz to our culture. Peter’s contribution to debate on the Australian contemporary jazz scene requires further reflection and consideration.
Lynette Irwin has an extensive history within the Australian music scene. Over the last 22 years she has directed, produced, presented, promoted and toured local, national, international jazz and contemporary music artists and ensembles in Australia and toured Australian artists internationally. She has worked in production, stage management and as artist’s liaison officer for many festivals in Brisbane and regional Queensland, including the Queensland Biennial, Brisbane Festival, Ambiwerra Jazz, Warana and Heat Festivals. She has served on Playing Australia’s Contemporary Music Touring Program Committee and for Arts Queensland and the Australia Council as a peer assessor. In 2004 she was appointed Artistic Director of the Melbourne Women’s International Jazz Festival is currently Presidents of Jazz Queensland and Secretary of Q Music. Lynette is a jazz broadcaster on 4MBS Classic FM Community Radio, runs the CD label Pinnacles Music and is Creative Director and Producer at Absolute Events Pty Ltd.