Towards the growth of an underground: a commentary on Peter Rechniewski’s essay The Permanent Underground (in Platform Papers No 16, Currency House, Sydney, 2008; pp.70)
Peter Rechniewski’s purpose in this valuable analysis and synthesis is to promote the development of jazz in Australia, by encouraging journalistic interest, public funding, national coordination, and consequently, audience development. The succinct argument is largely presented at the level of the powerful exemplar, mainly because more detailed cumulative (e.g. statistical) evidence is lacking and though much needed, will required considerable effort to obtain.
Rechniewski considers the history of Australian contemporary jazz, and emphasises the high quality of the music and its ‘dramatic transformation and expansion’ (p.5) between the mid-1980s and the present. In his view, we now have a ‘major contemporary jazz scene’ in Melbourne, while that in Sydney, where there are most jazz musicians, is ‘in crisis’ (p.6). ‘The Australian contemporary jazz scene is experiencing a period of considerable vitaility’ (p.54), yet overall, he views the sector as a ‘permanent underground’, and hence the title of his book.
But happily Rechniewski far from being a defeatist. His main purpose is to propose the ‘type of collective response the jazz community needs to make’ (p.7) in order to deal with its problems, and perhaps even emerge above ground. His key proposals are for a doubling of public subsidy, based on a new ‘National Jazz Plan’, which forms the substance of his pp.50-54 (Chapter 8). These flow from a brief description of the recent international achievements of Australian jazz, the poor critical and journalistic coverage of them (pp.2-5), and from his historical survey.
At this point I should make explicit my own vested interests in this area, as a long-standing composer-improviser, substantially connected to the jazz tradition, and as the founder and leader of the creative sound arts ensemble austraLYSIS. I am also the chair of the Australian Music Centre (AMC), whose objectives focus on the promotion of Australian music by seeking to make it adequately available online in sonic and notated forms, and appropriately supported by extensive meta-data. The AMC is particularly striving at present to attract the greater interest and involvement of improvisers and electroacoustic musicians, who are under-represented in our materials. So it is not surprising that I strongly support the objectives Rechniewski promotes. I also have no doubt that the current quality of Australian jazz is exceptional, and that it needs more support and audience to develop maximally.
I will restrict my discussion of the book to a consideration of the historical survey, and some comments about the further analysis of the economic and creative situation of jazz compared with other musics and other arts in Australia. The book provides a valuable time-line of Australian contemporary jazz since the 50s, particularly in terms of the organisational supports it had, noting the importance of the formation in the early 80s of the Melbourne Jazz Co-op (MJC), and the Sydney Improvised Music Association (SIMA), a major achievement of Rechniewski himself and an organization of which he is still the very active President. There is no discussion of the artistic and technical nature of the music’s transformation during these periods, such as I have tried to contribute towards in other booksi, as Rechniewski generously recognises. But such discussion has no necessary place in Rechniewksi’s book, as becomes increasingly apparent as he moves towards his proposals. I have no quibble with the historical information, noting that I am familiar with the scene at first hand here in Australia only since 1988. Chapter 3 is entitled ‘The end of jazz?’ After an appropriately brief cry that Wynton Marsalis has led the music into an ‘aesthetic cul-de-sac’ (p.23), referencing UK critic Stuart Nicholson, Rechniewski concludes by dismissing this complaint. In agreement with some of my own arguments (1), he concludes that our present heterodoxy, in which improvisers outside, around and within overtly jazz-oriented music interact successfully across wide parts of that spectrum, is an exceptionally healthy and productive one from an artistic perspective.
Chapter 4 is a comparison of the jazz scenes in different Australian cities, noting for example the lack of performance opportunities (largely related to venues) in Sydney, and their relative abundance in Melbourne. This chapter will be useful information for many, particularly for bureaucrats who need to adjudicate on the music’s development through crude financial instruments.
By Chapters 5 and 6, Rechniewski begins to assemble his case that jazz is poorly represented in Australian media, and underfunded from the public purse. I am again in agreement with his argument, but in the future it needs to be fleshed out more fully, in the terms that politicians and public servants can find even more convincing. The qualitative data on jazz in the media can be the subject of future and recurrent quantitative studies; I have not searched carefully whether any such data exist dealing with Australia, comparing jazz with other musics, or comparing Australia with other countries, but they are certainly not extensive. Rechniewski’s funding analysis is depressing, as were the similar simple analyses published by Bruce Johnson and myself which he references. Again this chapter should be an informative challenge to politicians and arts bureaucrats: do they realise that the average SIMA or MJC gig is supported by less than 900 dollars of public subsidy (using Rechniewski’s figures )? Do they realise how little the musicians earn? Do they realise how much private time (including rehearsal) is required for a musician to perform at a SIMA gig, and gather their 170 dollars (at least the equivalent of two working days)? On average the SIMA/MJC subsidy translates into less than 20 dollars per audience member (assume a modest audience number; noting that not all that subsidy is expended directly at the event, but some in promotion, administration etc). What are the comparable figures at an Australian Opera or Sydney Symphony Orchestra event, or for that matter the subsidy per visitor to the National Gallery? I will not present an exhaustive analysis of this here (though I intend to address it somewhat more at a Currency House breakfast talk later this year), but there are many available estimates of or sources for such data. In some cases subsidy per attendee even reaches about 300 dollars (the Powerhouse Museum during the 90s, based on the ratio between public subsidy and attendance number published in annual reports); this does not happen in jazz, needless to say!
Chapter 6 argues that jazz is underfunded mainly by means of a comparison with new music (meaning in this case new music in the Western classical music tradition). In a slightly ambiguous passage, it seems that of Australia Council for the Arts funding to music, approximately 15% goes to jazz and improvised music, and that this is similar to the proportion going to new music. Rechniewski’s implicit subtext here, with which I agree, is that there are rather more active improvisers/jazz musicians (whom I will lump under ‘jazz’ for the remainder of my comments) than there are active performers of new music, and so there should instead be an imbalance in favour of jazz. But this is the tip of a more fundamental issue: ‘Are there invisible ceilings that determine the amount of funding going to various sectors?’ (p.40). This is essentially where Rechniewski leaves his argument, to continue with his proposal (‘A New National Jazz Plan’ (NJP)) that, given jazz is underfunded, delineates how it should be better funded, and how this funding should be used in a coordinated way. The purpose of the proposal is as follows (p.50):
“The NJP seeks to raise the national profile of jazz, increase substantially the national jazz audience and thereby increase all forms of income to jazz and enhance career sustainability for an increasing number of jazz musicians”.
At a funding level, the proposal is to roughly double Australia Council funding to $2.4m per annum, and this is supported by educational, organizational and coordination proposals, and by ideas for many valuable specific initiatives. I am again in complete harmony with this proposal, and importantly, I am confident it would assist the artistic development of our already eclectic and innovative jazz canopy.
We need next to take the proposal further at an analytical and political level in order to achieve significant success. In other words, the argument needs to be cast additionally in quantitative and economic terms as far as it can be, since these are the terms in which government is at least interested. At the broadest level, jazz is part of the performing arts sector of creative industries (CI). Even at this level, policymakers and government have not defined what model of these industries they subscribe to, and these models are under serious assessment only now, particularly as a result of the work of Stuart Cunningham and colleagues at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excelling for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology (CCI). Suffice it to mention briefly that 4 models of CI are under particular consideration at presentii, the so-called ‘welfare’, ‘competition’, ‘growth’ and ‘innovation’ models. The first model is the most conventional one (suggesting that the arts are not economically important, but provide public good, and therefore deserve public funding). But the last two of the models are currently most plausible, and both indicate that CI activity can have a positive influence on the overall economy, through a variety of mechanisms, as well as contributing to public good in socio-cultural terms. Perhaps the most plausible, the growth model, furthermore suggests that enhanced CI activity should be encouraged since it will lead to enhancements in the overall economy. And in a complementary way, in an assessment of the economic production of individual artists based on older models (focussed on visual artists, but relevant to others), David Throsby and colleagues argue (3) that more than 2/3 of their economic contributions come from the ‘creative output’ embodied in their work, and less than 1/3 from the ‘commercial output’ such as sales and other forms of audience consumption. For a ‘growth’ model, the ‘creative output’ would include factors (such as social and communication influences) which enhance the operation and penetration of other sectors of the whole economy. The Creative Industries contribute around 6% of our economy, and the artistic labour force continues to expand, but we are behind the development in several countries (e.g. UK) (2). So such analyses broadly support the Rechniewski proposal, by suggesting that enhanced public subsidy could support increased activity which would promote not only the CI economy but the total economy.
The problem comes when we consider relative subsidies of different sectors of the economy. Distinguishing which of the 4 models best describes a sector gives an indication whether public subsidy will benefit it, and this is not always the case. But assuming as seems most probable that CI in general and jazz in particular deserve subsidy, then at what level should that be compared with levels for other sectors? There is no doubt that the subsidy level to CI is presently very low compared with that to several traditional industries, and to many other sectors including sport. This is the first and probably the largest factor that requires rectification for an optimal economy and society. After that, we come to smaller but still important sectoral issues, such as whether there is any possible basis for the almost complete separation of funding mechanisms for some performing organizations such as the Australian Opera from those for most music (the latter being the domain of the Australia Council)? How can such separation be compatible with any coherent assessment and comparison of quality and innovation, or of utility and value? It cannot, and we can only conclude that there is no rational government policy basis for the relative funding levels, the ‘invisible ceilings’ to which Rechniewski refers; these are presently set arbitrarily and historically. There is therefore a great opportunity for the new Rudd government to address what is not just a policy deficiency, but an almost complete policy incoherence or vacuum. Federal Government agencies are just setting about reassuring themselves that Australia has a higher education sector which produces research of quality, without even planning to use the data in the short term to determine the distribution of infrastructure funding for research (this is the brief of the ‘Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Initiative, just published for consultation (4) ). If they can justify and afford doing this even while knowing how insecure are the serious and intensive Australian processes of quality assessment and peer review of individual academic grant applications and publications(5), then surely they can do something simpler but rational and universal for the performing arts? It is our job as participants and supporters of these arts to force this agenda. I found no errors of any substance whatsoever in the book, and if they exist, they are most unlikely to be critical to the central argument (6).
I applaud Peter Rechniewski’s effort in making this significant contribution to the debate about Australian jazz. I hope that we can muster the appropriate analytical and political tools to take the proposal into reality, and to even higher levels thereafter, because this is the way the rhizomes of jazz can become visible above ground emerging from the ‘underground’ to make their best impact on our society, its economy, and our place in the world.
(1) Dean, R.T. 1992. New Structures in Jazz and Improvised Music since 1960. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
———. 2005. Sounds from the Corner: Australian Contemporary Jazz on CD. Sydney: Australian Music Centre.
(2) Potts, J., and S. Cunningham. 2008. Four models of the creative industries. Available on the CCI website.
(3) Throsby, D. 2006. An artistic production function: theory and an application to Australian visual artists. Journal of Cultural Economics 30:1-14.
Throsby, D., and V. Hollister. 2003. Don’t give up your day job: An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia. Sydney, Australia: Australia Council for the Arts.
(4) Australian Research Council. 2008. Excellence in research for Australia (ERA) initiative. Consulation paper. www.arc.gov.au/era.
(5) Marsh, H.W., U.W. Jayasinghe, and N.W. Bond. 2008. Improving the peer-review process for grant applications. American Psychologist 63 (3):160-168.
(6) I noticed only two trivial typos, which I record in case the book is reprinted: p.29 renders pianist Keith Jarrett’s family name incorrectly, and includes the amusing statement that in Australia ‘classical music and operate predominate’ in the media.
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Roger Dean is a research professor in Sonic Communication at MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney. Since 2007, he has been the chair of the board of the Australian Music Centre. Roger has written several books about jazz and improvisation, most recently Sounds from the Corner: Australian Jazz on CD, and is the founder and artistic director of austraLYSIS.
Find out more
www.australysis.com
www.marcs.uws.edu.au
Contact Roger Dean:
roger.dean@uws.edu.au