CHUCK YATES JAM GOES ON.LUCIFER FALLS.MCRISPELL AT SOUND LOUNGE.JOHNNY GOES TO HOLLYWOOD.STU HUNT EXP AT SOUND LINGERIE & 505. BO HO GRO GO ET 33 WELLINGTON
A discontinuous diary by John Clare
1. New Chuck Jam
For some 14 years superb pianist Chuck Yates has been the core of perhaps the longest-running weekly jam session in Sydney’s history at The Bald Faced Stag. Rivalled only I would think by certain trad jazz residencies. Then it stopped. For a beat or two. Then it started again on Thursday nights at the Huntsbury Hotel 125 New Canterbury Road near where Wardell Road runs away down to the river and winds up to Earlwood.
I went on the first night and already the faithful were gathering, and a group of young sit ins were nursing their saxophone cases or assembling their instruments and licking their reeds. The room is big and carpeted, the sound dry and clear. Chuck on electric piano (this may soon change) Ron Philpott on electric bass, Don Rader on trumpet (who will swap nights around with Warwick Alder) and drummer Tim Firth had already launched into The C Jam Blues, which I have not heard for a while except for a recording by Duke Ellington that features Ray Nance, Rex Stewart and Ben Webster and which I still play often. Even at the entrance I could feel that intense but happy swing, locked in and sweeping all before it. When I entered the room it really hit. Don Rader was blazing.
Don’s full-throated brass sound, slicing the air, peppered with fleshed closed tones, and his brilliant, running, flairing lines are a great joy. Chuck was funky and ecstatic. Phillpot, who is severely underrated, was solid and inventive, and Firth’s time and punctuations were dynamic. On All Blues Rader opened his range of expressive devices, sometimes at soft volume, sometimes producing that Miles Davis echoic effect, and often climbing in high, singing, bluesy constructions. Later Tom Stocker sat in on baritone sax and played beautifully, sometimes sounding like a harder version of Gerry Mulligan (who features regularly on the Letterman show these days – okay, he’s dead, but the hip will know what I mean!), but fundamentally hard bop in concept. The large instrument sounded magnificent, round and darkly rolling, in the room. James Ryan on tenor was also outstanding (see diary entry 3. below). Incidentally Dale Barlow will now be leading a Sunday band at this very friendly venue.
2. Sympathy For The Devil
Bear with me. Thus sayeth the preacher:
It was the first day of spring, and it was spring. Then it went back to winter. Now it is spring again. The air is like a bloom on the skin, warm as breath expelled on your hand from 15 centimetres. If it was liquid it would be aerated. Bubbles or pollen shift in the faint breezes by Chatswood Station, a warm curtain that moves against your body and a sweet anguish that strains about you. Happiness almost beyond happiness and it reminds me that not everybody will necessarily be happy in Paradise. Lucifer was not happy. I have just been visiting my aunt Joan – the same who took me fishing and horse riding as a boy and gave me books that I still have – at heavenly Castle Crag, and I think of Cameron Undy’s tune The Fall Of Lucifer on the Gerard Masters album Island Life, which brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to the overwhelming performance an the Jazz:Now Festival by the Stu Hunter Experiment, in which Cameron played so memorably. This will be performed again at Cameron’s 505 venue just after Wangaratta and again at the Sound Lounge a little later.
Riverrun (which has is a small ‘r’ in Finnegan’s Wake because the first sentence is the second half of the last) past Adam and Eve’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay we circulate back through Jazz:Now and environs to the Sonic Lozenge where Marilyn Crispell had passencore from North Amorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor and rejoindered with Lloyd Swanton and Swami Bakhir to exceed full well and holy their performance at Jazz:Now. In the smaller venue you were completely embraced by the pouring dark and bright music. It moved around you like ghosts and dashed you about in its deep springtide swells. Barker and Swanton were much more articulated acoustically. A slithering, zithering whizzing whining bow and fingers bass interaction with Crispell’s piano was so uncanny that she stopped so that it could be heard alone. I love the way Simon Barker sometimes pokes with the ends of his sticks in diverse nooks and crannies of his dumkit, creating a rhythmic rattling texture like a small orchestra of wood and metal percussions.
This connected me also to the free improvisation I have heard recently at such unnofficial venues as Bohemian Grove (L2/68 Sophia Street, Surrey Hills) and 33 Wellington Street, Chippendale. More of this activity soon, but I can tell you that this Sunday fresh, new trumpeter and composer Eamon Dilworth will lead his quintet (with Hugh Barrett in there) and on 12/10 you can hear the wonderful Trio Apoplectic and the Marciello Maio Trio/Brendan Berloch Quintet.
3. J.C. Goes To Hollywood
By vicus recirculation etc we went to another pub gig on a Monday night at the Hotel Hollywood or Hollywood Hotel, whose curved awning and somewhat art deco brick facade up in Foster Street Surrey hills has featured in rock videos. This is a regular gigue par les rues et par les (forget the last word, but it is by the streets and byways by the great Claude Debussy: Images For Orchestra), for James Ryan’s band The Lost Cosmonauts. The awning is curved and so is the little bar at which I sat, and at my end you can look out the open door and down the street which also curves away at the end at the Mabbot Street entrance to Nighttown. This is a nice little oddly shaped corner room with the band blowing straight at you while traffic lights change in the corner of your eye. Jane Irving was finishing her last night with the band before going off the new York and Paris. I really enjoyed her singing a lot. Her scatting reminded me of a verve LP I still have from the 1950s with the Metronome All Stars on one side and a session with Count basie, Ella Fitzgerald and Joe Williams on the other.
The band with Hugh Barrett on electric piano, Kevin Hailey on double bass, James Hauptmann on drums and the leader on tenor saxophone has the drive of a band that has played together for a while. They are all brilliant and flexible musicians, often heard in other contexts, but it is very good to hear how well they play the mainstream – with so much spirit and freshness. Hailey’s bass began one piece with a powerful invocation of charles Mingus. Through October they will be joined by the great Warwick Alder. Next month it will be Jeremy Borthwick and then Jason Morphett. You will like this little room, the friendliness, humour and atmosphere here; and you will like the music a great deal.
Ryan, who is a very fine and quite individual saxophonist, will also play with James Muller, James Hauptmann and Steve Hunter in a much more rock-influenced band called the Subterraneans on Thursdays through October at the well known Empire Hotel on the corner of Parramatta Road and Johnston Street, Annandale.