The temporary marquee, which gave surprisingly good service awaiting the completion of the new Town Hall, was in beautiful Merriwa Park and I walked down there in a torrent of light among the tall streaked gums. The strips of bark on the blue-white trunks, and the slender pendant leaves gave a directionality to this downpouring of sun so that I felt as if I was in the cone of a magnifying glass. Small cottonwool clouds floated in the blue Victorian sky, and those that drifted into the path of the sun became semilucent and filled with a silvery lustre. Heaven. There was a queue stretching back up to and along the main street for Paul Grabowsky and Megan Washington, which was good to see; but once again I wondered why – if my sources are reliable – the new Town Hall will have a smaller capacity than the old.
Set that aside for now.
On the first night I had enjoyed American tenor saxophonist David Murray’s sound check in the empty marquee more than I had his subsequent performance. His sound was magnificent, keenly edged yet dark and full, dark as ebony whose core is black, and he played beautiful ballad passages that dropped to subtones of orchestral magnitude, all couched in slithering or clipped arpeggios as romantic as Benny Carter and as ‘avant garde’ as Dolphy. His vibrato was varied and began sooner and later on different notes, broadening the sound richly at unexpected points. Unfortunately for me he kept stopping to call for microphone adjustments, which was after all what he was there for. Then he played a casual half chorus on Monk’s Let’s Cool One, showing how he can develop lines and momentum in the middle register. The angular patterns were like dark wood breaking and the spare use of the unmistakable high register was thrilling, sounding at times like an amplified viola.
The performance had its points of high excitement, but too often Murray discarded the virtues of his sound check to fly into the high register for extended displays that became wearing without the contrast of dark richness in the registers below. Next day, the Saturday, was much more satisfying. It was cooking. The high register was now thrilling because it sprang naturally yet surprisingly from the force beneath it. The rhythm section, who had always sounded good, were now united. Young drummer Malik Washington was a powerhouse and his smashing loose accents now had a logical momentum on which to work. Bassist Jaribu Shahid was big and driving and pianist Lafayette Gilchrist opened his playing to reveal marked individuality, invention and bubbling excitement.
Murray is one of those players – like Archie Shepp, Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins – who can create a deeply satisfying dark forest of tenor sound. On Saturday he did it. In contrast, his bass clarinet – while jumping in angular patterns, squalling and rhythmically popping in exciting fashion – also made use of the instrument’s liquid buoyancy in the low register. There was a spring at the bottom and a swing that was almost trad.
This was in the afternoon of one of the best days of music I have experienced. In the morning I had heard American pianist and composer Jim McNeely’s Spare Parts Orchestra, which had been assembled from leading Sydney players by Gai Bryant, who played a beautiful alto solo on the first piece – which was set grooving by Craig Walters’s fine opening solo. McNeely’s writing was subtle, often airily expanding in the balmy day and punctuated by brilliant blasts that froze the air from the great trumpet section : Warwick Alder, Don Rader, Angus Gomm and Daryl Carthew. A word here for Don Rader, who played one of McNeely’s themes at ballad tempo like honey on the side valve flugelhorn. Large sections of the tent were drawn back so that sunny day and the lovely park became part of the music.
After that I heard some actual trad; the Allan Browne and Margie Lou Dyer Allfrey Street Band. Bluesy singer and surprising pianist (at times she sounded a bit like both Jelly Roll Morton and Thelonious Monk) Margie Lou is the daughter of the late trombonist/singer/pianist Warwick ‘Wocka’ Dyer, an important figure in the Australian trad jazz revival. She and Browne have made a lovely CD (same name as the band) for Newmarket that is steeped in that ongoing tradition and their performance was similarly redolent and moving. Browne’s drum kit in this situation is a replica of Baby Dodds’s at the time of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens: a tiny Chinese tom tom, a huge bass drum, and small cymbals. Browne has figured in or led important bands in several styles and has been awarded the Don Banks Award and the Graeme Bell Career Achievment Award. A living treasure no less, and you feel it in the deep Japanese sense whenever he plays. Likewise Stephen Grant (playing glorious cornet on this occasion), bassist Howard Cairns, banjo/guitarist John Scurry and probably the youngest member (he looked from some angles like the young Don Burrows) Jo Stephenson, whose clear, singing, scalding clarinet was like summer lightning – and perhaps it brought the much-needed rain that fell later, too briefly, on the bronze land.
After this delight I heard perhaps the best thing of all: the Sam Keevers Nonet, which brings together some of the most expressive Melbourne and Sydney players, with Cuban percussionist Javier Fredes in uncanny tandem with Sydney drummer Simon Barker. This was music filled with the deepest passion. Everybody played beautifully (trombonist Jordan Murray played a theme so beautifully he need have done nothing else) but in the solos of Bernie McGann and guitarist Steve Magnussen I felt a physical jag of emotion that made me cry for a moment. It was there and gone. No more crying, just euphoria.
The fire began to rage when Scott Tinkler’s trumpet leaped above the ensemble with a high dramatic statement like an entry by Roy Eldridge.
After that I heard the second performance by David Murray and, still very happy, went back to Saint Patrick’s and joined a relatively sparse crowd to hear Trio Apoplectic, a Sydney alto/ bass /drums combo that is a favourite of mine. Their compositions are sometimes genuinely episodic but freely played and their sound is often light. Sometimes they move in an area that might be seen as a dialectic between the subtlest cool jazz of the West or East Coast of America and the free Californian jazz of Ornette Coleman.
The crowd was sparse because the night’s climax – the band co-led by Americans Jon Scofield and Joe Lovano – was fast approaching. The emptier the hall the more beautiful the music became. Finally I lay on my back along empty seats and stared at the pressed metal ceiling and the heavy emerald green and wine-coloured curtains ranked above the proscenium and it felt as if I was a child in his dressing gown allowed to stay up late, filled with calm and security. Dave Jackson’s pellucid alto sound sustained itself on the air, his long tones increasing subtly in volume, leaning on my heart, and the air seemed like velvet.
When Jackson said they’d make their last tune quick so we could all go to Scofield and Lovano, I said, “To hell with Scofield and Lovano! This is heaven.”
But I went of course.
Music often stimulates, excites and satisfies, but there are times when it goes beyond, becoming an important incident in your life or a part of your life’s deepest meaning; suggesting that your life may indeed have a meaning. There were times when this happened on this glorious Saturday. And Scofield and Lovano were still to come.
This was rocky and louder than anything before it, so that at first it was the most physically exciting. Volume is a legitimate element of music and they used it. The excitement of a loud electric band sometimes wears off for me quite soon. Well, I am an old man. Nevertheless it was full of invention and virtuosity and my interest was sustained by the young girl beside me, who was into it in large measure. The things that prompted her to yell in response were always brilliant things. She had good ears, and it was only when she walked away that I saw how really young she was. Lovano, bearded, tubby, with strenuous body language and cool yet almost threatening eyes under a Mediterranean straw hat looked vaguely like Francis Ford Copolla and could easily have won a role in The Sopranos. His tenor saxophone was remote miked and, despite technological advances, that always takes some of the warmth off the sound for me. That came later.
Scofield, with big tension bands running from his jawline down into his neck, small pointed grey beard, noble bald head and larger than life features tempered by oddly hooded yes, could have been a Shakespearian actor. A complex face. His play of sonic distortions was devastating (John Shand wrote that his psychedelic effects arrived like a hail of meteorites), and when he hit a climax his mouth gaped like a heavy metal guitarist’s, as if he was belching out all that apocalyptic sound. At that point he would suddenly slide backward, rock guitarist style, as if he was on roller skates. They certainly had a presence, and it was very American. I was exhausted by then, but a ballad at the end by Katie Noonan revived me.
Sunday on the main street: I scribble some notes over the best coffee in town outside the congenial Centre Take Away and multiple rows of pigs’ arses go by on a truck, which reminds me that Graeme Bell, whose band used to perform in the old Town Hall on their tours, wrote a tune called Pig’s Arse He’s In America. Bell, our first international jazz ambassador in the days of the trad jazz revival was leading The Graeme Bell All Stars at the Chevron Hotel in Sydney in the 1950s when a bloke came in and asked if he was really Graeme Bell.
Yes, that’s me.
“Pig’s arse, he’s in America!” was the response. A performance of that tune can be heard on a wonderful Newmarket CD: Graeme Bell, A Compilation Of His Recorded Compositions 19477 – 2007.
In the smaller marquee at the Ovens Street school I heard Way Out West play a selection from their wonderful album Footscray Station. Superb percussionist Ray Periera was on hands, as was master bassist (no pun intended) Howard Cairns, who demonstrated his authority in another idiom. Drummer Dave Beck’s beautiful little daughter and her friend occasionally ran out to the stage to talk to her father as he played. Dung Nguyen’s electric guitar and Vietnamese dan bau perfumed the air around the singing horn ensembles of trumpeter Peter Knight and tenor/baritone/soprano saxophonist, and sometimes his solos were foregrounded. The dan bau looks a bit like the Japanese koto but it has one string, which Nguyen played with a plectrum in his right hand while his left changed tension and pitch with a gear shift-like lever. This instrument charmed the ear with the purest orientalism and sometimes sounded like a Theremin. This is a good space for trumpets. Knight was sharp, clear and plangent. The whole was magic and it took us into a deep place in Melbourne. A hidden square in Footscray. Dear God, I would like to be there.
In the marquee Paul Grabowsky recreated the music from his superb CD Tales Of Time And Space, which he made in America with Joe Lovano and Scott Tinkler, who were both on hand. They played brilliantly together, Tinkler’s sharply cut and brilliantly projected patterns and shining ascensions a satisfying foil for Lovano’s sensual phrases, which rolled like clouds filled with warm incipient rain. This time Lovano played into a standing mike and his rich, tender and sometimes biting sound was allowed full presence. Bassist Phillip Rex, drummer Simon Barker and Grabowsky himself – all were superb. At the end Katie Noonan sang thrillingly.
I should mention that on the Friday night I had read a few paragraphs from my story in Miriam Zolin’s new literary periodical Extempore. Poets Lynn Hard and Geoff Page also read at the launch, which was quite a success I felt. In the gathering was David Murray’s pianist Lafayette Gilchrist, who approached me with kind words and asked if we could talk for a while, which we duly did. This charming man, and drummer Malik Washington were also there to hear the Bernie McGann Quartet, who played superbly with the same great rhythm section – bassist Brendan Clarke and drummer Andrew Dickeson – who had served with the McNeely big band. Trumpeter Warwick Alder was in mid season form and alto saxophonist McGann was magisterial. Lafayette was so impressed that he later analysed a McGann solo for Peter Rechniewski, who did his best to relay this to me.
Somehow I missed The Antripodean Collective with Tinkler, violinist John Rodgers, drummer Ken Edie and pianist Mark Hannaford, whose supreme playing can be heard on recent CDs from the great Melbourne label Extreme. I had heard them recently at the Sound Lounge in Sydney. John Shand said their Wangaratta performance was even greater. Theirs is a music of space, spontaneity and curious deliberation; explosiveness and intense stillness. Anybody who is interested in modern music from Debussy, Webern, Stravinsky and company to the present day should investigate the Anthrips. They draw a singular essence from all this, and from areas of jazz, through an improvised medium.
Tinkler urged me or perhaps threatened me to write something that caught his essential being, so I told told him, “You’re not worth a pinch of shit, Scott…A repulsive man, but very attractive.” He said he could go with that, and I only add that he is completely impotent. A little pressure, flattery and some threats will always win a glowing review from me.
These are a some of the highlights of another remarkable festival. I urge you to book now for number 20 next year. I should add that I enjoyed the meeting between local guitar marvel James Muller and Scofield somewhat more than I did the Lovano/Scofield band. Phil Stack incidentally won the bass competition with two tour de force performances, with Ben Waples and Sam Anning running up in that order. I heard only some of Lost And Found’s free improvisation (Grabowsky, Jamie Oehlers and Dave Beck), but dropped in on an interlude of serene beauty, followed by violent action. I heard Sam Anning with Zac Hurren and drummer Sam Bates in St Patrick’s, which was another highlight. Joe Lovano sat at the back. Zac’s tenor sound is one of the biggest I’ve heard, even when he is playing in a soulful croon, a monkish chant.