Cope Street Parade Among The Surry Hills
Easter Sunday, church bells in Sydney sandstone. Got the Dallas Blues: main street autumn leaves, buzzin’ round my head like a swarm of honey bees; but first. One of the wonderful things about Melbourne jazz, and it is occurring now in Sydney, is the interest in jazz history shown by young musicians whose metier is contemporary music. Perhaps it began with the Hoodangers, who have reformed and will soon be heard up here at the Sound Lounge. Perhaps it began further back with the great Allan Browne. In fact hard bopper Brian Brown used to go and hear and sometimes sit in with such figures as Ade Monsbourgh and Bob Barnard at one of the many trad jazz dances in Melbourne There was a kind or Roaring Twenties fad and young women often dressed somewhat flapperish, at the height of the rock and roll era. I was often there too. Some of the traddies would turn up to hear Brown’s band with Stewart Spear, Barry Buckley, David Martin, Keith Hounslow and sometimes Keith Stirling, at Jazz Centre 44 across from Luna Park at St Kilda. There was good will on earth.
Sweet memory peels among the hills of Surrey. Yet I am also reminded that some of the New Music old guard still sustain the anti-jazz mantras that began back in pre-Necks times. But a number of young musicians play in these areas and in jazz contexts, and they are happy to discuss all of it. And a number, here as well as Melbourne, listen to the superb traditional veterans and sometimes play the music themselves.
On Easter Sunday I took the ancient way up among the curving hills on the high side of Central Railway. The curved awning of the Hollywood Hotel, looming above me, closed that curving vista, but this time I went on up Wentworth Avenue to the Macquarie Hotel to hear The Cope Street Parade, who have been playing there between 6 and 9pm Sundays. The regular band is trumpeter Nick Garbett (The Vampires, Divine Dialects, etc), Justin Firmino, tenor and clarinet, Grant Arther, trombone, guitarist Brendan Champion, Alex Boneham, bass, and Alex Masso, drums.
Jason Morphett and friends were eating at the footpath tables, unaware that music would soon strike up within. While waiting we were bored sans merde by an offensive drunk who kept interrupting our conversations to tell us in a growly voice that he was a Queenslander, and implying that we were not real Aussies. A figure from old Sydney, the Central Railway end specifically. We all went inside, without our friend, and the atmosphere improved beyond measure. Good will reigned and, for all I knew, Christ had risen.
A surprise was Allan Davie, deputising for Garbett. He has been playing for some time with the great Unity Hall band in Balmain, and this is clearly his real idiom. Sometimes he played lightly, with an effortless clear brass ring, and sometimes he turned on ripping, shouting power, all in beautifully crafted constructions. The tenor is Firmino’s instrument and he produced the romantic, rhapsodic elements and the dark, muscular drive characteristic of early Coleman Hawkins. Self conscious on the clarinet, he was nevertheless effective and idiomatic, using the New Orleans vibrato, the buzzing, woody low tones and the shrill lightning strikes. Boneham, Champion and Masso essayed the slow motion stomping pulses and the gear shifts up into a light high swing in a repertoire that ranged through Kid Ory’s Muskrat Ramble, through Moten Swing and Gee Baby Aint I Good To You from the McKinney’s Cotton Pickers book (here are some of the early seeds of swing), Hoagy Carmichael’s Riverboat Shuffle (famous for Bix Beiderbecke’s version) and Louis Jordan’s Five Guys called Mo, which is at the intersection of jazz and R&B (a jump tune in fact).
They sang Jordan’s comic masterpiece as well as a couple of the old traddie songs, which are funny and full of charm and feeling. Some of the trad verging on swing pieces move through two or more strains to a call and response release, wave on wave of it, that reaches a blazing clamour of power. This is ecstasy. Indeed one of the great expressions of ecstasy in all music. Clearly the lads were fairly new to this stuff, but they essayed it with great spirit. I will be intrigued to hear Garbett in this idiom, and it will be possible to do so for two more weeks – more if the crowd keeps growing. You can order food at the bar.
Now I do know one superb younger drummer who has a little anti-jazz dissertation every time I see him, yet continues to play it. It is a neurotic concern. I love it, and there is no law that says I should not. Nor will all your philosophy and theories dissuade me. That is the incontrovertible truth. Hear the truth at the corner of Cope Street and Wentworth Avenue.
Go’n‘t put myself on the Santa Fee and go! Yes, go. Go’n‘t put myself on the Santa Fee and go…mmm go…to that Texas Town where they never see ice and snow…mmm snow. The Dallas Blues, 1918. The first published blues, with words added later. Sung and played magnificently by Louis Armstrong in 1929.