We are approaching the 20th anniversary of the Wangaratta Festival of Jazz & Blues. I have reviewed every year but one, writing at first for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, then in more recent times for the SIMA website. To mark this extraordinary anniversary, SIMA have assembled below all the Wangaratta reviews I have done for them. After the 20th Festival, that new review will be added. I might mention that the Festival and the Victorian Tourist Bureau commissioned me to write a book (Why Wangaratta?: Ten years of the Wangaratta Festival of Jazz and Blues) for the 10th anniversary. This is usually on sale somewhere at the Festival. Profit for me is very small. The plug is to let you know that the book has a condensed history of Wangaratta itself from before gold rush days, a much longer account of how this improbable event came together, and excerpts of reviews by myself and a number of others for each of those ten years. Now, here is the selling point: it also has an introduction by Jeff Kennett, who sadly was voted out of office the day before the book appeared! Jeff’s introduction is brief and he begins by telling us he is not interested in jazz (Well, stap me! You could have knocked me down with a feather!) but has been impressed by the mounting attendances year by year and the money that has consequently circulated in the town.
I am indebted to Peter Rechniewski and Peter Jordan for giving me unlimited space and stylistic freedom when I began covering the event for them. This has allowed me to write in a freer (you might simply say looser) way than I could for a newspaper, and it has allowed me to draw the town, the bush and other elements into my coverage. Of course I risked being called a wanker – never! – but the response from musicians and fans, particularly in Melbourne, has been heartwarming. In the middle of a harsh and even bitter debate with Mark Isaacs on the subject of the lamented Kevin Jones, the Sydney pianist and composer suddenly changed the subject and said, “Your review of this year’s festival was beautiful. You are a great writer!’
“No I’m not!’ I snapped, still angry. “I am a very ordinary writer.” It was only later that I was very moved by what Mark had said. Incidentally, my view of my work stands somewhere between those extremes. It varies.
I have been surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, by the literary interest shown by musicians and others. It reminds me of something that Miriam Zolin said while launching the second edition of her magazine Extempore: that as she became more interested in jazz she also began to realise how many writers, artists and film makers had been drawn to this peculiar form.
2008
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.
Read more
2007
Sitting in the deep and magical Merriwa Park, hearing bell tones of birds and snipping, sniping sounds that could be birds or insects, I wait happily to hear Dave Holland, and of course I think of Conference Of The Birds and other wonders. Ah, Wangaratta, expansion of the spirit! Blue gums, dappled and streaked with bark, tower above me and two boys play tennis into the gathering dusk on the courts through there. Pock. Pock. Pock. Pock. Music sounds better here, but that is often because it is great.
Read more
2006
That many of us draw pleasure from the bushland heat is an irony at this time. It fills our belly as we walk, on dry clay and rural pavements. The land is brown, sepia, smoke-grey, Manila, from Sydney to Wangaratta, with bales of hay that are all the use that can be found for failed crops. This can make us depressed or irrationally angry.
Read more
2005
Those big, black bush mosquitoes are biting through my hair. They would bite through a horse blanket. As usual there is a component of free jazz and just free improvisation at Wangaratta this year, and at an exceptionally high level. Whenever I walk under the light canopy of the bush, where sounds glimmer in the indeterminate distance, drop at my shoulder with the first streaks of rain; snipe, sting, rattle briefly, sound singly, in relays, or simultaneously, I think of the field of free music. In the bush no sound is a wrong note. Yet there is no discernible system. They seem random, yet perfect, inevitable; and some free music aims at that: the mystery of things just happening.
Read more
2004
To look down through the bush in the fresh morning, the ground strewn with sunlight, dead, crisp, biscuit-coloured gumleaves, bark strips, russet grasses deepening to watery blood, ferns, pale long shadows, with touches of olive brown water – storage batteries of energy – is as nourishing to the soul as church bells and the smiles of old ladies walking slowly to the rector, who waits cordially by the door of Wangaratta’s Holy Trinity Cathedral. Or the stained glass windows of St Patricks: the side ones at the back which always deliver a burning nostalgia for Port Phillip and the lanes and arcades down toward Flinders Street. Why this should be so – why sun through rose and amber and hard red and royal blue should touch such specific memories – is as mysterious as the effects of chords in music.
Read more
2003
Gums and willow trees along the river and the sunlit river path from the highway bridge. This is where we came in, thirteen years ago. In the Melbourne Age and the Sydney Morning Herald of that year, I noted the superb roses, the churches, the brick from two now inactive quarries; that the courthouse was an art deco classic and the river vistas of willows and silvery gums were pure Streeton. I also said recklessly that this was Australia’s greatest jazz festival, though it was tiny at the time.
Read more