GRADY.FERENCI. DALGLIESH.ABRAHAMS.CAPTAIN MANNERING.PONTING:WILLOW WONDER.OTHER VOICES OTHER ROOMS.GARZONE
Other Voice Other Rooms. That was the name of Truman Capote’s first book, a poetic novelette that I read when I was a teenager working as an advertising layout artist for Myer in Melbourne. That was a long time ago, and it is a long time since jazz and folk music were the main forms played in small unpublicised venues, in back bars of pubs, in strange rooms whose function when the music is not there can seem as mysterious as the music itself and the cognoscenti who gather to hear it. Avant garde jazz and underground rock moved into such spaces in the late 1960s, sometimes on the one program, with light shows by Ubu and others. Yet for all the amplification and light something remained of the shadowy world of acoustic jazz and folk. If you are lucky enough to have blundered into such places at an innocent age you will perhaps have experienced alienation and fascination in equal measure.
If you were old enough to have developed a resentment of everything beyond your own experience you might have loathed those “scenes”. There ain’t nothing else that bugs me more than workin’ for the rich man; hey! I’m gonna change that scene one day – Friday On My Mind. An accident of history has given some the impression that modern jazz musicians and fans were beatniks. The accident was the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, which was actually written in the 1940s but published in the 1950s. Jack was writing about jazz hipsters, artists and poets – whom he called beats (beatific deadbeats perhaps), but his young readers thought he was writing about late 1950s beatniks. What fun. But whoever they are, just who do they think they are?
Just enthusiasts really, and there is undoubtedly a certain cache if you happen to find yourself caught up in their enthusiasm, anonymous in some underground adjunct to mainstream society. Specially if the room is also a barber shop which in its manifestation as a venue calls itself SEDITION and amongst other art works has a poster of Lenin. I am not imbued with Gerard Henderson’s passion to reveal the evil truth about communism (those who are in any doubt seem as rare as fans of Attila The Hun) and to demand apologies from anyone who subscribed, however briefly, in their youth, so Lenin is just fine by me as an object of ironic nostalgia. I doubt that anyone was a communist here, except perhaps the barber and he does no harm, except possibly tonsorial. I saw Chris Abrahams here playing the harmonium with micro pitch expert Kraig Grady on microtonal vibraphone. Later Chris said, “It’s a great venue, isn’t it? It reminds me of Morgans in Glebe [where we used to hear Mark Simmonds, Bernie McGann, Phil Treloar, John Pochee and others].
I agreed and added that there have been several times in my life when I had thought such places had finally vanished, only to find a minor spate of them springing up.” I’ve written about some of them here, and even the Metro has given some space to them, so let’s stick with Sedition. When I arrived at this little place in Darlinghurst it was empty but the lights were on and the door wide open. The old East Sydney Tech is nearby and I was reminded that this former jail is a panopticon with the cell blocks radiating from a central watch tower (Google Jeremy Bentham and the significance of that should be clear).
Sedition is a real barber shop with chairs from my childhood that brought back memories so powerful that I felt cold atomised water hitting my nude neck after I had received a short back and sides. Memories of the dentist’s chairs of that age did not advance, fortunately. Grady’s vibraphone was at the back of the shop and I could not resist touching a few notes with the mallets. I had never struck a vibraphone before, microtonal or otherwise, and I can tell you now that the round notes are felt right up to your elbows, moulding your forearms in electronic sleeves. When Bill the barber arrived or came back from wherever he’d been he asked me to come up the road and have a few beers with him until the others arrived. I said, ah, I’m not really a drinker so I’ll stay here and mind the shop (and the vibraphone). When Bill came back I told him I had performed three hair cuts on blokes who had strolled down from Oxford Street, but none was satisfied with the result and all had refused to pay. “I’ve ruined your reputation,” I confessed, but Bill shrugged.
Listening to Chris and Kraig, who call themselves Whirlpool, is an otherworldly experience because the tonality is outside anything you have heard, including Chinese music, which I am very keen on. Yet there is nothing aggravating about this playing in the cracks as it were. Another world simply springs up. On the night it was melodic, shapely though intricate, and beautiful. Sometimes shapes formed from overtones created by those interacting microtones whirled about like the opening credits to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, sometimes spectral and sometimes so solid they clouted you like high pressure eddies beneath a dumping wave.
The next ensemble was Monica Brook, accordion, Simon The Frenchie and Joseph Derrick, trumpets. Simon is a special jazz trumpeter, unassuming but constantly developing, but here he played small, intimate sounds, including two ringing harmonics rubbed into being by the mouthpiece against the bell, as if he was coaxing up fire through friction. The trumpet’s sound is indeed created by the activation of standing waves or eigentones within the instrument through lip vibrations. Here Ferenci activated these waves from the turmpet’s outer shell. Incidentally, the flair of the bell, which is crucial to sound production, can be calculated with an equation used in atomic physics and the angle of the banks of irrigation canals. I know this because Colin Rivers, who was the editor of Electronics Today when I was its music editor, gave me a scientific article on the subject.
Expunge all that from your mind. Though this ensemble physically impinged much further into the little room, so that I sat hard up beside Monica’s beautiful old accordion, they produced small sounds and nobody played a solo as such. They created little cells or points of sound, and while it took some moments to begin hearing it as music, or at least a cohesive mosaic, the effect was ultimately very beautiful. At the end Chris sat behind them at the harmonium and sounds sprang up again and I looked around and saw people standing out in the street listening. Lovely.
I read recently that European art music and American jazz are irrelevant in Australia. This was written by one of the ancient warriors of the old guard of New Music, who was told to say this stuff in an English art institute where they groom you for a career as an iconoclast. The sad truth is that many more Australians would rather hear an Abba covers band or some equivalent than his dinkum Aussie art music. Let the people make up their mind. Then leave them to it and listen to whatever you like. As it happened Kraig Grady and I had an enjoyable conversation about Miles Davis, Stravinsky and Debussy after he told me that Stravinsky and Miles made up the greater part of his collection. Okay, Grady is an American. Deport him.
At the Sound Lounge recently there has been a run of jazz incorporating elements of the free era, some of which overlap very much with New Music. American saxophonist George Garzone was brought out here by Jamie Oehlers, and I regret having missed the first two nights. On the final night Oehlers joined the band – Garzonne, the Waples brothers and Mike Nock – and although he played brilliantly I bogged down in an excess of Coltrane in the second set and went home and oddly enough played Coltrane himself and did not bog down. The first set had been a different matter, fresh and powerful, both in the chanting unison saxophone passages and in an improvisation that seemed to revolve like planets in three different time feels simultaneously. Mike Nock is always at least as good as anyone he plays with, always fresh, always interesting and always giving everything. Here he unlocked his Pandora’s box, rising suddenly in dissonant peaks like waves hitting rocks, bridging space with delicate, ethereal figures.
Another great night at the Sound Lounge was provided by Elliot Dalgliesh and his Mute Canary tribute to Eric Dolphy. What a band this was: bassist Lloyd Swanton (a surprise inclusion in some ways, but sounding absolutely right as he does in any context), guitarist Carl Dewhurst, drummer Simon Barker, trumpeter Phil Slater and wonderful young Brisbane alto and tenor saxophonist Scott McConnachie. Many of Dolphy’s beautiful melodies were played, including the rarely heard Serene from the album Far Cry. The Dolphy idom was expanded electronically by Dewhurst’s exceptional guitar playing.
In the second set Elliott announced that he didn’t feel like playing any Dolphy just then and gave us Charlie Parker’s Relaxin’ At Camarillo instead, a wonderful blues on which Dewhurst introduced some superb jazz guitar references. At the end of the night Dewhurst told me, “Whatever you throw at Elliott he finds his own path through it. He finds a space that was meant for only him. Quite amazing really”.
I also heard the Kris Wanders Outfit which was devastating and a brilliant night by Roger Manins on leave from New Zealand. Dewhurst was heard again here and so was the brilliant, very different and not so often heard pianist Adam Ponting. A composition by Ponting was a highlight, but there was some very interesting writing indeed and great tenor playing by Manins, of course.
My sermon here is addressed to those of you who, like me, go regularly to the Sound Lounge to hear favourites, such as Mike Nock, Bernie McGann, Wanderlust (who just get better and better), The catholics, Ten Part etc. You should also drop in to hear some of this other stuff. You will be surprised.
If you are at Wangaratta this year you should catch Liaison Tonique from Cologne with special Melbourne saxophonist Adam Simmons. Also of course trumpeter Charles Tolliver, still sounding wonderful. And many others. Liaison Tonique have some other gigs including the Sound Lounge and they come courtesy of the Goethe Institute. To whom all praise.