Antipodean Riffs - Essays on Australasian Jazz - Bruce Johnson
4. The Reception of Jazz in Adelaide and Melbourne and the Creation of an Australian Sound in the Angry Penguins Decade
Antipodean Riffs - Essays on Australasian Jazz - Bruce Johnson
Bruce Axel Clunies Ross
retired. former prof of English, University of Copenhagen
Description
A re-examination of some of the arguments in ‘An Australian Sound’ (1979) suggesting that jazz in Melbourne and Adelaide in the 1940s was developing distinctive local attributes, before it was swamped by the international revival of traditional jazz. A major influence was the spread of jazz through 78r.p.m. records, which detached jazz from its sources, tended to fix its styles and inspired the early attempts to define it. The recorded jazz available to the musicians who formed the nucleus of the Bell band, when they began to play together, was a selection of the sides cut in the 1920s which have become classics. The Bells did not copy this style, but, according to Graeme Bell ‘we used it as our model from which to express our own music’. Dave Dallwitz, in Adelaide, took a similar approach, which came to fruition in his work with the second Southern Jazz Group. Jazz was developing in Adelaide and Melbourne simultaneously with modernism in literature and the visual arts, and was associated with the formation of the Contemporary Art Society in both cities. The poet Max Harris took an interest in jazz and was perhaps responsible for the introductions leading to the first Australian jazz convention. He added jazz sections in the magazine Angry Penguins and its off-shoot, which formed the programme of the first convention. Local jazz experts, including William H. Miller, Dave Dallwitz, Tom Pickering and the Bell brothers, debated Australian developments in the pages of these magazines, in the context of contributions from New York and London by Inez Cavanaugh and Charles Fox. Australian sounds in jazz culminated in the forty-five original tunes (by various hands) recorded for the A.B.C. by Dave Dallwitz with the second Southern Jazz Group in 1951, and then they faded, until Dallwitz re-emerged as a jazz musician in the 1970s and recorded a lot of original music, including the Ern Malley Suite, which brought him international recognition in Down Beat and confirmed the distinctive qualities of Australian jazz in what is now identified as the ‘traditional’ mode.