-
The lists of referring URLs and search terms that show in the visitor statistics for this site make interesting reading for me. Many visitors have searched for a name; sometimes it's mine. I can only wonder who punched "John Rumney band player" into Google recently and clicked on the link to ClassieCorner. That someone seems to know about my passion for jazz and maybe some of my recent history playing guitar in the Moreton Bay/Redland City community. The link took them to a page that had nothing to do with my music but simply included the key words, so I thought I should post a bit more personal info about my life in music and some of the influences.
-
The date of this post is actually May 13, 2012, but I am using an old page, just because I need time and space, the two most important requirements when one starts to look into themselves.
-
THE guitar, for more decades than I want to admit, has been my great escape from the humdrum of everyday life to a place where words and thought patterns associated with the verbal come third to melody and rhythm. Although this marvellous instrument has given me respite from the word-based thought pattens that dominate my professional life as a journalist, entry to this paradise usually comes at great cost and effort, as probably every musician knows. My cultural partnership with the six-stringed idol started with the blues, many thousands of kilometres from the US cotton fields, fireside jams and vernacular of the black culture.
-
THE great Phil Manning said on an ABC documentary about a decade ago that when he was growing up in Melbourne in the 1960s the young blokes would play either football or music, chasing the Sherrin or jamming the blues with their mates on Saturday afternoons. It was a bit like that with me in Tasmania, a few years after Phil: A mate, Pat Hussey, introduced me to the patterns and we jammed on 12-bars - slow, medium and fast - and with other mates, including Chris Sulzberger. We hero worshipped Hendrix (No.1), Cream, Ten Years After, the Beatles, the Stones and all those other '60-early '70s hard and serious players. Pat went on to have a career as a pro guitarist in many bands and now lives near the Victorian-SA border, performing solo with an attachment to the sweet and powerful sound of Guild guitars; along the way, Chris played mainly rhythm guitar in Gold Coast-based rock bands including the Gonads and Patriots Nite Train.
-
AS I gravitated into jazz from the early 1970s and in a career (day job?) that virtually decided when I slept, showered and ate, I found it difficult over the years to find like-minded musos to jam with. When a cadet journo at the Hobart Mercury, I had some great late night sessions jamming with Mike Ward, who just like me is a publishing survivor 40 years on (2012 is our anniversary in the trade!). On the occasions Mike was too tired to jam I would listen to Ian Neal's Music to Midnight on ABC Radio, or my first jazz album, John Coltrane with the Red Garland Trio. Garland opened my mind to the magic of jazz piano and within a few years I was addicted to the likes of Errol Garner, Oscar Peterson and George Shearing. During the 1970s I was a regular at Judy Bailey's Sydney gigs and during the '80s in Brisbane at performances by the late Gordon Cuming (the Aussie who played piano in Lionel Hampton's band) and Clare Hansson. Clare was playing at the time with the great trumpeter, Rick Price, another of my jazz heroes who has moved on to jazz heaven. I must give a credit to one of the best all-round but less celebrated Aussie jazz pianists, Brian King, who did much of his work outside the metro limits and missed the glory.
-
THERE were/are two Brian Kings playing jazz piano in the Brisbane region; the one I owe a debt to was based at Nambour on the Sunshine Coast. I spent many great nights in the early 1980s listening to Brian in his trio with Mike Garry on bass and Sid Hillier on drums, and will always remember Brian's great version of The Nearness of you. Sid, by the way, drummed for the Beegees when they were kids in Brisbane. But, as far as jazz piano goes, nothing stirs my heart as much as Tommy Flanagan on Parker's Scrapple from the Apple and Errol Garner playing I'll Remember April in his Concert by the Sea (Cuming's treatment of this rarely heard standard unfortunately remains just a fantastic memory; he gave me a cassette tape of his playing but in Sydney in the 1980s I lent it to a restaurateur, and when I went back the restaurant had closed and he had done a bolt with my treasured recording).
-
ANOTHER mind-blowing musical experience on the Sunshine Coast comes to mind. A simple notice in the paper said something like "jazz, Hotel Caloundra, this Sunday". Wow, what a buzz to see/hear a Hammond organ/grand piano duo! Ray Sparks on organ and Fred Young on piano. Fred wasn't young then. He told me he had been the black sheep in a family of classical pianists, shunning the theory, refusing to learn to read and getting down to business playing everything by ear. He was truly one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard, and I only had the privilege once.
-
DURING the 1970s-80s with the rock and blues still in my veins, I discovered ACJ (Antonio Carlos Jobim) and realised his compositions were in fact the force behind the Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz recording that had started my addicted to Latin jazz. Although, like most children of the 1960s, I was quite familiar with that 'Stairway to Heaven' of jazz – Ipanema. At the time my recorded favourites also included The Crusaders (incl. Larry Carlton and David T Walker, of course!), Lee Ritenour, Stanley Clarke ... well, that's for starters. But I was also reaching further into record pile and some serious name dropping is needed here: C McRae, E Fitzgerald, P Lee, B Holiday, the Andrews Sisters, N Wilson etc); plus the guys like F Sinatra, B Crosby and M Torme; composers and lyricists doing it their way (incl. J Mercer, G&I Gershwin, H Carmichael, C Porter).
-
THIS list has reminded me of the great jazz addict, the late Sid Bromley, who hosted many of the world's greatest players in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, from the '50s for many years. Sid told me many stories about musos including Joe Pass, with whom Sid had a special connection, and Oscar Peterson, whom Sid hosted on a tour. Unfortunately, Sid died just a few years ago and I don't want to rely on my memory to document them; nevertheless, they are great jazz party stories which I share when the circumstances permit. I do remember clearly Sid's account of waiting at Brisbane Airport for Ella and Mel, when they toured together. This is one story I can tell...
-
SID couldn't find the two stars and went to the airline counter to ask for them to be paged. Over the PA came the announcement, "Would E Fitzgerald and M Torm [minus final accent] come to the [airline] desk?" Decades later, Sid still shuddered as he told of his embarrassment that "they couldn't even get it right for the top jazz singer of the day".
-
THINKING about what I can say here in honour of Sid, a truly great figure in Australian jazz even though his major credits were as a zany personality rather than a muso, I will document something special – about that Joe Pass association. This could be the first time this has been made public in the written word. Grab yourself a coffee, wine, beer, or even a scotch because this is a slice of international jazz history, told to me by Sid in the early hours at his his St Lucia home about 1984...
-
HAVING had many meetings with Sid at Brisbane venues in the era – such as the Basement of Mileham (Dr Jazz) Hayes and Bonapartes Hotel – I asked a favour of him: to 'guitar sit' some of the special instruments from my collection while I was on holiday. I always felt twitchy about leaving them all at home and used to farm them out to friends. I knew I could trust Sid, and he was happy to stash a few around his house while I was away. Entering Sid's house – 1950s bungalow style – was like a trip into a bebop party room. He had an upright piano and a drum kit set up ready to go. He took me on a tour of his record collection – wall to wall and so heavy he said he needed to have the foundations underpinned. When I went to pick up the guitars we loosened up with a few bottles of XXXX Light, his brew of choice, then he sat at the piano and played some of the most discordant music I have heard, without any clear melody or beat. After about 10 minutes, Sid broke the welcome silence with a simple statement: "Tea for Two, isn't it great? It virtually plays itself." Sid, a then retired Customs officer, had a long-established routine of a trip to the Big Apple every year to keep up to date with the state of the art, and I guess he was in a neo-bop interpretative mood.
-
I ASKED who had been in the party room and he said Ella had sat in my chair and Louis had sat 'over there'. Sid's favourite acclamation was "Out of nowhere", which he would use where others would say "gee" or "wow". A few hours later I was saying "out of nowhere" when he showed me a letter from one of my jazz heroes, Joe Pass, dated in the 1960s, carrying Joe's stamped letterhead and thanking Sid for what he had done for him.
-
SID had read or heard that Joe was out of the scene because of medical reasons (aficionados will know what I am saying here) and had written to him while he was in an institution, appealing to him to get his act together and return to performing. Joe's letter said Sid's expression had been the turning point that had made him realise that if someone in a far away place like Australia cared about him he should indeed lift himself from his low. Joe said he had asked his wife to investigate moving to Australia but all she could get was tourism oriented. Sid said he had met Joe several times since that interchange, which had occurred almost two decades previously. So that's it: Sid Bromley's great gift to jazz has been put into print. I finally have got it off my chest.
-
MANY of the key influences have hidden in the vacant expanses of my penthouse suite (top storey, just above the shoulders) but I do not forget one: In about 1976 or '77, I heard Johnny Nicol at the Mayfair Room in Kings Cross. Here was a fantastically natural Australian voice spanning the cultural divide. I was fortunate to meet Johnny and become a mate after he moved to the Sunshine Coast in the late 1990s, and enjoy the memory of the fantastic music he made with the late Vince Genova, the Fame School graduate who studied with Oscar Peterson and then made Queensland his second home. I must thank author Scott Nicol who gave me the opportunity to contribute to his biography of Johnny, Johnny Nicol: My Life My Music http://www.dingocreek.com.au/general/johnny-nicol-biography/ I have fond memories of jamming with Johnny on the deck of my Buderim home, bathed in gold as the sun set over the Blackall Range. Despite Johnny's high level of experience and position as one of the all-time greats of jazz (full stop) he can come down to the level of a mug like me and make us sound good. What a buzz; thank you, Johnny! I note that the wikipedia entry at this point describes Johnny as an "Australian jazz singer" but he is one of the best guitarists you will ever hear. I was washing the dishes after dinner one night when he picked up my old Maton Freshman and played his arrangement of It's a Lovely Way to Spend an Evening. I was clinking around with knives and plates and suddenly thought I must be crazy; I had one of the world's top musicians in my home and I was stupidly doing a mundane task.
-
YOU would not believe how he played that tune – not one run was repeated in 10 minutes! Johnny's early album Traces remains my favourite because he gave such life and vigour to compositions from way across the Pacific and 'modernised' them with, as I said, an Australian voice, both vocally and instrumentally.
-
MOST of the players I ran into over the years and who shared my love of the great jazz tradition were fully fledged pros and I was too timid to ask to jam with them. In any case, the next newsroom roster would put an end to any chance of me 'doing something' with the music. The upshot was that I kept plugging away by myself, learning songs by the great composers including Gershwin, Porter, Carmichael, Berlin, Kern and Jobim, and even Thielemans' Bluesette and a bit of straight hard bop like Parker's Yardbird Suite. It certainly was "hard to learn how tears can burn one's heart" (only joking) while the occasional partytime jam kept me going a long time.
-
IN 1999, I received some inspiration from talking with Rick Farbach whose newly released autobiography, Cleftomania, I reviewed for the Sunshine Coast Daily's Saturday magazine. Rick bemoaned the demise of the jamming tradition and told me how he had been bitterly disappointed during a recent visit to Melbourne when even with a list of musical credits as long as his vocabulary he could not find any jamming. I had first met Rick when he played bass at a Sunshine Coast Jazz Action Society concert in 1981, and more than a decade later on my return to the Coast I had the pleasure of seeing him perform on chromatic harmonica.
-
RICK was a post-war immigrant from Germany and made his name in Australian jazz as a guitarist before specialising on bass. He retired as the musical director of Brisbane television stations, and in the late 1980s was stricken with arthritis in his hands. He then took up the harmonica. Of course, I seized the opportunity and asked if he would jam – Rick preferred to call a 'jam' a 'blow' – with me sometime. He invited me and the family to the Noosa North Shore home where he and his wife Dawn had lived since the '70s. I think I gained a bit of 'cred' with Rick because I could cite the signature tune of his hero, the king of the cool jazz era, Stan Kenton, with whom Rick toured and after whom he named his son; Kenton Farbach, of course, now is a highly accomplished composer. Rick offered to teach me everything he knew if I would travel to his home but in that era I was tortured with heavy workloads in a demanding job and unfortunately was too worn out to travel on my days off. Nevertheless I am 'eternally grateful' that he shared his genius, including his humour, with me. It was a great loss to the world when he died in 1984, joking with the medical staff right to the end.
-
THE genius of Farbach and the quirky humour of Sid Bromley must have made a memorable mix when they got together. Rick showed me a letter from Sid, written in a scratchy calligraphic style, with a touch of origami - a little diamond ripped out of a cormer as a decorative touch. The world is much poorer since these blokes moved on to jazz heaven. ABOUT a decade ago I became frustrated that I was unable to find jazz singers to jam with. I played for a while with Carol O'Rourke, who had her own brand of Aussie rock but liked some jazzy and bluesy approaches, and had a few sessions with Sue Gillespie, who was conservatorium trained and at the time was branching into jazz standards. I also jammed with several karoake singers. But it didn't really 'click'. Then I thought, 'What the heck! In the meantime, I'll do it myself." So I performed solo for an extended period entertaining elderly patients in the secure wards at the Yarrabee nursing home at Redland Bay and at Aunty Alice's Restaurant at Russell Island. High points included the Auckland jazz guitarist Steve Terry playing lead with me at the nursing home and the accomplished Aussie multi-instrumentalist Jon Jass, also on lead guitar, at the restaurant. About this time, a lady on the checkout at the local supermarket had a croaky voice and when I asked if it was getting better she said, "Yes, but I still can't sing."
-
THAT really started something because the checkout chick was a semi-retired jazz singer from New Zealand making Australia her new home. The Kiwis know her as Viki Carryl, and since that great day we have done dozens of performances, at times bringing other musos (bass, sax, drums) into the act. Oops, the word count is near 3000 and I could keep going forever but better let you rest your eyes. I'll get back on the jazz boat a bit later, when time allows. Yours in jazz, JR
No comments:
Post a Comment