All That Jazz Brings On A Dizzy Feeling

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday January 17, 2009

Reviewed by John Clare

From swing and bop to West Coast cool and Wangaratta, a rich field is thoughtfully explored.

A New History of Jazz: Revised And Updated Edition

By Alyn Shipton

Continuum, 804 pp, $36

Jazz: The Australian Accent

By John Shand

UNSW Press, 228 pp, $34.95

THOUGH a dedicated Time Team viewer, I must confess that the fascination of pre-jazz musical archaeology has faded. Yet it is an exotic field, in which slavery, voodoo and the unique social mix of New Orleans figure. Alyn Shipton approaches it with academic rigour. As his title implies, myths are questioned.

The stream of jazz as we know it remains compelling. Here I look instinctively for the author's treatment of movements that are often misrepresented. Cool jazz, for instance. West Coast cool could take restraint into blandness but there is much there of singular interest and importance; much that is intense in its subtlety. Full marks here to Shipton, though Ted Gioia's West Coast Jazz remains essential.

The swing era was a rare time when many of the best jazz bands were as famous as rock bands are today, which was not quite the case in the earlier "jazz age". Contemporary writers can forget how much creativity and contrast there was among popular and obscure bands. Shipton's survey is practically peerless.

Hard bop of the 1950s and early 1960s was fed to students until it became something to react against (as John Shand's book demonstrates). Shipton's revitalising survey is a tour de force. The first "modern jazz" is generally described as frenetic but it had its cool aspects. Shipton is superb on the evolution of styles and gives such a sense of how startling the cauterising dissonances of Dizzy Gillespie's modern big bands sounded that I promptly revisited them through my own record collection. A good history will do that.

Gillespie's technique is lauded but neither Shipton nor anyone else I've read has shown how the musician's multi-noted dazzles were not only spectacular but set up swarms of harmonic atmosphere, in some ways foreshadowing John Coltrane's so-called "sheets of sound".

Shipton might have tried to evoke Gillespie's curious trumpet sound and the way it subtly changed in the 1950s. Music is sound before it is even rhythm or melody. It may not be possible to evoke the presence of unique sounds in the air but their characteristics can be analysed. Shipton fails to note important tonal differences between Miles Davis and Chet Baker. Still, he made me really "hear" pianist Horace Silver for the first time.

The poet Philip Larkin claimed that if you hadn't heard about a record "at school", you assumed it was not worth hearing. Some British jazz writers seem to have attended St Prig's, though not all by any means. Unlike the prigs, Englishman Shipton has placed styles and innovations within a social and political context where "one's club" is a very different place - most potently in his examination of the broad movement known variously as free jazz, the new thing and the avant garde.

Shipton has surveyed jazz beyond America but not, unsurprisingly, in Australia. This history gives little sense of jazz in the 21st century but, up to the recent past, is as comprehensive as any I've read.

There has been a narrative history of Australian jazz from 1946 to 1994. In fact, I wrote it. John Shand, a regular contributor to the Herald, has taken a boldly different approach to current Australian jazz. He has profiled a group of representative figures, who speak at some length. They include Mark Simmonds, the members of the Necks, Phil Slater, Steve Magnussen, Scott Tinkler and Phil Treloar. While many other musicians are cited in these profiles and in subsidiary essays, some readers have inferred that everything of contemporary significance has radiated from the central group.

The book's strength - the length and depth of the selected dialogues - has marginalised such enormously important figures as Sandy Evans and the late Roger Frampton. Current Australian jazz often combines the hypnotic and euphoric with spiky elements of a still-evolving avant garde. Feeding into the latter is a rapprochement between young jazz players and exponents of so-called new music. Also feeding this are the astonishing virtuosos who came together in the Brisbane band Artisans Workshop. They are not mentioned.

American musicians at the Wangaratta Festival of Jazz have initially felt that locals were doing some things wrongly. By the festival's end they have usually decided that, no, they are doing things their way. Unlike Shipton, Shand has described musicians' sounds in poetic detail and has given us a much stronger sense of jazz in this century. He has gone much further than most into what improvisation means to the players and what fans hear in it.

Some subjects in this book cite inspirational jazz musicians but present jazz as a set of principles from which they have departed. Yet many listeners still hear their music as jazz. Such departures became part of jazz long ago. Is it jazz? Is "jazz" still relevant? Well, a recent examination of contemporary artist Jeff Koons used a nutty soundtrack collage of traddie and avant jazz - and it was perfect!

Shand's important book has information on festivals and venues and comes with a CD that allows the reader to judge whether the music has an Australian accent.

© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald

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