Roots. Craig Horne
the teenage, cornet-playing schoolboy from Vermont. In his autobiography, Seeing the Rafters, Sangster describes how every Sunday he would kiss his Presbyterian Church Choir singer father goodbye and catch the train to North Melbourne to see Graeme Bell’s jazz band go gangbusters. Sangster was drawn to Roger Bell’s cornet technique, writing that he ‘played it clear and strong.’ He was also inspired by Lazy Ade Monsbourgh: ‘He was a revelation, I marvelled as he played his rich valve trombone like he was straight out of Bourbon Street in New Orleans.’
Occasionally, tuba, banjo and washboard replaced drums and bass in the band. When this occurred, a new smooth, light rhythm could be heard purring behind Graeme’s front-line players on songs like Bell’s ‘Blue Tongue Blues’. Upon hearing this, Sangster was hooked, and he went on to become a powerhouse in Australian jazz, touring with Bell and his band from 1950 to 1955 and playing various instruments including drums, cornet and vibraphone.
Sangster went on to play with Don Burrows and even joined the progressive rock group Tully in 1970. He toured with the rock musical Hair and wrote scores for television, documentaries, films and radio. In 1973, Sangster released a series of popular Lord of the Rings-inspired albums that started with the Hobbit Suite.
By 1946 the Uptown Club was in full roar. Every Saturday night it was packed with, a young crowd of university students, artists, musicians, dancers, plain jazz enthusiasts, and even the Chilean Consul’s daughter, Alma Hubner, one of the Bell’s band most ardent supporters. As Bell wrote:
‘Admission was 3s3d and we played from 8.15 to 11.45pm. At the time it was an offence to drink alcohol where people were dancing or within 100 meters of premises where there was dancing. You couldn’t even go out to your car parked around the corner the corner to take a swig without being booked.’12
As alcohol was not allowed, soft drinks were sold in the foyer, along with cups of coffee and tea — although there was grog smuggled in via medicine bottles and the odd Dexedrine tablet to speed things up a bit. Graeme Bell and the Uptown Club weren’t going to challenge the Le Lido on the Champs-Elysees for sophistication, nor was it, for fear of being closed down by authorities, able to challenge Melbourne’s overarching cultural conventions.
The First Australian Jazz Convention
In December 1946, Bell, Ade Monsbourgh and Harry Stein helped unite Australia’s jazz fraternity by organising the first Australian Jazz Convention, held in the EYL’s Hall in Queensberry Street.
As Jeff Sparrow observed,13 Australia’s musical isolation at this time was so intense that jazz-heads habitually accosted American sailors on the docks to ask them if they had any records. This isolation was, at least in part, the result of two events: the Australian Government’s banning of imported recordings in ’40, and the paucity of overseas musicians visiting our white-Australian shores. After the Sonny Clay episode, it was not until 1954 that another band led by a black musician was permitted to tour.
Australia was a Federation in name only in the ’40s; more accurately, perhaps, we were a loose collection of self-contained states and territories, separated physically and culturally by distance and inferior communications. Jazz enthusiasts lived in islands of polyrhythmic isolation in our capital cities or worse (in terms of access to jazz), remote rural locations. Jazz lovers and musicians alike were in desperate need of an opportunity to meet, discuss current musical trends and ideas, and simply just play and have a good time. The Australian Jazz Convention provided that opportunity.
As Bell wrote, for five days in 1946, jazz musicians and music lovers from all over Australia descended on the EYL Hall for a series of lectures, concerts, jam sessions, workshops, record programs and discussions. Graeme Bell gave a talk on the music of Louis Armstrong, Dink Johnson, and Jelly Roll Morton. Bill Miller presented material under the heading ‘Origins of Jazz’, featuring field recordings of Alan Lomax and including blues, ‘Negro’ lullabies and chain gang work songs. Concerts sold out, jam sessions went long into the night, ideas were swapped, and a lot of hot Australian jazz was played. Bell later recalled, ‘We were all walking on air. Here were these musicians from Sydney Hobart and Adelaide — few of us had previously met — who had been searching out this music that we had. Their aims were the same and they talked the same language. The rapport was almost unbelievable.’14
The lecture papers given at the conference were later published in the John Reed/Max Harris literary and artistic avant-garde journal Angry Penguins, which again reflected the association hot jazz had with the modernist movement at the time.
The convention did however highlight certain characteristics associated with the Melbourne ‘traditional’ or ‘hot’ jazz scene that were not shared by other mainland cities. There was, for example a notable absence of Sydney bands from the first jazz convention. This was largely because Sydney didn’t support a lot of traditional jazz music, it being a Melbourne-based phenomenon at the time. In his book Black Roots White Flowers, Andrew Bisset speculated that Sydney bands were more mainstream. He writes:
‘In Sydney there were more commercial ballrooms and more money for entertainment, especially during the war. If a musician reached a professional standard on his instrument then he had a good chance of making a living by it in Sydney, provided he played the music that was popular. Because of this, Dixieland was despised as something you rose above. But in Melbourne, [where]… many good musicians remained amateur, they were free to pursue their own interests, [consequently] Dixieland musicians researched their subject thoroughly, they knew more tunes than their Sydney counterparts, they sharpened their talents, their bands stayed together longer because there was nowhere to go, so they developed their own style and eventually created their own jobs.’15
It’s a tribute to the vision of early pioneers of the Australian Jazz Convention that it continues to this very day. The Convention, in its 73rd year at the time of writing, is now permanently held in Ballarat annually and is the longest continuously running jazz convention in the world.
Then it was 1946; Bell was playing hot jazz at the Uptown Club, and the Eureka Youth League was booming. At Heide, Sid Nolan was spreading his tins of Ripolin and bottles of oil on the scrubbed long table in the dining room; on the walls were charcoal drawings of bearded heads.
Brisbane poet Barrett Reid said of that moment:
‘I saw real paintings, free authentic, for the first time. I had arrived [at Heide] just as the Kellys were nearing completion; the large hardwood panels, the cardboard studies, the many drawings and water-colours, captured and controlled my eyes.’16
What Reid saw that day was an example of modernism engaging with popular imagination, through the vehicle of the Ned Kelly story. Nolan’s genius was to take the motif of Kelly, the black square letterbox, and, as Harding and Morgan wrote in Modern Love, mix local folklore with a lyrical bush setting in which Kelly appears as a kind of Australian Everyman. With the help of Nolan’s work, over time, the outlaw came to personify what many Australians thought about themselves: a race of anti-authoritarian men (no sheilas here mate, and no shirt lifters!), rebellious and alone, riding a stallion heroically through the great green grey of the Australian bush towards a blue horizon, beyond which lay immortality. Through Nolan’s Kelly series modernism came into the mainstream.
A similar phenomenon in the hot jazz scene would take place in February of the following year when, according to Bell’s autobiography, Harry Stein phoned him to ask if he and the band wanted to go to Prague.
Stein went on to explain that the World Youth and Students Convention, a leftist youth festival, would be held in the Czechoslovakian capital between July and August of ’47, and youth organisations from all over the world had been invited to send delegates. Sporting bodies, gymnasts, dance troupes, choirs, and so on were going, why not a jazz band? The Eureka Youth League would sponsor the event and Harry Stein would accompany the band as tour manager. Fares would be raised in a collaboration between the EYL, the trade union movement and the band.
It’s interesting to note that modernist artist and CAS mainstay, Noel Counihan was also sponsored by the left to travel to Czechoslovakia in the ’40s as part of an Australian delegation to the first World Peace Conference held in Paris. Counihan worked in Prague, Hungry, Poland and finally England