Roots. Craig Horne
own specialised form of energy which will assert its self regardless of any opposition.’24
Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd followed Tucker’s lead. The aim of these artists was not to walk a collective path to modernism, but rather undertake their own solitary artistic journey, one that moved them away from our shores and resulted in their becoming what Albert Tucker described as ‘refugees from Australian culture’.25 John Reed reported that the postwar years had seen ‘some organic change … in the community, a lessening of sensitive awareness, or perhaps a mere dissipation of energies into numerous channels, irrelevant to creative talent.’26
This ‘dissipation of energies’ led directly to the collapse of what had been one of Reed’s greatest achievements: the dynamic Contemporary Art Society.
This new social and artistic conservatism was felt most keenly in Melbourne; as Richard Haese wrote, ‘the Melbourne scene had been the liveliest, and the change of cultural climate was felt most intensely there.’27 And with Melbourne’s cultural landscape fast resembling a pile of indurated clay, what was the impact felt within the jazz scene?
It firstly had the effect of breaking the nexus between the modernist art movement and jazz: they no longer could be described as a cohesive whole. With the collapse of CAS, and with many of its key practitioners living in exile overseas, there was no-one left on the visual arts scene to fight the good (left-wing, artistic) fight. This probably had a real impact on Bell, and on the jazz scene in general.
Let’s go back a little to the time when the Graeme Bell Australian Jazz Band — they had been renamed again — returned home from their triumphant European tour in August 1948. By then, the band’s international career had been launched and the Bell boys were household names throughout the country. Bell explained, ‘By the time we reached Melbourne, the publicity was quite overwhelming and we wondered what we had started. All capital dailies were running stories with photos … we were also filmed by Cinesound Newsreel …’28
Even the conservative Australian Broadcasting Commission wanted a piece of the action and dangled a lucrative contract in front of the band. But there was a catch; in order to sign the ABC contract the band had to satisfy ‘Aunty’. Bell had to agree that ‘I [Bell] was not going to place a bomb in the middle of Collins Street or paint a hammer and sickle over the door of St Paul’s Cathedral or do anything a communist was supposed to do …’29
Bell managed to do this by agreeing that he and the band would sever all connection with communist fronts like Eureka Youth League, including the Australian tour organised by the EYL to ‘pay back’ their sponsorship of the band to Prague.
The band was broke on their return from Europe and as Bell explained in his autobiography; being on the road is expensive, and despite six months of packed houses there was little to show for it. The ABC contract would not only wipe out any outstanding debts, it would secure the band’s immediate future. It was no contest; the EYL lost their poster boys for recruitment to the cause.
The decision meant that things got decidedly hostile between the band and their former comrades. Audrey Blake from the EYL shot both barrels in an article published in the EYL’s Youth Voice:
‘When Graeme Bell’s Band left Australia all were members of the Eureka Youth League. We gladly accept their resignation. People with such lack of principle have no place in our ranks … Without the League, the Bell Band’s European tour would have been impossible. The Bell Band, who are now interested only in money, have placed themselves beyond the pale of all progressive elements in the Australian labour and democratic movement …’30
This proved to be a turning point in the relationship between left wing politics and the Melbourne jazz scene. Up to this point, people like Harry Stein believed that jazz music should be championed by the Communist Party, and that, in turn, it would play a significant role in recruiting musicians and young people to the left. But by the end of the ’40s, fascism had been defeated, the Cold War was in full swing, a new social conservatism was on the rise and there was no longer the same commitment by artists to left wing causes. A new era of artistic individualism had arrived.
Visual artists such as Tucker and Nolan, and Graeme Bell and his band were artists first, not politicians or political organisers. They had sympathies for left wing causes, but were no longer part of a united, modernist ‘art movement’. The EYL and the Communist Party of Australia had undoubtedly helped facilitate the emergence of a vibrant live music scene for hot jazz in Melbourne. But ultimately musicians are, as ‘autonomous agents,’31 a cultural reality seen as treacherous by an increasingly Stalinist-dominated Communist Party of Australia.
The flirtation between jazz and the EYL, and its unhappy outcome, reinforced the view of puritanical CPA hardliners like Paul Mortier: that jazz was not a progressive force in society but rather a decadent pollutant that would turn sons and daughters of good Marxist families away from the working-class cause. Mortimer is quoted by Ashbolt and Mitchell:
‘To the extent that we fail, their minds will continue to be gripped musically by the inanities of Tin Pan Alley, or the eroticism of Bessie Smith …’32 Mortimer was instead advocating young people turn to folk music which, during the ’50s became the natural home for radical youth. But that’s another story; it will be explored shortly.
Mortier had much in common with Methodists at this time; both socially conservative and both infused with a joyless commitment to the one true cause. But he had much more in common with Stalin and his war against Russian culture, where modernist filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein and artists like Chagall were forced to flee Soviet shores in pursuit of artistic freedom overseas. If artists didn’t emigrate, they fell under the Soviet boot for fear of the death camps. Musicians like Shostakovich conformed to Stalin’s sterile socialist realism because failure to do so would risk his being tried as an enemy of the people during the purges. The Stalinist era eliminated an entire generation of the Russian internationalist avant-garde, replacing it with conformist mediocrity pumping out propaganda.
Meanwhile, Bell and his band had reached a pinnacle of their creative power. Their ABC concerts were a huge success both critically and financially, with the Melbourne Herald’s music critic John Sinclair stating that the Bell band played ‘vital jazz in its purest form …’33 The band played town halls up and down the east coast and recorded thirteen radio programs for broadcast on ABC stations right around the country. Graeme Bell remembered the tour fondly:
‘After the scruffy accommodation and travelling conditions we [endured] in England, the ABC’s first class and very efficient arrangements were not hard to take … grand pianos tuned on the day of the concert, taxis to and from hotels, press receptions, supper after the shows … [we were well] looked after …’34
After the ABC tour ended the band was back on the road, this time with ex-Duke Ellington trumpet player Rex Stewart. Together they played sixty country towns in all, from Port Augusta in South Australia to Sale in Victoria and up to Yass in New South Wales. The tour was the most comprehensive of its type ever undertaken in Australia, giving many country people their first chance of seeing a live jazz show.
Following the Rex Stewart tour, the newly named ‘Graeme Bell and His Australian Jazz Band’ travelled back overseas, beginning with England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. This tour included a Royal Command performance for Princess Elizabeth in 1951, and a tour of war-ravaged Germany with the Delta blues singer Big Bill Broonzy. There the band was met with reception that Bell described as ‘over-whelming’; jazz had had been banned during the Nazi regime and was now a living symbol of freedom for the German people.
A touring jazz band, for German girls, also presented a chance to exercise these freedoms; as Bell explained in 2006, ‘German girls would hide in the band bus behind the seats, and when the band would take off, in the middle of the snow, on these long journeys, they’d reveal themselves, some of them would wear wedding rings so that they could get into the hotels with the members of the band and pose as their wives, and they’d purposely speak bad German.’35
The tour included fifty-eight concerts in two months in the European snow through January and February and although very well organised, the cracks were beginning to show. By the end of