Roots. Craig Horne
permits to such persons should be refused?”’
The Minister agreed — and six band members were deported. It would not be until 1954 that another band led by an African-American musician would be permitted to tour our sunburnt shores, a huge cultural and musical lost opportunity, for the whole country, but especially for Melbourne.18
Melbourne’s reception towards African-American jazz musicians contrasted to that offered by European cities such as Paris, where jazz was introduced to the French by segregated black soldiers stationed in France during World War One. African-American soldiers — led by Lt James Reese, a well-respected New York bandleader — marched their music through two thousand miles of tiny farm villages and concert halls across France. Everywhere Reese led his 369th Harlem Infantry Regiment band, they created an exciting musical revolution. The French went crazy for jazz and the African-American musicians who played it.
After the war, many African-American musicians, dancers and entertainers returned to France. Many settled in, and delighted cabarets and club audiences of Paris’ Lower Montmartre, which became known as Black Montmartre. Club owners and club-goers from all over the world couldn’t get enough of the syncopated rhythms. In the early ’30s Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Coleman Hawkins — and later Ella Fitzgerald — were treated like royalty by Parisians and so these musicians toured often, up to and after World War II.
Not in sunny white Australia however where politicians and the conservative press had dismissed jazz music and musicians as decadent, degenerate and a direct threat to our racial purity. Such disapproval from community elders, however, spurred many young people to explore the hidden pleasures of this new and exciting music.
Initially jazz was hidden in the popular songs of America’s Tin Pan Alley inspiring Melbourne’s more curious and adventurous musicians to delve further. This study led to jazz appreciation societies emerging across town, and saw both amateur and professional musicians emulate what they heard on records from Chicago and New York. Suddenly jazz bands were the cat’s pyjamas and jazz musicians were cool — especially hot stylists like Melbourne’s own multi-instrumentalist Benny Featherstone and the trombonist-bandleader Frank Coughlan. These bands played a mixture of jazz and popular swing for eager dancers to do the Lindy Hop and Charleston. They played to packed crowds at venues like the Palais in St Kilda or the exotic Green Mill with its state-of-the-art rubber sprung floor, atmospheric lighting, and convenient location across the river from the Flinders Street Railway Station. Frank Coughlan also played informal group sessions at venues like the Fawkner Park Kiosk, as well as gigs at The Melbourne Town Hall.
You can still hear what those ‘cool cats were puttin’ down’ through the wonders of wire recording. In 1925 American band leader Ray Tellier had an eighty-two week run at the Palais with his outfit the San Francisco Orchestra, during which time the band recorded ‘Yes Sir That’s My Baby’. This song, along with Bert Ralton’s Havana Band’s ‘I Want to be Happy’ were the first Victorian jazz age recordings.
Then the roaring twenties gave way to the depressive thirties. Suddenly the capitalist world was being blown apart and chaos was driving its fist into the faces of the poor. The ’30s saw a third of the working population unemployed; the poorer suburbs were hardest hit, as were those aged 20-29 and over forty. Even those who managed to keep their jobs had their wages cut and their taxes increased. Homelessness was rife, children starved, families were torn apart. Those of the working class were reduced to rubble, but the affluent middle class mainly survived. But what’s that I hear? A new sound had crept into the financial ruins of Melbourne, and that new sound was Dixieland jazz — but only those living in a working household, those with food in the icebox, cream-coloured drapes and an HMV radiogram, took any notice.
Chapter 3
Modernism, Communism, Hot Jazz & Graeme Bell
Jazz is a tree. It has many branches that reach out in many directions, it goes out into the far east and picks up an exotic blossoms … everywhere it goes east, west, north, south, it produces many different coloured flowers and picks up many influences … but as you go down into the earth, you’ll find blue-blooded-black roots deep in the soil of black Africa which is the foundation of everything, because it is [the African beat], the most listened to beat in the world …1 (Duke Ellington)
Dixieland jazz originated in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century and was played mostly by its African and Creole American originators: Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Kid Ory. Dixie bands typically featured piano, saxophone, trumpet, bass and drums and some may have also included trombone, tuba, clarinet, banjo, guitar and washboard. This wild mercury music caused a sensation in African-American communities across the United States, with its shards of attacking horn, its disorientating rhythm, and its stab first and ask questions later attitude. However, perhaps unsurprisingly, the first commercial recording of jazz music was not made by its intense and passionate originators but by five white crackers cashing in on this new sound: the Original Jazz Band. In 1917 this inauspicious bunch climbed the stairs of the Victor Talking Machine Company on 38th Street in New York City and recorded a stinking pile of 12 bar crap known as the ‘Livery Stable Blues’. Highlights of this musical mess included a clarinet making the sound of a rooster, a cornet whinnying like a horse and a trombone mooing like a cow; Pat Boone and Vanilla Ice would be proud.
By the ’30s it wouldn’t be this piece of cultural appropriation that would be played by Melbourne musicians, but one of more traditional jazz, played by a couple of serious students of the genre with unorthodox chemistry — the Bell Brothers. Although not the first to play Dixieland jazz in Melbourne, they would be its principal exponents.
Graeme Bell was a classically trained piano player and his brother Roger blew horn. The two Scotch College boys fell in with some jazz dudes from their school, like ‘Lazy’ Ade Monsbourgh, and started playing clubs, coffee houses, pubs and specialist jazz venues like The Embers as well as jazz appreciation societies. It was the Bells that got things swinging.
In the ’40s, jazz appealed to the young almost as much as it horrified the establishment. During the war, many local musicians came into contact with Americans who updated them on developments in the scene. Melbourne became the centre of a local enthusiasm for ‘hot’, or traditional ’20s New Orleans style jazz,2 with its emphasis on improvisation and authenticity and which paralleled new directions in the visual arts and literature. In 1941 for example, Graeme Bell’s3 Jazz Gang formed a Victorian Jazz Lover’s Society and staged regular gigs at The Stage Door on Flinders Street. The Gang co-produced a program of boogie-woogie piano, blues and traditional jazz, with supports from such people as a young pianist Don Banks and blues singer Vivian Roberts along with guitarists Joe Washington and Spade Davis. Bell writes that, ‘To date, this was probably the most adventurous staging of jazz music in Melbourne.’
But the Victorian Jazz Lovers Society shows were important for another reason: they were co-produced by Harry Stein, sometime drummer but fulltime leader of the Communist Party-aligned Eureka Youth League. Harry would have a significant role to play in both the evolution of jazz music in Melbourne and in bringing Graeme Bell and his take on the traditional jazz form to the attention of the wider world.
Picture this: it’s among the darkest days of World War II. German U-Boats have blasted the British fleet to bits in the Atlantic and the Nazi Army has marched into Greece. Auschwitz has expanded to increase the production rate of bodies and up to 34000 Jews are slaughtered in ditches by anti-tank guns over a two-day period during Operation Odessa, while almost simultaneously, Liverpool is reduced to rubble by the Luftwaffe. Meantime, Rommel roars across the African desert, Moscow is under siege and Japanese Zeros sink most of the US fleet anchored at Pearl Harbour. With the world on the brink, Graeme Bell and his Jazz Gang formed a partnership with the Communist Party of Australia to bring their two-beat hokum to the jazzbos of Melbourne.
Bell’s band poured out their polyphonic blues improvisations every Saturday night at The Stage Door. Roger Bell’s cornet played the melody on songs like ‘Shimmy Like Your Sister Kate’, while Ade Monsbourgh on clarinet or valve trombone and Pixie Roberts on clarinet improvised around Roger’s wailing voice. Jack Varney on banjo or guitar chorded away as Lou Silbereisen on bass or tuba kept the oom-pah