Roots. Craig Horne

      The Eureka Youth League, Communism and all that Jazz

      Throughout the ’40s and ’50s, and into the ’60s decade of rebellion, the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) developed significant relationships with cultural and artistic movements. The youth wing of the CPA, The Eureka Youth League (EYL), played a particularly important role in the attempt to forge an alliance between musicians and communism. First through jazz, and then through two folk music revivals, the EYL sought to use music to recruit members and to foster its ideological and political struggles. In the end, the EYL’s and CPA’s relationship with both jazz and folk was tenuous. Yet along the way, the music itself flourished. This, then, is a story of tensions between and paradoxes surrounding the Party and musicians sympathetic to it. Yet it is also a story about how the cultural life of Australia was greatly enriched by the EYL’s attempt to use music as a political tool …7

      Back in 1942, newlywed Graeme Bell was hangin’ with the Reed push, playing hot jazz and pissing-on at the Fawkner Hotel in Toorak Road, or spending time at his flat in South Yarra. Drinkin’ at the flat was de rigueur with the hip bohemian crowd and everyone who was anyone was there — jazz musicians, music critics, Michael Keon. It was at the Bells’ Adams Street flat that Sid Nolan turned out monochromes of nudes painted on blotting paper with the aide of a dipped finger in a jar of red pigment. Groovy baby.

      But then the planets aligned, and Graeme and Roger Bell’s life would change forever when Harry Stein of the Eureka Youth League, the youth arm of the Communist Party of Australia invited the Bells to play at Stein’s Eureka Hot Jazz Society at 104 Queensberry Street North Melbourne. What was going on here? Why would a card-carrying communist support and promote a bunch of avant-garde jazz heads like Bell and their modernist artist mates?

      Maybe Stein and fellow members were true Bolsheviks, in the pre-Stalinist sense. Like Harry’s Eureka Youth League, the pre-Stalinist Russian Bolsheviks encouraged a national cultural pluralism, a kind of democratisation of art where progressive artistic movements would become a dynamic force in society, hopefully resulting in modernity becoming accessible to everyone. In the immediate aftermath of the 1917 revolution, Lenin’s Commissar of Education Anatoly Lunacharsky turned over the Russian art schools to modernist artists such as Marc Chagall, whose staff included Malevich and El Lissitzky. According to Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New:

      ‘Lunacharky, who was determined to see the birth of “an art of 5 kopecks” — cheap available and modern — created the Higher State Art Training Centre in Moscow … which turned into the Bauhaus of Russia, the most advanced art college anywhere in the world, and the ideological centre of Russian Collectivism … where the modernity of rivets, celluloid, aeroplane wings replaced primitivism and mysticism.’8

      Maybe Harry Stein viewed things similarly to his Bolshevik comrades. Maybe he too wanted to establish Melbourne’s very own democratically available modernist jazz centre right there in Queensberry Street, a place where everyone, not just the denisens of the Trocadero or Palais de Danse, could access this dynamic music. He certainly wanted to establish a space where jazz musicians could play, swap ideas and be supported by both a sympathetic promoter and a receptive audience. If this fitted into a broader communist vision for Stein at the EYL Hall in North Melbourne then perhaps it was successful.

      The war was clearly approaching its end. Together with the Soviet Union, the Allies had invaded Germany and were pushing the Nazi Army back to Berlin. Hitler suicided, the Germans unconditionally surrendered in May and now there were just the Japanese to deal with in the Pacific. For Melburnians it was time to emerge from the depression, fear and monotony of war and embrace the warm miracle of peace. That’s what happened, though not overnight, at the EYL Hall in 1945.

      Down the road apiece was Camp Pell, an American Army Camp set up in Royal Park. It was there that thousands of cashed-up, unbound, jazz-loving US soldiers were in search of a good time. Ironically they would find it at Commie Central, EYL Hall. Jazzbos and their girls dug the band, danced the Lindy Hop and disappeared together into the anonymity of the blackout. It was, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, a still point in a turning world. It was a time of anticipation. There was a sense of existing in a kind of dream, where — to quote Eliot again — the past and future had gathered. There was nothing to do but dance and wait.

      Then the bomb annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, turning men, women and children into shadowy outlines on walls. Japan surrendered in September and war was over, for now. Camp Pell was dismantled but the EYL jazz scene lived on — in fact, it thrived. Pretty soon the Queensberry Street hall became a musical magnet for every jazz cat in Melbourne, especially when Graeme Bell’s Jazz Gang rented the space from Harry and the EYL to run a regular hot town cabaret every Saturday night. The cold, cavernous Victorian Hall was transformed into an atmosphere of a Parisian café-chantant by visual artists like Tony Underhill who painted neoclassical figures on huge pieces of paper and hung them on the walls. Artist/set designer Warwick Armstrong also painted a semi-abstract design of Salome dancing before Herod for the stage backdrop. Graeme Bell himself designed a modernist depiction of a clarinet player for the band’s music stands. A piano was rolled out of Graeme’s mother’s house and into the club, front of house staff were recruited from the ranks of girlfriends and wives, and suddenly, to immediate success, the Uptown Club was born.9

      Bell had experience hosting dances, and had learnt a thing or two about building a crowd. As he wrote,

      ‘When you’ve got something to market and a ready-made outlet doesn’t present itself, you create your own.’10

      Years before, Bell had hired places like Leonard Cabaret at the St. Kilda Baths for a regular Sunday night dance. The whole enterprise was a kind of cottage industry; he printed tickets himself and made each patron a club member. This had the bonus of creating a mailing list of jazz enthusiasts that could be added to as he expanded his entrepreneurial empire. For the opening of the Uptown Club, Bell broke out the franking machine and hit the post office, and designed posters and notices.

      When the Uptown Club finally opened it was a full house from day one. Couples danced to blues shouters, boogie-woogie piano, and of course the red-hot sounds of Graeme Bell and his Jazz Gang. It was a venue straight out of a Scott Fitzgerald novel, a place where ladies could rouge their knees and roll their stockings down.

      ‘Put your lovin arms around me, like the circle round the sun,

      I want you to love me momma like my easy rider done …’11

      Soon 104 Queensberry Street North Melbourne was the place to