GIANT STEPS
by Murray Jennings
Being a Journey from Perth to Birdland, Beyond & Back, via
Melbourne, Trad Jazz and
two 1959 Wall Posters
-/-
Old
memories came rushing back last year, in
front of a street stall in Paris, backing on to the parapet alongside the Seine.
While my family selected postcards, I stared at the facsimile of a poster
advertising “In Person MILES DAVIS, Club Diamond, Beale Street, Memphis with
Guests including Lee Dorsey, Jimmy Reed...Two shows: 10:00pm and 1:00am. SUNDAY
JUNE 7th 1959
What a night that must have been! By 1:30, Jimmy
Reed would have warmed the joint up with ‘Big Boss Man’ and ‘Bright Lights, Big
City’, two of my favourites, a pre-‘Ya Ya’ Lee Dorsey might have followed with
some hot New Orleans R&B and assuming it was his sextet, Miles would have
followed the other five members slowly from the shadows at around 2:00am, to
the cheers and whistles of a very hip crowd. The black and white picture on the
poster showed just him, expressionless, trumpet clasped loosely over his chest,
a white, open-necked shirt, cuffs and cufflinks peeping from under the sleeves
of an obviously expensive, grey-striped Italian jacket.
Naturally, I bought the poster to bring back
home for my study wall. Not just because it was Miles, but I had noted the date
of the show. The Miles Davis Sextet had recorded the ‘iconic’ album,’ Kind of
Blue’ earlier in the year but it hadn’t yet been released. The date was
significant because I was holidaying in Melbourne around that time, walking on
wobbly legs after my contemporary jazz epiphany, courtesy of the Dave Brubeck
Quartet.
Green and only nineteen, getting over the breakup with my girlfriend, decked
out in working gear trying to look like Jack London or Jack Kerouac, intent on
melting into the Melbourne crowds. Army Surplus khaki cotton jacket, two deep
inside pockets, one for a packet of Blue Capstan tobacco, Riz-La papers, a box
of Swan matches and and a little notebook and a biro for jotting down ideas for the first Australian ‘Beat’ novel. The other pocket contained my ‘bible’, a
much-thumbed copy of ‘Protest”, an anthology of Beats and Angry Young Brits. As
a bookmark, I used a folded note of introduction from a Perth clarinettist
friend, Ross Nicholson to a Melbourne clarinettist, Nick Polites: ‘Please make
him welcome...’ I wore my Postman’s issue khaki shirt and dark blue serge
trousers rumpling over a pair of old desert boots, together with Ray Charles-style
black-framed sunglasses, should the sun break through the misty rain, or even if
it didn’t. Cool, eh?
Oh yeah, cool, swaggering down Flinders Street in charge of the world, but
I hadn’t yet taken the first big step
out of two-step trad jazz, except for a few 45rpm EPs; Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Gene Krupa,
Big Bill Broonzy, Leadbelly. I’d been to Sunday afternoon trad and mainstream
jam sessions in Perth’s YAL hall and I’d heard Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dizzy
Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Dave Brubeck, et al, on a friend’s record player, nodding
to the rhythms, but with no real idea of what was going on. Back home I’d whack
on my little EPs or some 10 inch LPs of Muggsy Spanier, Humphrey Lyttelton, Bessie Smith, King Oliver...With those people,
I didn’t have to think. My cousin
played piano and tuba in a Perth dixeland band and on occasions I’d carry his
tuba in through the stage door and thus score a freebie to the dance. Cool, or
what?
Not so cool were my Melbourne digs for the three weeks annual leave I’d
taken; the Salvation Army People’s Palace (midnight curfew), a short
suitcase-lugging walk from Spencer Street station. The address mightn’t have
been cool, but the dimly-lit, sparsely-furnished, 4th floor room
with a view of brick walls across the light well gave me enough atmosphere to
scribble some naive, phoney poems about
being down and out in Perth and Melbourne. Besides, it was cheap and only about
a ten minute wide-eyed wander to the Flinders and Swanston Streets
intersection, the hub and hum of the city.
Nick Polites played clarinet with
The Melbourne New Orleans Jazz Band and ran an up-market sweets shop opposite
Flinders Street Station. After a day and a night of riding trams and exploring
the city, I walked into the shop and showed him the note of introduction. It
was a very friendly welcome. Nick told me where and when the band was playing
and invited me to join them for a drink backstage. I was still 18 months away
from the legal drinking age, but had already risked arrest by having one beer
at Young and Jackson’s hotel, just so that I could see the famous painting of
the naked Chloe. So a few private drinks backstage at dance gigs with a bunch
of musicians was an attractive offer, which I accepted with gratitude.
All of which happened in St Silas Church hall in Albert Park, where I
should have taken advantage of the number of unattached Melbourne girls and
asked one to dance, but was overcome by a mixture of shyness and sadness. I was
missing my girlfriend. Anyway, I couldn’t imagine Kerouac cake-walking or
jiving to a trad jazz band. Not cool. So I found a shadowy corner, dragged out
my little notebook and biro and tried to scribble brilliant pithy observations,
like a true writer.
Brunette,
swirling red skirt, twirling under the arm of the square with the short
back’n’sides, When she faces me her blouse gapes and I can see...
Nick,
licorice stick pointing at the ceiling, doing the classic ’ High Society’ solo
over Frank Turville’s cornet in harmony with Kevin Shannon’s trom, Mookie
Herman thumping the bass and Willie Watt’s banjo syncopating with Graham
Bennett’s steady rhythm on the snare...
In the break I went outside, rolled a smoke, adopted a ‘cool’ expression
like James Dean’s, hoping one of the girls smoking in a little group would come
over, having spotted that I wasn’t a regular and introduce herself. None of
them did. It started to rain and they squealed and rushed back inside, hands
over their loosely permed hair-do’s.
A bloke rushed past me up the path to the stage door. He had dark, curly
hair and wore a fawn duffel coat and faded jeans. I was envious. No matter how
often Mum washed my jeans, the bloody things wouldn’t fade enough. I followed
him, plucking up the courage to meet the band.
Backstage, my shyness fell away immediately as Nick put a hand on my
shoulder and ushered me over to the rest of the band. Hands let go of beer
glasses and shook mine. Big grins. Perth, eh? Do you know Dick Hattan? Here y’ go, get this into you. You drunk
Victoria Bitter before? Been here long? You went to school with Ross Nicholson?
He’s young, but he’s goin’ places...Oh, Paul, come and meet a visitor. This is
Paul Marks. He’s our singer. The man in the duffel coat shook my hand. You’ll
hear him after the break. Bugger! Is that the time? Drink up, fellas! Down the
hatch and let’s go!
After the next bracket I wandered over to where some band wives were
serving behind a corner trestle table with a few piles of records for sale. I
couldn’t afford an LP, so I bought an EP of the MNOJB as a memento, especially
as it contained two of the songs Paul Marks had just sung, ‘Walking with the
King’ and ‘Dallas Blues’. My mouth watered over others by Graeme Bell, Ade
Monsborough, the Port Jackson Jazz Band and bands I’d never heard of, most on
the Swaggie label. I was just able to tuck the EP into my inside jacket pocket,
having left my book back in my room, then went outside for another smoke. I overheard
a conversation from a group nearby, along the lines of “You know Dave Brubeck’s
in town this week?” “Yeah, but he’s too far out for me. I don’t understand all
this modern stuff.” “ What about ‘Take
Five’? They’re playing it on the radio all the time. Just happy foot tapping
music, like these blokes in here.” “Nah, you need three feet to tap to Brubeck.”
At the end of the dance, I re-joined the band backstage as they packed
up their instruments and Mookie Herman, leaning on an upright piano, passed
round a flagon of riesling. It came to me, and with a swift swipe of my hand
across the spout, hoping nobody noticed, I gulped down some of the sweet wine
and passed the flagon on. As the jokes and laughter flowed, so did more wine
and then more beer and so on... until it was time to go. One by one, they bade
me farewell and went out to their cars. Nick autographed my EP and invited me
to come to their next gig, the following Friday in Glen Iris. He also asked if
I’d like a lift back into the city. I declined politely, saying as it had
stopped raining, I’d enjoy a walk.
.What I didn’t say to him was that I had never mixed wine and beer
before and I was feeling a bit strange. I needed
to walk. It turned out to be a long walk, punctuated by pauses to piss and
puke as surreptitiously as possible in long wet grass and under hedges. And it
started raining again.
I sloshed up to the front door of
the People’s Palace at around 12-45am. I rang the bell several times before a
little elderly gent finally shuffled into view through the folding gate, glared
at me as I told him my name and room number, swung the gate open and muttered a
warning that he wouldn’t let me in after curfew again. I thanked him and took
the lift up to my floor, went straight to the bathroom, did what I had to, returned
to my room, hung my wet clothes up to dry and went to sleep with, of all
things, the opening bars of ‘Take Five’ in my head.
My life was about to change dramatically in ways that I couldn’t have
dreamed of.
I counted about twenty of these posters the next morning as I walked
downtown to find a cheap breakfast.
ONE
NIGHT ONLY!
THE DAVE BRUBECK QUARTET
Featuring the Worldwide Hit
‘TAKE FIVE’
FESTIVAL HALL
Be quick! Tickets selling fast!
8-00pm
-----------------
When? Friday night!. Risk it? Or go for what I know
at Glen Iris with a great bunch of musos? My head still thumping in an odd
rhythm, it occurred to me that to come all the way from Perth and not grab an
opportunity to at least try something
new, would be pretty unadventurous. Especially for an aspiring writer. After
lashing out on a pack of American Camel cigarettes, I found a laminex and
chrome greasy spoon cafe, devoured a fried egg and bacon and an awful coffee,
then sat and smoked and scribbled some attempts at ‘Beat’ poetry in my
notebook, feeling so...cool!
Friday night. I
entered the foyer of Festival Hall and nothing could have prepared me for the
next two hours. Squeezing past quite a few men in suits and women in smart
frocks, at first I felt like an interloper, imagining that they might think I’d
wandered in, mistaking it for a cinema. But if they did look down their noses
at me, I didn’t notice. I bought a programme to read when I’d found my seat upstairs
in the gallery, handed in my ticket and climbed the stairs.
Memories get cloudy
after many years, but I can remember
Joe Morello weaving past his kit to sit behind the bass drum, Gene Wright
bending to pick up his bass from where it lay on the stage, Paul Desmond almost
floating on, to take up his position downstage by the stand holding his alto
sax as the applause got louder. I can’t forget the whistles and roar as Brubeck
himself entered, giving a short wave to the crowd before sitting at the piano. I
also remember being surprised that it was a grand piano. I’d only ever seen a
grand piano at classical concerts I’d attended with my mother in the Capitol
Theatre back home.
I can’t remember
what they opened with, just that it was begun with a loud chord on the keyboard
and a great thump on the bass drum before setting off at a rapid pace with
Desmond’s alto trilling over the sizzling pinging of the cymbals and amazing
treble runs by Brubeck. I sat, totally enthralled, eyes probably out on stalks
and ears certainly desperately trying to decipher the sounds for my confused
brain.
I did recognise a
couple of tunes, at least for the first twelve bars or so, before the band took
off into another dimension; probably some Rogers and Hart, or Cole Porter. But
I know that this was where it started to demand something of me. I found myself
following Gene Wright’s bass lines, then consciously switching my attention to
Desmond’s beautiful tone, Brubeck’s left hand, and so on. He occasionally spoke
to us briefly, announcing titles or giving some background to a number and it
was when he mentioned Mozart that I really
took note of what he was saying. It was the briefest of introductions to
Brubeck’s adaptation of a tune I knew so well. My mother, a pianoforte teacher
all her life, played it at home.
And there it was.
My turning point. Point of departure. My
point of no return. All of those. ‘Blue
Rondo a la Turk’. I possibly made a nuisance of myself to the people on
either side of me. I’m sure I laughed as soon as I recognised it and realised
what Brubeck was doing with it. And I
know I jumped around to its infectious trade-off between piano and alto with a
shuffle beat from Morello, followed by some angular ensemble phrases before
Desmond rode sweetly over the steady bass line and I was tapping both feet,
feeling like Mr Bojangles. Ecstatic.
I didn’t leave my
seat during the intermission. I wanted to savour what I’d just heard and pick
through it in my mind while I read the programme notes. There were brief bios
of the four. I learned about Joe Morello’s limited vision and Brubeck’s
classical influences since studying with Darius Milhaud, a composer I’d never
heard of.
The second half of
the concert is a blur. I was so busy thinking
about what was going on,trying to keep up with chord changes and the
unusual rhythms of some of the pieces, that it was only when they finally got
to an extended version of Desmond’s ‘Take
Five’ and the crowd went crazy, that I became conscious of having
experienced my jazz epiphany. I wouldn’t have used that word back then. Awakening, perhaps. My whole body
tingled. I felt like part of the informed audience, instead of the feeling of
alienation when I first arrived at the theatre. I couldn’t wait to tell my
Miles, Diz and Bird friend back home. “Mouldy
no more!”
I did get to one more trad jazz gig before
returning to Perth. I talked to the musicians about Brubeck and two of them
said they were cursing that they couldn’t get to the concert. I felt liberated.
Aha! So you don’t have to abandon the old when you embrace the new. If you open
your mind and your ears, you will be rewarded. I’d taken some giant steps
toward my rewards.
By 1961 I had my
own jazz programme on Perth radio, using ‘Milestones’
as the opening and closing theme and happily playing everything from Jelly Roll
Morton to Lady Day, Basie, Ray Charles, Monk, Coltrane and even a live
performance from the brilliant blues harmonica player, Shane Duckham, who just
wandered in, one night. Oh yes, and Ornette Coleman’s ‘Change of the Century’, which took some getting used to. Several
giant steps from New Orleans.
All of which
prepared me for Sydney in 1962 where I started all over again, via Graeme Bell
in the Macquarie Hotel, Dick Hughes and Ray Price at the Adams, Graeme Lyall,
John Sangster and Judy Bailey in the El Rocco...
But that’s just the
beginning of another story.
/////////////////////////
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