BELL JAZZ LECTURES

The  Doubly Gifted  Committee and  Waverley  Library named  this lecture series  on jazz the Bell Jazz Lectures, in  honour of Graeme Bell's outstanding contribution to jazz in  Australia and abroad  over  the previous 50 years.   He was an outstanding pianist, excellent band  leader, and composer of note, who died on June 13, 2012. Graeme was also  a talented artist who  exhibited in the Doubly Gifted exhibitions of visual art works by jazz musicians, as well as contributing to other  exhibitions. The series began in 1993 and concluded in 2014. Read these lectures also at www.waverley.nsw.gov.au/services/library/reference_library/doubly_gifted_annual_bell_jazz_lectures

JAZZDAGS

by Jack Mitchell

Seventh annual Bell Jazz Lecture delivered September 18, 1999 at Waverley Library

Graeme Bell wrote the foreword to my book Australian Jazz On Record 1925-80, and he quoted Noel Brown of Festival Records as saying "We need people like Jack Mitchell." Graeme himself had said in the introduction to Norm Lineman's Australian Jazz Picture Book: "Let's raise our glasses to the Norm Linehans, the Jack Mitchells, the Eric Browns and Roger Beilbys, the Andrew Bissets, the Peter Magees and many others…

ALONG DARK ALLEYS: THE LITERATURE OF JAZZ & CRIME

by Peter J F Newton

Eighth Annual Bell Jazz Lecture delivered September 9, 2000 at Waverley Library

Many people get much joy from reading novels of crime and detection. Some like to take that pleasure vicariously, whereas others are there for psycho-dramatic chase that leads through what the poet Francis Thompson once referred to, in a very different context, as the labyrinthine ways of the mind or was it heart? Whichever is the case, we are taken into and along sometimes-dangerous ways to what is hopefully a satisfying resolution…

GOODBYE PORKPIE HAT: WRITING JAZZ IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

by Mandy Sayer

Ninth Annual Bell Jazz Lecture delivered September 22, 2001 at Waverley Library

The famous bassist and composer, Charles Mingus, was onstage at a New York Club when a man crept up and whispered in his ear that the virtuoso tenor saxophonist, Lester Young, had died. Mingus, who was on the piano during that set, and who was one of Young's greatest admirers, abruptly stopped playing the tune the band was halfway through and seguewayed into a piece of music no one had heard before…