BOOK REviewS

This section includes reviews of books on jazz subjects by a number of writers. Reviewers interested in contributing are welcome to contact the editor by filling out the form in the CONTACT tab. When contributing please include the title of the book and its author, the name of the publisher, the date of publication, the book’s ISBN number, and the number of pages in the book. Please also provide, if possible, a high resolution scan of the book’s cover. Readers can click on the INDEX button for a list of reviews in this folder.

SEEING THE RAFTERS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF AN AUSTRALIAN JAZZ MUSICIAN

by John Sangster

Reviewed by Ted Nettelbeck

February 5, 2022

I did not know John Sangster (17.11.28-26.10.1995), I never heard him play, and I had not previously read this book, published some 34 years ago. We were approximately contemporaneous; he was only seven years older than me and I have played with many of the musicians gracing the pages of this book.  Some jazz musicians gossip and I was therefore well aware of the trajectory of Sangster’s career, which began in his teens among the cream of Melbourne’s trad scene during the late 1940s-early 1950s, notably with Graeme and Roger Bell and Ade Monsbourgh. However, by the mid-1960s, after moving to Sydney with the Bells and others more aligned with traditional and swing idioms, he had transitioned to exploration of more contemporary jazz…

WANGARATTA FESTIVAL OF JAZZ & BLUES 30 YEARS

by Adrian Jackson OAM & Andra Jackson

Reviewed by Eric Myers

The Australian Jazz Directory, published in 1998, listed 81 annual jazz festivals, and 37 arts or blues festivals which included jazz, the last available evidence of the prolific extent of jazz activity throughout the country. The Wangaratta Jazz Festival, which began eight years earlier in 1990, quickly superseded other such festivals to become, by the mid-90s, a phenomenon – the country’s leading jazz festival. It was the outcome of what now appears to be a unique vision. One might ask, as does the book’s publicity blurb, “How on earth could a tumbleweed town like Wangaratta in rural Victoria host a jazz festival?”

AFICIONADO: A JAZZ MEMOIR

by Geoff Page

Reviewed by John McBeath

The Australian, October 18, 2014

At some time most of us have developed a consuming teenage passion, one unfamiliar to our puzzled parents, and so can identify with these opening lines: "It's only a phase, my mother said. He'll grow out of it." What the 16-year-old had discovered was jazz and that "phase" for Canberra academic, author and poet Geoff Page has lasted more than a half century. Aficionado traces Page's evolution of his love for the music, beginning with two school friends at an Armidale, NSW, boarding school. He re-calls their "arcane knowledge" of jazz was no use with the local girls, who were enthusiastic about Bill Haley and Elvis Presley…