BRUCE JOHNSON

This folder is dedicated to the writings of Professor A J B (Bruce) Johnson, perhaps best-known as the author of the Oxford Companion to Australian jazz (1987). A prolific writer on Australian jazz, his articles on this website already appear in many folders, and in the fulness of time they will hopefully be uploaded to this folder. Click on the INDEX button for a list of articles in this folder.

OBITUARY: BOB BARNARD AM 1933–2022

by Bruce Johnson

May 16, 2022

Bob Barnard’s death is of course a deeply felt loss personal to his family and friends. It is also the loss to jazz of the country’s most gifted trumpeter emerging from the primarily traditionally based style. Apart from the memories of those of us who heard his work in live performance, he has left a massive body of recorded work that began with his first recording session on his sixteenth birthday with the band of his brother Len, and with whom in later life he would record a body of work for the Swaggie record label that firmly consolidated his pre-eminence. By 1952 the early public proclamation of his command was his unseating of fellow trumpet players Roger Bell and Frank Johnson in the Australian Music Maker poll…

ART, JAZZ AND UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

by Bruce Johnson

JazzChord, May/June, 1993

Since jazz emerged from its folk and geographical origins in the 20s, it has travelled back and forth across the disputed terrain between high and low culture. At various times and in various places it has been referred to as a folk form, as popular music, as art music. Its position within this field makes it a fruitful vehicle through which to study the matrix of cultural politics, by which I mean the balances of power which determine which cultural forms carry authority. Among jazz followers there has been a general tendency to advance the claim that jazz is an art form, supposedly in order to give dignity and legitimacy to its aesthetics…

GAIL BRENNAN QUERIES BRUCE JOHNSON

by Gail Brennan (aka John Clare)

JazzChord, Jul/Aug, 1993

I'm not sure who it is who "desperately asserts" that jazz is an art form, but Bruce Johnson is right: they should be stopped. In pop and rock they have the right attitude. Rock writer Nik Cohn asked, “Who needs art when you've got superpop?” In this ethos it is irrelevant that Elvis was actually a good singer. His prime virtue was to have embodied a powerful archetype of the teen imagination. The teen imagination may have been well-prepared by decades of commercial activity, but what are you going to do? - debrief them all in order to achieve a level playing field? Rock has clearly asserted its indifference to the values of "art"…