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.

PLAYING AD LIB: IMPROVISATORY MUSIC IN AUSTRALIA 1836-1970

by John Whiteoak

Reviewed by Bruce Johnson

JazzChord, Apr/May, 1999

John Whiteoak is both a practitioner and scholar of popular music, and brings to bear a breadth of sympathy and expertise that has made him one of the most important Australian researchers in recent developments in the study of music in Australia, in particular, shifting music scholarship away from a modernist preoccupation with the linkage between music and composer/text, to the study of its linkages with performance/context. This interest naturally drew him to the study of improvisational practices…

THE AUSTRALIAN JAZZ EXPLOSION

by Mike Williams

Reviewed by Bruce Johnson

Quarterly Rag, October 1981, No 21

This book has actually been available for nearly a year now, and the moment at which it appeared was, for me, particularly well chosen. At about the same time I had received an invitation to attend a jazz conference. The letter was sent on behalf of 'the future of jazz'. Evidently jazz in this country is so infirm that it is likely to expire but for such things as a day of seminars… Strangely, the news of this revivifying enterprise succeeded only in depressing me. I was much cheered by the appearance of Mike Williams' book…

JAZZ DIASPORA: MUSIC AND GLOBALISATION

by Bruce Johnson

Reviewed by Ted Nettelbeck

February 5, 2020

Professor Bruce Johnson is arguably Australia’s foremost scholar of Australian jazz history. Throughout his long career as an academic, jazz trumpeter and jazz advocate he has produced an extensive list of publications, including The Oxford Companion to Australian Jazz (1987), the first and most impressive encyclopaedic account of the Australian jazz scene from its beginnings around 1917 up to the time of publication. His latest book, Jazz Diaspora: Music and Globalisation (2020)… extends his previous challenges (Johnson, 2002, in press) to the predominant US-centric account of jazz history (denoted throughout as the “canonical model”)…