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.
Bruce Johnson
A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN AUSTRALIA
by Bruce Johnson
Fine Music FM, 1988-1990
This series of 20 one-hour programmes, broadcast between mid-1988 and early 1990 on Fine Music FM in Sydney, received two radio awards: the BASF and PBAA (Public Broadcasting Association of Australia) Award for Excellence; and the Australian Hi-Fi FM Radio Award for excellence and originality.
How can a music with its beginnings as a local semi-folk tradition in New Orleans come to be a leading soundscape of the 20th century and become an international sound tapestry of modernism of its time? In the preface to his 1987 publication The Oxford Companion to Australian Jazz, Bruce Johnson comments on the bewildering rate that the 20th century music called jazz evolved. That rate is not just in the America of its birth, but in almost every country around the world…