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.

DEXTER GORDON’S AMERICAN CLASSIC

by Bruce Johnson

Jazz Magazine, September/October, 1982

This, Dexter Gordon's latest, is not one of his greatest. In general it lacks the depth of feeling of Go!, the high spirits of Long Tall Dexter, the intensity of The Homecoming. Its best moments are on side 2. Now, says I, what has side 2 got that side 1 hasn't? Answer: a pianist, Kirk Lightsey, instead of an electric organist, Shirley Scott. I think it's the instrument and not the instrumentalist that makes the difference. Back to Lennie Tristano (see previous Bud Powell review), who felt that the electrified instrument often became a barrier rather than a medium. This record gives substance to the idea. Scott's work has a depersonalised blandness to it which seems to have a soporific effect on the rest of the band…

FREDDIE HUBBARD

by Bruce Johnson

Jazz Magazine, September/October, 1982

Taken together with the Bud Powell and Dexter Gordon albums, this LP suggests a most catholic range of jazz to be expected from the new label Elektra. Quite unlike the others, this is more in the line of jazz-rock fusion. Whether you like it or not, it represents an alternative to the hard bop, experimental free form, and the modal directions which jazz has been taking over the last 20 years or so (though of course Hubbard's own work constitutes a synthesis of all of these). It's an approach which jazz thinking hasn't really come to terms with yet, though this record comes closer than most essays I've heard in the idiom. At its least impressive you could call it disco-jazz…

GOIN’ TO TOWN WITH LUIS RUSSELL

by Bruce Johnson

Jazz Magazine, November/December, 1982

If your eye has been caught by the title of this LP you will probably not need to be told anything about the band involved, but just in case, Luis Russell's band was, with Fletcher Henderson's, one of the most throbbing big bands of its day, and Henderson's didn't really catch up in terms of elasticity until a few years later. The mighty pulse of the sessions made during the year beginning September 1929 has tended to distract from the rest of the band's output. But the group was scarcely less swinging, if at all, up until at least August 1934. The loss of Red Allen and J C Higginbotham may have deprived the band of depth, of what Samuel Johnson would unembarrassedly have called 'bottom', but it gained a quicksilver fleetness in Rex Stewart's precocious cornet solos…