ESSAYS

This section includes essays on various jazz subjects, written by a number of writers. Contributions are welcome. Writers interested in contributing are welcome to contact the editor by filling out the form in the CONTACT tab. Photographs to illustrate those essays are welcome. Readers can click on the INDEX button for a list of articles in this folder.

TEN YEARS OF THE BASEMENT

by Phil Tripp

Jazz Magazine, Spring, 1983

How does one appropriately describe a venue that has struggled through ten years of changes — not all of them voluntary, survived in spite of a limited appeal to the mainstream lounge lizard crowd, and still has that undefined ambience that lures one time and time again to leave cares at the door and partake, mingle, enjoy?

SIMON BARKER: NEVER RUNNING OUT OF STEAM

by John Shand

 Australianjazz.net, December 7, 2014

It was Mark Simmonds, the maker of Australia’s most intense jazz, who first spotted Simon Barker’s promise. That was over two decades ago; two decades during which Barker has made himself the most original drummer/percussionist in the country. This is partly thanks to his intensive study of traditional Korean music, but then even the fact he undertook that study reflects a distinctive mind-set: an innate curiosity that underpins the work of significant artists from Turner to Picasso and from Beethoven to John Coltrane…

PAUL FURNISS: MORE THAN A TRAD PLAYER

by Bruce Johnson

Jazz Magazine, Winter, 1986

Paul Anthony Furniss was born in Sydney on 2 November, 1944. The first memories he has of instrumental experience of music go back to early childhood when someone gave him a kazoo, prophetically shaped like a saxophone. Things got a bit more serious when he began the descant recorder under the tutelage of Victor McMahon whose long teaching career also benefited players like Mal Cunningham and Don Burrows...