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.

ART AS WORK

by Elsen Price

June 26, 2022

Art has been my job since I was old enough to work. Whilst I am quite lucky to be able to do it, it’s definitely not something that is easy to do, both when I started and as I continue now. I feel I have had a very unique circumstance to be able to work as a musician. Growing up in Bithramere in Northwest NSW, the job description of professional musician did not exist in my working-class surrounds, or even playing an instrument like the double bass. When I was five years old I had the wonderful opportunity of seeing amazing Australian fiddle players at the Tamworth Country Music Festival at a free event at the local park. The players were Marcus Holden, Pixie Jenkins, Mark Oats, Ray Schoeffel and Andrew Clermont. To my five-year-old ears this was the most amazing thing I’d ever heard…

SANDIE WHITE: A FASCINATING AND VARIED LIFE

by Ralph Powell & Sandie White

AJAZZ 87, November, 2020

American trumpeter Nat Adderley is quoted as saying, “I never heard of a jazz musician who retired. You love what you do...”. Jazz singer and consummate scat performer Sandie White is testament to that with a career spanning six and a half decades beginning in 1955… Sandra Louise Walker had sung from an early age, even busking with family friends for sixpences as a four-year-old with her rendition of That Old Black Magic. She credits her love of singing to her mother Beatrice Walker (née Hussey-Cooper), who was a classically trained singer, nightclub crooner and radio personality in Sydney…

A MOST ELEGANT ART

by Ian Muldoon

August 7, 2022

Mike Nock calls “jazz" a much misunderstood genre.  In my view (am I alone here?) much of the problem of how jazz has been and continues to be perceived, is not about the music qua music, but about its beginnings, its associations, its marketing, its use in television and cinema, and its revolutionary artistic nature. But another factor - perhaps a big one - determining its status and hence its appeal is that it is the "black man’s music”. And being “ black”, we the people have been consistently reminded, is to be less intelligent, less attractive, than being “white”…