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.

THE REMARKABLE MR MORRISON

by Mervyn E Collins

Australianjazz.net, November 18, 2014

It was a bloody cheek really – I didn’t know the bloke from a bar of soap except I knew he played trumpet better than your average cleaning agent. I’d first heard James Morrison do his multi-instrumental jazz thing a long time before in front of a brass band, of all things, and been mightily impressed.  I’d taken a bunch of secondary school music students to a tutorial and heard him play his brass menagerie and tell his yarns. On impulse I, who’d never met him before, was asking him if I could write it all down…

JAZZ AND THE ARTIST’S BUSINESS

by Ian Muldoon

September, 2018

Like many 1940s childhoods in Australia, mine was a haze of watching, waiting, playing, bike riding, punctuated by the odd moment of intense surfing pleasure or occasional fear from a flurry of arms and fists in a scrambling biff with a playmate, or pain from a damaged big toe kicked by  running barefoot down the street and through the bush. My memories of schooling come down to getting six “cuts” for reading a forbidden book, and Mr Furzer giving me an early mark in Year 3 at Manly West Public, and having “adventures” with some like-minded boys...

EXCEEDING MY REACH: ‘INSIDE’ THE UNFAMILIAR

by Robert Burke

September, 2018

Graeme Lock in his book titled Bluetopia describes a jazz utopia for African American jazz musicians as being ‘a space, the future, the sacred, and the spirituals, the remembering with time, the past, the secular, and the blues… these impulses can fuse, forming a crossroads in the creative consciousness where visions of the future and revisions of the past become part of the same process, a “politics of transfiguration”, in which accepted notions of language, history, the real, and the possible are thrown open to question and found wanting’...