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.

MELBOURNE

by Bruce Johnson

Oxford Companion to Australian Jazz, 1987

As in Sydney, the magnitude of jazz activity in Melbourne requires its own book. Melbourne has been a crucial centre of Australian jazz, in particular its more traditional styles. The contribution made by Melbourne to attitudes regarding the music has been sketched in some of the major essays in this volume. More detailed aspects of the subject are incorporated in the relevant shorter entries on individual musicians and bands. The purpose of this essay is to deal with matters which fall somewhere between the general and the particular, and which have been distinctive to or unusually important in Melbourne…

THE HISTORY OF JAZZ AUSTRALIA 1985–2015

by Diana Allen OAM

Jazzline: Vol 48, No 2 Spring/Summer 2015; Vol 49, No 1 Autumn/Winter; and Vol 49, No 2 Spring/Summer 2016

Although initially daunted at the thought of writing the history of Jazz Australia and the very thought of going through hundreds of newsletters, once I got started it all began to flow and eventually I hardly knew where to stop.   As the saying goes, time goes quickly when you’re having fun, but it hasn’t all been beer and skittles. I have taken some hair-raising risks along the way and have often gone out on serious limbs, but then, I have always been a risk taker…

THE TROCADERO: A GLIMPSE INTO THE GLAMOUR OF A BYGONE TIME

by Loretta Barnard

Australia Explained, April 20, 2020

At 9 pm on the evening of 3 April 1936 in Sydney – the opening night of a sensational new palais de danse (nothing so common as a dance hall) – Monsieur François Stempinski and his Silver Sextette played the Trocadero March, especially composed for this very occasion, as guests milled into the exciting entertainment venue, the Trocadero. Half an hour later, trailblazing jazz musician and bandleader Frank Coughlan (1904-1979), dressed in white tails, led his thirteen-piece orchestra – also impeccably attired in white dinner suits – in a rendition of Cowboy in Manhattan. Sydneysiders, still dealing with the long-term effects of the Great Depression, had flocked to the Trocadero to escape reality for a moment, enjoy themselves, hear the latest music and dance up a storm…