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.

BILL MOTZING: A MUSIC ADVENTURER AS EDUCATOR

Interview by Andrew L Urban

Encore Magazine, March, 1979

Andrew L Urban: After almost three years, as Head of the Jazz Studies programme at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, you left at the end of 1978, just a few weeks ago. Did you leave amicably? Bill Motzing: Oh yes, no problem. It's just that I'm not much of a bookkeeper — which is mainly what the job was. Mainly administrative, and though I did start some new courses, I learnt all I could from doing the job…

I’LL STRING ALONG WITH YOU: SOME GUITAR PLAYERS

by Ian Muldoon

May 20, 2020

Until quite recently I thought a Stratocaster was an aircraft flown by Pan American World Airways.  At the same time such ignorance is put in stark relief by male baby boomers, who seem to have all played or been schooled in, or be authorities on, the guitar and guitar players. Maybe it was the emergence of rock and roll and the teenager in the 1950s and 1960s that inflamed the interest in this instrument, or for Generation X, Chuck Berry’s Johnny Be Goode as performed by Michael J Fox (voice by Mark Campbell) in the film Back to the Future. Whatever the case, there does seem to be hundreds of millions of guitar “players” on planet earth with each one having very strong opinions about the guitar, and guitar music…

THE RENAISSANCE IN JAZZ: WOMEN

by Ian Muldoon

June 5, 2020

Do we need a reminder that women have been at the heart of the origin of jazz, its development and progress and are central to it still? Reflecting on its origins out of the African diaspora, slavery, the Civil War, and then the cultural stew of the United States where its major driver was the need of the individual to express themselves musically, driven by the yearning for freedom, a freedom from musical, economic, cultural, and physical barriers, the music called “jazz” might be considered the perfect artistic vehicle for women artists. Just to  consider the contemporary evidence of international trafficking in women, of barbaric cultural practises, and in “civilised” Australia, the weekly death of a woman from domestic violence, or such official statistics as there being one million single mothers in Australia in 2020, is to see parallels with the origins of the music and those driven to pursue it…