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.

WORK AND THE PERFORMING ARTIST

by Ian Muldoon

June 14, 2021

On the first day of winter, 2021, at 7.25 pm Eric Myers and I edged our way through the narrow entrance to Moya’s Juniper Lounge, Redfern. The narrow, dark, deep room was abuzz with chatting and laughing and clinking. Much of the right back side of the venue featured a wall of bottled liquors in a multitude of shapes and colours. At the front, adjacent to the entrance, and to the right squeezed up against the wall was an upright piano. Uh oh! I thought. In the remaining few square metres behind some chairs and just to the left of the piano the bass and drums were subsequently set. In the event, the performance of The Pocket Trio that night got me thinking about Haydn, Fats Waller, satisfaction, and Ahmad Jamal, and was an instance of the transcendent beauty of the finest of musics in a vibrant human setting….

THE CITY OF JAZZ

by Duke Ellington

March 26, 1959

The City of Jazz is a place in which certain people live. Some are on their way out, while many others are on their way in. Some are rushing to get there, but others appear reluctant and are cautious in their approach. Still others claim they are afraid, and hesitate to expose themselves in this place they feel so strange, this strange place where the most solid citizens are so hip, or slick, or cool. These hesitant ones fear they will feel like country folk in the metropolis, or like people on the Chinatown bus-tour. They wonder if they will be taken for suckers or squares. My experience on my many visits to and from the city (I do one-nighters, you know) has convinced me that its people are all very nice human beings…

MY DAYS AS A JAZZ CRITIC

by Eric Hobsbawm

London Review of Books, Vol 32, No 10, May 27, 2010

I owe my years as a jazz reporter to John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which made the British cultural establishment of the mid-1950s take notice of a music so evidently dear to the new and talented Angry Young Men. When, needing some money, I saw that Kingsley Amis wrote in the Observer on a subject about which he obviously knew no more and possibly less than I did, I called a friend at the New Statesman. He arranged a meeting with the editor, Kingsley Martin, then at the peak of his glory, who said ‘Why not?’, explained that he conceived his typical reader as a male civil servant in his forties, and passed me on to the commander of the (cultural) back half of the mag, the formidable Janet Adam Smith. Her interests ranged from mountaineering to poetry, but did not include jazz. As ‘Francis Newton’ (named after a Communist jazz trumpeter who played on Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’), I wrote a column every month or so for the New Statesman for about ten years…