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 NECKS: A VERY SILENT WAY

by Glen Goetze

Russh magazine, Wednesday, 26 May 2021

How do you catch smoke? Freeze a moment in time and put it in your pocket? Speak the unspoken, or eff the ineffable? Getting a grip on The Necks is similarly evasive. Formed in Sydney and now based between Sydney, the Blue Mountains and Berlin, The Necks have been walking their own path for some 30-odd years now, and with his bandmates, drummer Tony Buck and pianist Chris Abrahams, bassist Lloyd Swanton hopes to continue for some 30 more. The Necks live in a liminal space between genres; outside of trends, an alchemical concoction, less understood than felt. Often labelled ‘jazz,’ the music both more and less than that – the drums, bass and piano trio conjure minimal, repetitive, almost imperceptibly evolving motifs over an extended duration that lends their work an elemental monumentality unmatched in regular song-based musics…

HENRY (RED) ALLEN: THE NEW YORK JAZZ SCENE AND A TOUR OF HARLEM

by Clement Semmler

Chapter 18 of the book “Pictures On The Margin”, published in 1991

This chapter is based to some extent on a coincidence. I had collected jazz recordings since 1934: in those days of course they were called 78s — recordings rotating at seventy-eight revolutions per minute, with individual tracks that ran for three minutes or so. Their musical quality was nothing like that achieved in these later days of long play (LP) discs and compact discs (CDs), but they were the staple diet of jazz lovers down the years and we all treasured our Duke Ellingtons, Louis Armstrongs, Bix Beiderbeckes and the like. One of my especial favourites was an HMV 78 by a trumpet player called Henry (Red) Allen with a small group of a tune called It Should Be You. I bought it in Adelaide in the late 1930s. It had been recorded in 1929 when Allen was playing with the Negro orchestra of Luis Russell at the Saratoga Club in Harlem...

ALL THAT JAZZ ISN’T ALL THAT GREAT

by Justin Wm Moyer

The Washington Post, August 9, 2014

Jazz is boring. Jazz is overrated. Jazz is washed up. Unlike a poorly received New Yorker piece purportedly written by jazz great Sonny Rollins, this is not satire. “Jazz might be the stupidest thing anyone ever came up with,” read “Sonny Rollins: In His Own Words” — actually written by Django Gold of the Onion. “The band starts a song, but then everything falls apart and the musicians just play whatever they want for as long they can stand it. People take turns noodling around, and once they run out of ideas and have to stop, the audience claps. I’m getting angry just thinking about it.” Though Gold’s piece elicited  an angry response from Rollins and outrage under the Twitter hashtag #rollinstruth, it was, as they say, funny because it was true…