JOHN CLARE

This section is dedicated to the work of John Clare, who began writing in the early 70s, and has long been regarded as the doyen of Australian jazz writers. Helen Garner, in her preface to Clare's book Take Me Higher, describes how she used to cut out his writings under his Gail Brennan pseudonym and paste them into her diary. Originally she thought the articles were written by a woman. She describes his writing as "superbly literate and articulate, deeply informed, yet completely ordinary in tone, even at their most elated. A relaxed freedom flowed through everything he wrote. He was fearless. He rejoices. He celebrated. Years later, an art critic who admired him said to me: John Clare’s an ecstatic.” Many of John Clare's articles that were published previously in various publications are collected here. Click on the INDEX button for a list of articles in this folder.

DAVE JACKSON QUARTET: COSMONTOLOGY LIVE

Reviewed by John Clare

www.australianjazz.net, July 21, 2014

There’s a thorny quote in the press release for Dave Jackson’s new CD Cosmontology Live: ‘Time is a social institution and not a physical reality’. I say thorny because for me the two most bewildering concepts are gravity – which is a warp in the space time continuum caused by the proximity of a solid body, yet also a virtual force – and time, which seems undeniable when one event succeeds another. Only the calibration of time seems like a convenient fiction to me. Yet in some disorienting and possibly liberating moments many of us have probably experienced something like the suspension or transcendence of time itself…

JAZZGROOVE MOTHERSHIP ORCHESTRA WITH SCOTT TINKLER

by John Clare

www.australianjazz.net, September 9, 2014

Walking from Glebe to the relatively new jazz club, The Foundry, I am tracked by various familiar resonances. Ultimo was once full of huge warehouses and bond stores, and across from the club itself, in a brick and sandstone building, was the old Technological Museum. You could see bottles being made there. And many other things, including minerals under ultra violet light. Before all that, in very early days, there was a wattle grove, now commemorated by a street of that name. The Foundry has a jazz hip hop night on Friday, acclaimed by American alto saxophonist Greg Osby as perhaps the best he had seen in the world. Speaking of resonance, Jazzgroove Mothership Orchestra hit like a slammed door when I walked in…

WANGARATTA’S 25TH FESTIVAL

by John Clare

www.australianjazz.net, November 6, 2014

Marcel Proust in his great search for lost time talks about the duality of feeling he experienced whenever he went on holidays with his mother or grandmother – how, beneath the excitement of change – the anticipation of different and perhaps brand new sensations – lay a reluctance, even a kind of dread, in relinquishing the familiar. For surely the familiar is fresh in the light cast by anticipation of the new. For me it begins at Central Station. Sydney that is…