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.

DICK HUGHES: A MILDLY INSULTING SKETCH

by John Clare

Music Maker, March 30, 1972

Dick Hughes is a tall man with a low centre of gravity: a bit of weight around the seat. When he sits at the piano, much of that weight is soon transferred to the keyboard. Dick is no cocktail tinkler. In fact, if Dick Hughes has a fault (and we've got to find one, because we once said that he was not beyond criticism) it is a tendency to hammer a bit when the music has reached its height, to let his left and right hands become fractionally disco-ordinated, and to pinch treble notes off the board with a little too much vehemence. In short, he allows emotion to bulge momentarily into grossness, like a man who has just had that one drink too many. Fortunately, it takes him a long time to reach that point, and there is always a great deal of good jazz to be heard along the way...

ALLAN BROWNE

by John Clare

Extempore, June 17, 2015

I am just having a coffee – LaVazza as it happens, which smells mighty good – and I imagine that Allan Browne will join me. Allan’s latest disc is playing. Ithaca Bound. Ithaca was the home of Ulysses. Allan’s shipmates are Geoff Hughes, guitar, Eugene Ball, trumpet, Phil Noy, alto saxophone, Nick Haywood, bass, and the captain on drums. Beautiful music, beautiful men in every way. The opening track begins with a suggestion of creaking timbers heard from underwater. Well, that is how I hear it. The ship is launched. Then there is a phone call. Oh! Brave Ulysses has indeed gone home. That is to say, Allan Browne has died…

GAIL BRENNAN QUERIES BRUCE JOHNSON

by Gail Brennan [aka John Clare]

JazzChord, Jul/Aug, 1993

I'm not sure who it is who "desperately asserts" that jazz is an art form, but Bruce Johnson is right: they should be stopped. In pop and rock they have the right attitude. Rock writer Nik Cohn asked, “Who needs art when you've got superpop?” In this ethos it is irrelevant that Elvis was actually a good singer. His prime virtue was to have embodied a powerful archetype of the teen imagination. The teen imagination may have been well-prepared by decades of commercial activity, but what are you going to do? - debrief them all in order to achieve a level playing field? Rock has clearly asserted its indifference to the values of "art"...