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.

THE RETURN OF BOB BERTLES

by John Clare

Jazz Down Under, September/October, 1976

Bertles is back! One of the hottest alto and baritone players in Australian jazz, Bob Bertles went to England with Max Merritt and The Meteors, spent the last three years touring with Ian Carr's band Nucleus, and was next seen walking into a recording studio in Sydney while The Last Straw were listening to some tapes they'd put down. We looked up and there he was. Old times! But Bob has come back with new ideas, tapes, charts, and probably more enthusiasm than ever…

FURTHER REFLECTIONS ON THE JAZZ GIANTS

by John Clare

Music Maker, November, 1971

Kim Bonython and George Wein's Jazz Giants Show last month was not only one of the best concerts I've attended: it proved to me that there is a big market here for a wide range of jazz. However, I will wait for euphoria to set in regarding the state of jazz appreciation in the country until after someone has successfully promoted a concert of jazz by men either under 50 years of age or whose main contribution was made after, say, 1960. If someone can sell jazz, the creative act, without the additive of nostalgia, I will know that people here are still interested in jazz as a living, developing tradition. For whether it is known here or not, jazz is still the most vital, adventurous and artistically important stream of improvised music in the West…

NAT BARTSCH TRIO

by John Clare

https://australianjazz.net, May 3, 2013

Art and music traditions are abiding fascinations for me, and for most viewers of this site I imagine. Any genre that has been around long enough to be called a tradition will have moved across a good deal of territory, through many transformations, until examples from different periods can at first seem inimical to each other, and yet are soon recognizably of the same stream, the same chain of consequences. How different is Beethoven to Debussy, and yet how easy it is now to recognize them both as classical composers. I have been listening to the two discs of luminous and tranquil music listed above, and while they are both very much of now they have sent me back to a time when the current jazz was so radically different as to seem their antithesis…