jOHN Pochée BIOGRAPHY
This folder contains reviews and articles pertaining to Eric Myers’s biography of the late Australian drummer/bandleader John Pochée, who died in November, 2022, Readers can click on the INDEX button for a list of reviews or articles in this folder.
Jack Thorncraft
THE LAST STRAW & BERNIE McGANN TRIO AT JENNY’S 1983
by Anthony Stanton
Jazz Magazine, May/June, 1983
So far 1983 has seen few highlights on the modern scene. After the non-event which was the Sydney Festival my own highlights have consisted of hearing the music of five bands: the two listed above as well as Roger Frampton's new band Intersection, Guy Strazzullo's In Focus, and the Miroslav Bukovsky Sextet. Few of us who had enjoyed the artistry and musical profundity of The Last Straw in the 70s believed that the band would ever get back together. I last heard them at The Basement in 1978 and came away from the final night suspecting that was going to be their swansong. I wasn't completely mistaken as the band played one more time at the end of that year. Their audiences were still enthusiastically turning up but no-one who booked jazz in Sydney appeared to be interested…
L-R, Dewey Redman, Bernie McGann, John Pochée
US JAZZ STAR TO JOIN LOCAL MASTERS
by Peter White
Sydney Morning Herald, January 3, 1986
Even 30 years is not enough to diminish the way-out-ness of jazz drumming luminary John Pochée, and the small group of his fellow musos who orbit the sparsely populated, experimental avant-garde outer reaches of the jazz music galaxy. Pochée doesn't regard the music he plays, usually with the legendary and eccentric saxophonist Bernie McGann, as weird, threatening or esoteric. He and his colleagues have been playing in essentially the same style since the 1950s when they first clapped their hypersensitive ears on the sounds of bebop pioneers Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk…
John Pochée
ADELAIDE RESCUES JAZZ MUSOS
by Peter White
Sydney Morning Herald, May 12, 1986
It seems that the cause of conserving one of Sydney's most endangered musical species, the avant-garde jazz muso, has been taken up, not by local entrepreneurs or jazz buffs, but by the art lovers of Adelaide. Life has always been difficult for even average, middle-of-the-road jazz musicians. Their music finds itself in a no man's land between the mass popularity of the Top 40 and the heavy 'subsidisation of so-called high art classical music. The options for the avant-garde jazz musician, committed to experiment, innovation and originality, are limited almost to the point of non-existence. But now the local avant-garde fraternity has received an unexpected and unprecedented fillip, not from some brave local entrepreneur or arts funding authority, but from interstate through the 1986 Adelaide Festival of Arts…