OBITUARIES

This folder includes obituaries for jazz musicians or persons of significance to the Australian jazz community, written by several contributors. Click on the INDEX box to access a list of obituaries contained in this folder.

OBITUARY: DICK MONTZ 1942-2005

by Peter McCallum

Sydney Morning Herald, January 28, 2006

Tens of thousands of Australians knew the Dick Montz sound. Polished, piercing and brilliant, it was the basis of the slick, energised fanfare that introduced ABC television news and the ABC sports report during the 1980s, finishing with a high note snatched from well out of the trumpet's natural habitat. But this wasn't the first time it had attracted attention...

OBITUARY: ERROL BUDDLE 1928-2018

by Eric Myers

The Australian, February 28, 2018

Clive James once wrote, ‘‘The most daring thing you could do in Sydney in the late 1950s was listen to Errol Buddle at the El Rocco”. The subject, one of Australia’s greatest jazz musicians, has died in Sydney of heart failure. Buddle was 16 in 1944 when he heard Adelaide’s most prominent jazz saxophonist Bobby Limb, and was mesmerised by the music…

OBITUARY: ERROL BUDDLE 1928-2018

An appreciation by Bruce Johnson

March 16, 2018

I did not perform often enough with Errol Buddle to be able to speak as one of his regular musical colleagues. Even so, every one of the handful of times I worked with him, I found the experience overwhelmingly memorable, a source of enormous pride. It was not simply that I was having a musical conversation with a jazz musician of unsurpassed command and sensitivity, but that I knew I was standing next to a legend. I knew this as a long time historian of Australian jazz, and it is in that role that I am asked to write this obituary appreciation of his importance as a giant of the postwar Australian jazz...