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: BOB BERTLES 1939-2024

by Eric Myers

January 18, 2025

Bob Bertles was born in Newcastle on March 3, 1939, and died in Sydney on December 31, 2024. As a child he listened to his parents’ 78 collection hearing the big bands of Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller. He once said, “From as early as I can remember I wanted to play the clarinet”. His father bought him a clarinet at the age of nine, with Bob teaching himself for the first few years, with the encouragement of his father, who was a Benny Goodman fan. In 2003 Bertles told interviewer John Sharpe: “The hit parade was all Frank Sinatra and Cole Porter songs. I learnt all those songs by playing along with those records. I never had any formal training until we came to Sydney from Maitland in the early fifties, when I was about 12”.  At 12 or 13 he heard the American alto saxophonist Charlie Parker on the Voice of America, which opened up a world of musical possibilities for him.

OBITUARY: FRANK GIBSON JR 1946-2025

by Garry Lee

June 19, 2025

Frank Gibson Jr was a New Zealand drummer and educator, who was born on February 19, 1946 and died in Auckland on May 21, 2025, aged 79. He has left a significant legacy in Australian jazz primarily for the five years he lived in Perth from 1992 to early 1997 when he returned to Auckland to assist his father with their family drum shop business. Frank was lecturer in Jazz Drumming at West Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University. I became first aware of Frank from the playing on the 1976 album Tasman Connection [Cherry Pie label] that included players from Sydney and New Zealand led by Don Burrows and Julian Lee…

OBITUARY: JOHN BUCHANAN OAM 1935 - 2024

by Keith Pettigrew

Fine Music 2MBS-FM, September, 2024

John Buchanan was born on January 14, 1935, during the post-depression pre-war swing era of jazz, and died on June 13, 2024. He first became interested in the music of the 1920s and 1930s during his teenage years. He often argued convincingly that the music of the 1930s was not really jazz, but rather the popular music of the times: modern dance music from the period when people danced together, and society was characterised by post-depression excitement with life, the importance of the radio as entertainment, the emergence of the radio big bands, and thence to their touring dance halls of America. The swing era…