The Valley Jazz Festival

Used to be that Brisbane was a run down colonial backwater, a large provincial town. The beautiful Queenslander architecture of stilt houses, wooden pubs and shady government buildings owed much to its Indian origins. The mango and jacaranda trees belied a political corruption and a rigid morality that symbolised a police state of lazy brutality.









Looking towards The Valley from Centennial Park


This tropical torpidity could also boast some great Australian painters like Donald Friend , Mervyn Molvig and Ian Fairweather. Jazz was played in pubs on Sunday afternoons and in some gangster run clubs in The Valley. Its heart was the magnificent Brisbane Jazz Club, a converted boat shed underneath the Storey Bridge. I say this is one of the most beautiful places to gig with undeniably the best band room I've ever been in - a slipway converted into outdoor garden fringed by mangroves and boats and ferries on the Brisbane River with the city skyscape as its backdrop.









Joh Bjelke Petersen

The Brisbane of my youth was a cultural backwater. In the dark days of the corrupt populist Bjelke Petersen regime, police would raid rock gigs and shut them down for fear of the assembly of a large group of young people would have a corrupting influence. There was once a piece of graffiti emblazoned in large capitals on a building site, "95% of artists leave Brisbane. Why don't you?' And they deserted Brisbane for Sydney and Brisbane in droves.

Now all that has changed. Brisbane is one of Australia's boom cities undergoing a type of Californication. Artists now come to Brisbane for the opportunities. And Brisbane has sustained a lively jazz scene for quite some time. The fact that we've been playing freeform jazz at Rics is evidence of that. It can now support a jazz festival that is growing in scope and popularity.


I can't wait to see the great trumpet player Phil Slater's Band of 5 Names at The Zoo and James Ryan's Trio on Thursday night.

The Trevor Hart Quartet is playing Rics on Wednesday night (25th) as part of the festival. Visit www.valleyjazzfestival.com for more info.

Flamenco trumpet

BACALAU

Since I can remember, people have commented that I have a 'Spanish' sound. I'm not too sure what that means. Do I sound like a guitar or a bloodied bull in an arena? Perhaps they are picking up on a fascination with Spanish culture and history. I'm intrigued by Andalusian music from Spain and North Africa - of lyricism set again rhythmic complexity.

I assumed that trumpet featured prominently in Spanish music. Sure it can be heard in film scores and some orchestral works but I was quite taken aback to learn that it was just a little add on /frilly filler in some modern flamenco recordings.

Bacalau is an attempt to redress this imbalance: to try to meld the flamenco guitar and percussion with the trumpet.

bacalau hung outside a shop

Bacalau, the salted cod essential to so many Spanish dishes, needs to be seasoned to bring out entirely original dishes.

Bacalau is having a rare appearance at the Brisbane Jazz Club this coming Friday night. Check out the details on the poster.

The influence of Roy Elridge

Occasionally I find myself surprised by the emergence of a memory of a long forgotten musical influence. Coming across the name of Roy Elridge, the fiery trumpet player, triggered this within me recently. I was reding Ian Rankin's latest Rebus novel, The Naming of the Dead. One of the victims is called Ben Webster and the associations flowed.

In the pantheon of American jazz trumpet players Roy stood as a bridge between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy. ie, he played swing. Perhaps it was because, like Lester Bowie, one of his seminal influences was carnival music that Roy played with a great sense of drama.

This is best illustrated in the 50's record Ben Webster and Associates. Apparently Ben ran into Roy on the way to the recording studio and invited him to the session. It's really a jam session that was so popular in those times... a couple of blues and standards. Now that's normally a formula to turn me right off but the playing is superb. Roy's solo starts with the 1st 12 bars of a blues repeating a triplet riff G# A B over and over. By the change in the second chorus he is screaming like a Baptist preacher (even though he was a Lutheran). ecstatic, exuberant, the glory that is a trumpet. He seems like he's pushing his instrument to the max. Jubilation is the object. Roy is just not doing the changes but has this preacher -in- the -pulpit quality that so suits the trumpet.

As a little aside, I'm including this little article I found that illustrates the racism endured by Afro Americans playing in white bands.