Congratulations!

Philip Harvey lives in Victoria. His poem Saturday Afternoons won third prize

Our second prize winner is from WA. He’s Kevin Gillam and his poem is called twelve bar blues

Our first prize winner is Ross Clark from Queensland and his poem is called The Death of Jazz

All the winning poems will be published in issue 5 of extempore and you can order your copy here for posting in late October

Read more about the National Jazz Writing Competition http://njwc.extempore.com.au

Erik Griswold’s Simple Addition performed by Clocked Out. This is an excerpt from ‘Dream, Spill, Fear, Percussion’, premiered at the Bigwest Festival, Melbourne, December 2007. Featuring Vanessa Tomlinson and Nozomi Omote. More information available from www.erikgriswold.org

Peter Knight does an in-depth interview of Erik for us in Issue 5. Get your copy now, and we’ll post it to you with subscriber copies in October.

See this video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Q6ccYLCVU

Oh, and before you start listening, Spike’s one of those fantastically creative guys who makes beauty happen all over the place… his short story was a prize-winner in the 2008 National Jazz Writing Competition. Read the story in our free archives online!

And we did a little Q&A with Kristin Berardi too…

And please support the journal that celebrates creativity in music, writing and art… by subscribing!

Or go straight to the video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KvOQrv6tJY

So, Allan Browne handed me a gift on Monday night and as is usual for Al’s gifts, it was a book. Normally it’s poetry he gives me to read, but this time it was something very different; Three Wishes: An Intimate Look at Jazz Greats by Pannonica de Koenigswater. Students of jazz history may remember her name as being the person whose apartment Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker died in, but she was a major patron of the jazz scene back in the 50’s-70’s and during that period she took Polaroids of all the musicians that came through the place. As well as the photos, she also asked them to answer the simple question of “If you had 3 wishes, what would they be?”

The obvious answers about money and health came up fairly often, but there are also some really surprising and off-the-cuff wishes made too. I won’t spoil them by mentioning them here, but I do recommend you seek the book out and read it.

The main reason I’m mentioning it is because I think it was a great idea that should have a follow up – with that unique Aussie twist that we give things here. To do this, I need your help though. If I start taking photos of all the musicians that play here, what question should I ask them to answer? It needs to be simple, and not require an essay to answer. Feel free to send me suggestions, and if we get a good question to ask, I’ll start asking it. I might also speak to Miriam about making a special section in extempore (are you reading this Miriam?) for all the answers and photos we get.

I reckon this would be worth a book! I’d encourage you to contact Jeremy with your ideas… try him at meggs [at] bennettslane.com … Yeah, I know he’s not Meggs, but I’m fairly sure the mail will get to him there…

For a list of CDs available for review and view guidelines, go to our Music Reviews page > For more information, talk to Miriam on info@extempore.com.au or on 1300 783 446

by Andrew W Hurley in Issue 4

Issue 4 is our current issue, so you need to be a subscriber to read the essay online

Support this independent journal that celebrates music, and the writing it inspires by subscribing!

Holocaust survivor and jazz guitarist Coco Schumann’s story is the focus of Hurley’s essay. Here’s a taste.

… As the Cold War heated up, West German politicians were also raising the prospect of rearmament. Chastened by all these developments, Schumann and his family began to seriously evaluate the idea of emigrating.

Australia was not their first choice. The Schumanns did not consider themselves Jewish enough for Israel (which, in any event, had only just been recognised by the British and was in a rather precarious position, security-wise) and a green card for the United States was out of the question: Some time earlier, convinced that the path being embarked upon in East Germany was the only one which could overcome the scourge of National Socialism, Schumann’s mother had joined the Communist Party. That was enough to rule out an American visa for her son, and so an assisted passage to Australia it was, in exchange for which the Schumanns signed a contract to work for two years in whichever job the Australian government designated to them. For Coco, that job was to be tending boiling vats at the Jam Factory in South Yarra. Hardly a dream job, but at least it was in a large city where it would not be too difficult to find other like-minded musicians.

As soon as possible, he went in search of opportunities to perform. Here in Melbourne too Schumann led a charmed existence. Before long he had found a regular engagement as a musician at the Oran Coffee Lounge in St Kilda, which now replaced the Jam Factory as his employer. Other contacts were quickly established with émigré musicians like Heinz Gehl, Andre Schuster and the famous accordionist Leo Rosner, a Jew who had been on ‘Oskar Schindler’s List’ and whose character appears briefly in Steven Spielberg’s film. Schumann recorded with Rosner’s Gypsy Band and also went on a national tour with it. However, jazz was his first love, and when the opportunity presented itself to perform at Melbourne’s Downbeat Jazz Festival in 1952, he leapt at it.

Andrew W. Hurley holds a degree in Law and a PhD in German Cultural Studies (University of Melbourne), and is a lecturer in German Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. He has also published on German and Australian cinema and is currently working on an ARC-funded project on representations of music in recent German literature and film.

A taste of the music…

Accordion player Emil Ludvik (1917 – 2007) was one of the most gifted arrangers, band leaders and jazz musicians in Czechoslovakia. In 1939 he founded his first “Hot Kvintet”, which was the hard core of his later big band. After the war, Ludvik wrote music for many Czech movies. Ludvik’s arranger and trumpeter (you can hear him on this video) was the fabulous Fritz Weiss who founded the legendary “Ghetto Swingers” (with Coco Schumann at the piano).

Or go straight to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6dqjNCOWuM

by John Shand

Like what you read? Why not subscribe to receive your copy in the post and support our independent journal!

Excerpt

Ornette Coleman believed that written music impeded natural expression, something that his 1972 encounter with the master musicians of Joujouka in Morocco only served to confirm: ‘I saw 30 of them playing non-tempered instruments in their own intonation in unison,’ he enthused to Richard Williams in Melody Maker. ‘They would change tempos, intensities and rhythm. They changed together, as if they all had the same idea, yet they hadn’t played what they were playing before they played it!’

Free improvisation already existed to varying degrees in many musical cultures, although generally there was either a predetermined form, rhythm or scale in which to work. The revolution in America, as trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith has observed, was about when the improviser ‘creates at that moment, through his or her wit or imagination, an arrangement of silence and sound and rhythm that has never before been heard and will never again be heard.’

Whereas the surrealists were interested in the automatic process for its own sake – exposing what the vaults of the subconscious were hiding, often with emotionally neutered results – the free improvisers still embraced that primal artistic concern of communicating, of touching and moving the listener. It was not a matter of bending or distorting the music to achieve this, so much as that ‘automatic playing’ equalled profound self-expression, which almost inevitably must reach out to those who hear it.

John Shand began writing on Australian jazz for Jazz magazine in 1981. For over 15 years he has been jazz critic for The Sydney Morning Herald. He contributed to the New Grove Encyclopedia of Jazz, edited and co-wrote the 24 Hours Essential Guide to Jazz, edited Jazz’n’Blues magazine, and has been a regular jazz contributor to 24 Hours, Limelight, and Australian Hi-Fi magazines. His writing on the subject has also appeared in Vogue Australia, The (Sydney) Magazine, Rhythms, Jazzchord, Beomag, and programs for the Sydney Festival. Many Australian Jazz CDs bear his liner notes. In 2008 he published Jazz: The Australian Accent (UNSW Press). John is also a playwright and librettist.

In his essay Musical Surrealism (a variation of which appeared a decade ago in the journal East-West), Shand inspects the irony of the Surrealists’ attitudes to music, and in structures and processes inherent in the emergence and development of free improvisation.

View the full essay in our online edition

John Shand – The longest poem: forty years of ECM

Get your copy of Issue 3 now > and support our independent journal!

Hear ‘Birdsong’, a track we love (from YouTube) from an ECM CD.

Excerpt from John Shand’s piece in Issue 3

Eicher then had one of his light-bulb moments for a spectacularly successful collaboration between Charlie Haden, Garbarek and Gismonti. Two brilliant releases ensued in 1979, Magico and Folk Song, both floating into a cross-cultural zone that nonetheless resulted in music of distilled purity. Eicher says that putting together musicians who have never played together is always a risk. ‘But nothing in contemporary music should go without risk,’ he adds. ‘You might say one of the driving forces in art to me is to take risks. This risk was to bring people together from Los Angeles, Rio De Janeiro and Oslo and then be, so to speak, on an island where nothing else counts, and we come together to make music. If it works, it works wonderfully, as it did with Magico and Folk Songs. There are a few occasions where it didn’t work so well. But most of the time I would say the greater the risk, the more satisfying the result.’

Eicher also enjoys trying to massage the players into the right mood. ‘You don’t talk about musical notes,’ he says. ‘You talk about something else that comes from the surroundings, the light or the circumstances; that comes from our memories, our lives. That is what makes records live, and also makes them stay alive after 30 years.’

A thread running through much ECM music is the very 20^th-centruy artistic phenomenon of evocations of starkness and loneliness; the predicament of humanity in a hostile world, paralleled in the paintings of de Chirico and the plays of Beckett. While Eicher acknowledges that an array of influences plays upon his sound world, he is adamant that there is never an intention to impose these influences on the music: they emerge organically.

About the author

John Shand began writing about jazz for Jazz magazine in 1981. For 17 years he has been The Sydney Morning Herald’s jazz critic. He contributed to The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, edited and co-wrote the 24 Hours Essential Guide to Jazz, edited Jazz’n’Blues magazine, and has been a regular jazz contributor to 24 Hours, Limelight, Australian Hi-Fi and SAM magazines. His writing on jazz has also appeared in Vogue Australia, The (Sydney) Magazine, Rhythms, Jazzchord, Beomag and programs for the Sydney Festival. Many Australian jazz CDs bear his liner notes. In 2008 he published Jazz: The Australian Accent (UNSW Press). John is also a playwright and librettist, who has previously published The Phantom of the Soap Opera (a play for teenagers) and Don’t Shoot the Best Boy! – The Film Crew At Work.

Visionary producer Manfred Eicher gives few interviews, but his record label’s [ECM—Editions of Contemporary Music] 40^th birthday was enough reason to find time for a chat with John Shand. The longest poem: forty years of ECM is a personal appreciation of ECM interwoven with material from interviews conducted with ECM artists over three decades.

This Video from YouTube transported us and we wanted to share it!  DEFINITELY NOT the high quality sound you’d expect from from an ECM CD but still beautiful.  ‘Birdsong’  was recorded live at the Village Vanguard inNew York. Chris Potter on tenor sax, Jason Moran on piano, Paul Motian on drums – a song from the ECM CD Lost in a Dream.

Get your copy of Issue 3 now > and support our independent journal!

Their collaboration embraces music from the Sichuan Opera tradition, Western classical music, experimental music, folk music traditions, jazz, free improvisation, Chinese classical traditions and story-telling. Their meetings took place in Zou Xiangping’s rapidly modernizing city of Chengdu in the Sichuan province of China, and the title of the CD best symbolizes this multi-cultural gathering that transcends musical and geographical boundaries.

The Wide Alley or “Kuan Xiangzi” was one of the last remaining old streets in Chengdu, and during their visits Vanessa and Erik witnessed its dismantling and transformation into an old town style, modern shopping lane. Whilst referencing the above genres, the “Kuan Xiangzi” for the musicians in this project became a street where they could gather and play together, to express themselves, their roots and their ideas – an opportunity to share thousands of years of history and create a context for an audience of today.

The Wide Alley features a 10-piece Chinese/Australian ensemble of highly regarded and widely practiced and travelled musicians:

Tian Linping – voice, percussion
Zou Xiangping – voice, percussion
Shi Lei – bamboo flutes
Zhou Yu – erhu
Peter Knight – trumpet
Adrian Sherriff – bass trombone
Erik Griswold – piano, melodica
Robert Davidson – double bass
Vanessa Tomlinson – percussion
Zhong Kaizhi - percussion

Peter and Adrian are no strangers to this kind of musical journeying… Peter’s genre-bending band Way Out West is a hybrid of Vietnamese-African-Jazz sounds, and Adrian’s diverse experiences as a multi-instrumentalist, in particular with the Australian Art Orchestra, has seen him involved in unique projects with Indonesian, Indian and Australian indigenous musics. Robert’s works have been performed by all of Australia’s professional orchestras and many leading ensembles and soloists. He leads the post-classical quintet Topology and has studied with composer Terry Riley and South Indian vocal music in Kerala, India.

Zou Xiangping is Professor in the Composition Department at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music and his compositions for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles and Chinese instruments are performed around the world. Tian Lin Ping, recipient of numerous prizes for her interpretations of traditional and contemporary opera styles, is a member of the Chengdu City Traditional Opera Company and performs and tours with the Sichuan Arts Troup. Zhou Yu is Professor in the Chinese Instrument Department at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music and is in-demand internationally as an erhu (Chinese violin) soloist. Shi Lei is principal flautist with the Chinese Orchestra at the Sichuan University and Zhong Kaizhi is a Sichuan opera percussionist at the Sichuan Academy of the Arts in Chengdu and both are well versed in traditional and modern forms.

Vanessa and Erik are known both for their innovative Clocked Out Duo – whose unique approach to music-making traverses experimental music, jazz, world music and multi-media using traditional and modified instruments – and for their individual contributions to contemporary music in Australia and internationally. Clocked Out is their ensemble-in-residence at the Queensland Conservatorium at Griffith University, which produces an annual series of concerts and inter-arts events in Brisbane and tours internationally.

With The Wide Alley, they have created an extraordinary and rich tapestry of sounds – a wholly successful and engrossing fusion of East and West.

‘Erik’s The Way’, the first track on the CD is an apt introduction, erhu and Chinese cymbals open in traditional style to then blend and gently harmonize with bamboo flute, brass and piano, which gives way to a jazz trombone solo, underpinned by piano and featuring brief oriental interjections by trumpet and flute… and then a return to the lilting theme with the ensemble.

By way of contrast, track two features the high-pitched voice of Tin Xiangping with a traditional Chinese song, ‘Picking Begonias’, which is a playful, almost Gilbert and Sullivan-esque song – but Tin’s distinctive voice and vocal stylings, and the accompanying erhu and bamboo flute remind us that we have our feet planted firmly in the Sichuan province.

We are then wending our way through the streets of old Chengdu and taking in the sights with ‘Bicycle Groove’, with the Chinese players conjuring the sounds of a busy city street. This is a feature for Peter’s lyrical trumpet, and Vanessa and Erik’s evocative arrangement of the traditional Chinese tune, with erhu, bamboo flutes and brass closing in the style of an anthem.

A gentle piano introduction leads to what could be ceremonial court music, before twisting into a groover with some unusual percussive singing from the region, quickly accompanied by a swirling melodica, with the double bass then coming in with “the bottom”…and then the full ensemble. This is ‘Di Da Kwa’, or ‘12 Month Story’, a song which describes the people’s traditional activities for each month of the year, heartily vocalized by Zou Xiangping after the ensemble section…

And so this fascinating journey continues – including quite stirring settings to music of some poems by the great poet-sage Du Fu – culminating in the challenging and almost cinematic Sichuan Opera Overture, a traditional work arranged by Zou Xiangping and Zhong Kaizhi and conducted by Kaizhi – in Chinese Opera the percussionist is the musical director. It explores a variety of moods and styles with percussive breaks between ensemble and solo passages – a dramatic 16 minute work that features all the players, particularly the percussionists and the diversity of their arsenal. It is a perfect overview of this innovative East-West collaboration.

The liner notes provide English translations of the various songs and poems, and more detailed information about the musicians and the background to this recording.

The Wide Alley is a limited edition release with each CD housed in an individually hand-crafted sleeve. It is available from Clocked Out at: www.clockedout.org