Film - Joel Checkley and Belinda Ensor, 'Not for Discos'

Michael Tortoni

My name’s Michael Tortoni. I am the proprietor Bennetts Lane Jazz Club and I’ve been involved in music all my life.

As teenager I was signed to Warner Brothers in one of the youngest bands, signed to Warners at the time, a band called Taste. We had a few hit singles, then after Taste I went to the Victorian College of the Arts and graduated there and of course I had by that stage developed a keen interest in Jazz and had, you know, this desire to want to open a Jazz club in Melbourne. Because when I was at college I realised, just how many, we had an incredible pool of talent living in Melbourne and I didn’t think there was a Jazz club that was doing it justice, so I tried to bring some justice to it, so I finally opened Bennetts Lane.

The people who came to Bennetts Lane have always been interested in music, I mean that was the basis that I opened the club on, that it wasn’t a venue like a pub with music, It was, and still is, the other way around. It’s the music that drives the venue.

it’s been a great incubator for musicians that are serious about, you know, and committed to the art form. Cause really Jazz is kind of a lifestyle, you don’t just go and play jazz because it’s cool, you know, you’re writing you’re always thinking, it’s always on your mind, you know, and there’s a certain amount of integrity and that draws people in I think and then it becomes like this circle of people being interested in what’s going on.

[musical interlude]

Mel Blachford

My name’s Mel Blachford and I’m the Collections Manager at the Victorian Jazz Archive which is a not-for-profit, volunteer run organisation dedicated to preserving Australian Jazz for the future, located in the foothills of the Dandenongs in south-eastern Melbourne.

I’ve been hooked on Jazz for a very long time. I spent most of my life as a pharmacist so before I actually retired from my paid job, I came out here once a fortnight on my rostered day off and I thought this is a great place and I’ve been here ever since.

Our mission statement is, is to proactively collect, archive and disseminate all matters to do with Australian Jazz. It’s part of our social history and if its not preserved then it’s lost for, so we want it for future generations.

One of the things that is really important about this archive, and it probably applies to a lot of other volunteer ones as well, is there’s two functions of it, you’re either there because you collecting and archiving but it has an important social function as well. We've got several people here who come who are either widowed or widowers and we’re the reason why they get out of bed.

They come here and we support them and we joke with them and we have laughs and all those things here. And I’m not too sure which one is the more important. I think they’re both equally important with each other.

There is a lot of interest in Jazz amongst younger performers. You only have to look at places like Bennetts Lane to see the caliber; the young people there, amazing sort of stuff. I’m not for discos, I’m talking about live music. To sit there in a live performance, watch the interaction between the musicians, they always manage to make it look so easy, but it's really quite hard, and the interaction with the crowd spurs them on and you just get wonderful things.

[musical interlude]

Julia Messenger

My name is Julia Messenger and I’m a singer here in Melbourne and I play a lot of Jazz gigs around town in places like Bennetts Lane.

When I was young I did ballet and song and dance, so that took me to the stage. And then as a young teenager, I didn’t listen to what my peers listened to, I actually listened to Ella Fitzgerald, it just was very comforting to me hear Ella’s voice and I used to just play my cassette over and over again of Ella.

During my university years of studying classical singing I supported myself through singing in pop and rock bands and Jazz bands and had my own Jazz Band at The Rainbow every Wednesday night as well. Paul Williamson was on Monday nights and I was on Wednesdays. [Laughs] So, we were very young and very gung ho with our Jazz.

What I love about Jazz is that it’s [finger click] connected and I can see the gift of music in the audience and with the people on stage and within myself. It’s immediate.

It’s a beautiful community full of people who are completely dedicated to the genre of Jazz. For me personally, Bennetts Lane has been a real gift, because it’s a safe place for me as an artist, to work on my own material, to test new material. The audience and the musicians are both there for the same thing, and that’s the love of music.

Film - Joel Checkley and Belinda Ensor, 'Graeme Bell's Czechoslovak Journey'

TIMOTHY STEVENS

My name is Timothy Stevens I’m an improvising piano player and composer. I did research on traditional Jazz in Melbourne in the form of the Red Onions jazz band a few years ago, which led me to learning about other Melbourne bands including Graeme Bell’s band.

[musical interlude]

TIMOTHY STEVENS

Graeme longevity was quite extraordinary and his continuing capacity to get up and perform was quite breathtaking and I think he remains probably the most recognisable traditional Jazz musician in Australia. I can’t think of anybody in that, that particular scene whose more widely know or appreciated.

Graeme was born in 1914 and grew up in Richmond. His piano lessons started when he was about eleven, obviously in classical music, but his brother introduced him to jazz when he brought some records home.

They started playing in the mid to late thirties and the very important early gigs they did in Melbourne were at the Uptown Club, which began in the mid-1946 and Harry Stein’s Eureka Youth League had began during the war I think in around 1942.

GRAEME BELL

The full story is that the Eureka Youth League was the Young Communist League and things were very tough in those days. Almost wearing a red tie was suspect. Or red socks, you know.

And then eventually we started playing for gigs for them. Until finally we hired the place, their premises on Queensbury Street, North Melbourne, and we called it the Uptown Club.

We got a young audience. University students. All young people. All sorts of people.

TIMOTHY STEVENS

I mean in terms of establishing a scene, in terms of you know clubs like Uptown were really, really important in getting small group traditional Jazz on the map in Melbourne.

The biggest thing to come out of this was the trip they made in 1947 to the World Youth Festival in Czechoslovakia. That’s where an Australian band appeared internationally, at least in the period of jazz that we’re talking about for the first time. And it marks, I think, the beginning of the Jazz scene in Australia as we sort of know it now.

GRAEME BELL

So it was one day when I was teaching that the phone went. It was Harry Stein. And he said, ‘how would you like to take the band to Czechoslovakia?’. Well, I nearly fell over. And I hardly knew where it was. He said, ‘well the Czechoslovakian government are running a World Youth Festival and we’ve been asked to send some delegates’. And he said ‘people are sending sporting bodies, student bodies, why not a jazz band?’ He said, ‘no one seems to be sending a jazz band’. I said, ‘gee, that’d be great’. I said, ‘I’ll go anywhere’. He said, ‘right, well, we’ll probably have to raise our own fares to get there’. One fella sold his car, Pixie sold his tenor sax, Jack Varney sold his vibraphones. And we went over on a shoestring without any money for our fare back.

TIMOTHY STEVENS

I don’t really know how much Jazz there was in Czechoslovakia at this time, and perhaps the Bell band brought something that was exciting and unfamiliar and a bit new, but it certainly resonated. They recorded also in Czechoslovakia for Supraphon which was a really big thing and his original compositions and they were really pursuing a thing of their own. So the records were coming back here and people were really excited by that so was a big thing for the jazz community here.

GRAEME BELL

And while we were there, the Czech Youth Club and another club called the Grammar Club, which was really a jazz club, offered to take us on tour and we finished up by touring all the leading towns of both Bohemia and Moravia. They hadn’t had an import band in Czechoslovakia since before the war. But they were all just starving for something. Every performance packed. And six hundred people seated at tables having coffee or soft drinks. And we were booked for a whole month, travelling by train or bus. And Jack Varney married a Czech girl and he met her there, you know. We met these young people and they were trying out their English on us. Very little English spoken in those days as compared to these days in Europe. But we got by. We all had to learn a bit of, a smattering of survival Czech to get by.

TIMOTHY STEVENS

I think Graeme was very good at facilitating opportunities for other musicians. He was a very encouraging man and was a very important and influential early musician in the Australian post-war Jazz scene –led several bands throughout his lengthy career and was important early on in the development of what people have termed an Australian Jazz style.

Film - Joel Checkley and Belinda Ensor, 'Women in Jazz'

REBECCA BARNARD

Hello, I’m Rebecca Barnard and I am a musician. I come from a long line of jazz musicians. My father was Len Barnard who was a drummer and I’m here to talk about some influential women in jazz.

[musical interlude]

REBECCA BARNARD

I suppose I’m not know so much as a jazz singer because I had a pop band Rebecca’s Empire that did quite well, you know, Triple J loved us, and, oh those were the days. That was the 90s. But I’ve always sung jazz, that’s sort of like my first love, you know, it’s like breathing. It’s sort of effortless.

There are several women that come to mind when I think about Victorian jazz, or women in Victorian jazz. The first one being Margret RoadKnight who best known for the hit she had in 1977 which was more a folk song ‘The Girls in Our Town’.

[Sings]

Girls in our town leave school at sixteen, they work at the counter or behind the machine.

It’s just, it sucks you in immediately, it’s real life.

Margaret is not your stereotypical type of female singer/songwriter. She’s very tall. And she started off like I did really, just harmonising with her sister while they were doing the dishes, and you know jotting down lyrics here and there.

And then she started performing at Traynors, which was a Jazz Club in Melbourne, and really started to expand into Jazz and the Blues by becoming Frank Traynor’s Jazz Preacher’s vocalist.

And then she began her recording career and the first single ‘Girls in our Town’ reached the top twenty and she toured internationally and, but you know I think the reason her career didn’t go further than it did was because she didn’t want to play the game, she didn’t want to be told what to do, she had her own unique style and she stuck to it and managed to have a career that is still going to this day.

Another very unique female artist is Judy Jacques.

[musical interlude]

She started very young. She joined the Yarra Yarra New Orleans Jazz Band in 1963 and that opened a lot of doors for her. She did a lot of television work. She wasn’t singing Jazz as such, it was sort of Bluesy, Jazzy. And she eventually moved into experimental voice.

She started to collaborate with visual artists and poets. She was very ahead of her time.

[musical interlude]

She won a Bell Award for her album in 2003 called ‘Making Waves’ which is, has been called Experimental Folk Jazz fusion. You know, she’s not afraid to delve into her ‘self’ which can be confronting I think for a lot of singers. And I see that as being very brave. She’s been a wonderful role model for a lot of women, including me.

Someone that I could not leave out is Margie Lou Dyer whose had a big influence on me, and we go back a long way.

Our connection really goes back to our fathers. Wocka Dyer, her father, who was a brilliant trombone player, and who very sadly died when Margie was I think eighteen months old and my father, Len Barnard, the drummer they played together. So we’ve always had this connection.

Margie really learnt to play Jazz piano by listening to her dad’s records. I think that, you know, that’s were she got her Jazz sensibility from, like I did, listening to my dad’s records, they just sort of saturate you whether you like it or not, ‘cause their sooo good.

She’s been in about eight or nine bands and she, whenever you talk about it she still says, ‘it’s a man’s world’. But no musician male or female that I know, that can play the sort of piano that she plays and then her voice on top of that, it’s just beautiful, it’s, she’s a totally natural musician.

[musical interlude]

It’s just an honour to know her, really.

And that’s what I love about jazz and particularly women in jazz. It’s not a phony thing, it’s the real deal.