The Permanent Underground: Australian Contemporary Jazz in the New Millennium
Platform Papers: Quarterly Essays in the Performing Arts,
No 16, April 2008
By Peter Rechniewski
(Currency House)
Review and response by Mark Isaacs
After reading The Permanent Underground, I had several telephone chats and email volleys with the author as well a five-hour conversation when we met recently at a Sydney football club.
I have several interests that must be declared at the outset. As a jazz artist the vast majority of my performances in Sydney over the last 22 years have been as a result of Peter’s artistic direction of the Sydney Improvised Music Association (SIMA). Peter engaged my trio in 1986 in a double bill at The Basement along with the first Sydney performance of Ten Part Invention. I’ve played for SIMA since then and up to the present day, although there were a couple of periods where I voluntarily eschewed SIMA performances due to disputes between Peter and myself. Some years ago I – along with others – publicly criticised SIMA and also challenged the former NSW Jazz Co-ordination Association which auspiced the National Jazz Development Office. Peter was Vice-President of the Association for many years and I stood against him – unsuccessfully – for that position in 1999.
It would be fair to say that there’s some complex history there – personal and political tensions coupled with the inevitable interdependency that occurs in a small scene between established artists and administrators of presenting organizations. When I accepted the invitation to respond to The Permanent Underground I wondered how credible my piece might be viewed as being, given all the above. All I can say in that regard is that I remain committed to Australian jazz music beyond my personal ambitions as one of the artists it has spawned. And I firmly believe that Peter is likewise committed to the music beyond whatever aspirations he may have to continue to influence the development of its infrastructure. It is upon that common ground – and it alone – that I write this piece. And it’s from that place that I declare without hesitation that without Peter’s voluminous energy and commitment, Sydney contemporary jazz – and some aspects of the scene nationwide – would be not so much “underground” as long ago dead in the water.
The Permanent Underground starts – as good history often does – with a story. In 2003 Melbourne-based saxophonist Jamie Oehlers won a prestigious international saxophone competition at the famous Montreux Jazz Festival. He had come second in the same competition a year earlier. Moreover the year Jamie won, another Australian, Willow Neilson, came third while yet another Aussie, David Rex, was amongst the 12 finalists. As Peter compellingly remarks “I can find no evidence of any other international music competition in which Australians have made up a quarter of the finalists, let alone provided two of the three place-getters, including the winner” before going on to document the paucity of coverage this received in the media (Oehlers’ performance in Sydney upon returning from the competition was not reviewed and only a “very observant reader” would have noticed the “tiny item” in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age announcing his win). From this specific example of no featured celebration of an unprecedented achievement appearing in the arts pages of the broadsheets or on the ABC arts or current affairs TV programs (who hasn’t already given up on a place for the arts on commercial television?) Peter builds his general case regarding media marginalisation of jazz.
The essay goes on to recount the recent history of the modern jazz movement in Australia starting in the late 1950s with the El Rocco Jazz Cellar in Sydney and Jazz Centre 44 in Melbourne to the present day. Peter takes us through the art form’s rising and falling fortunes as clubs opened and closed and private entrepreneurs came and went. Government-funded jazz organisations appeared in the 1980s only to have many of the positive effects they brought militated against by external factors, such as Sydney’s punitive licensing laws (only recently repealed).
Peter’s potted history has already been the site of some inevitable dispute over detail – no doubt it’s not without flaw or fully comprehensive – but the essay is not without subtlety. Emerging as the salient point to be gleaned from what seems initially intended as a historical account for its own sake is above all the deep inconsistency of tenure that jazz has experienced over the decades, which – coupled with the media’s laconic interest – leads Peter to postulate his view of the solution to this “permanent underground”.
Before doing so though, Peter tackles head on the high-handed idea often heard that jazz is in fact dead as a “site of innovation”, an argument that has been refuted by some international commentators who have observed that the site of innovation has not shifted away from the art form so much as geographically away from the USA. Peter extends their largely Eurocentric argument to encompass Australian jazz and goes on to analyse its state at the current time, including a more detailed appraisal of its media coverage (or lack thereof).
From there Peter proposes his tripartite solution:
(1) increased Government funding
(2) the formulation of a national plan for jazz which Peter offers up a first draft of for discussion
(3) the formation a new national advocacy body to consult on the plan and lobby for the artform on an ongoing basis.
These points can all be boiled down to what Peter views as the antidote to his essay’s title (if I may be permitted to weakly pun upon it): permanent infrastructure.
Though Peter’s rather sanguine view of the previous national jazz
organisation and plan could easily be disputed, even its fiercest critics (and perhaps I could be counted as one of those) should not draw from this specific instance a general argument against any kind of national service organisation and a concomitant plan for jazz. I readily welcome Peter’s initiative to start a process to create both. I also hope that there will be a vast improvement on what resulted from the efforts of the past.
Peter says “the jazz community must not allow personal agendas or slow consultative processes to destroy another opportunity to take control of its future”. The language is uncharacteristically porous here. Does he mean that the jazz community must accept slow consultative processes as inevitable and not become self-defeatingly fractious over them, as in the past (in his view)? Or does he believe that it is in fact these same slow (or indeed non-existent) consultative processes that themselves destroy trust in the community (and hence all else) and that therefore the leadership must pledge to stringently avoid this paradigm? From talking to Peter I have a sense that it is the latter and this is to be welcomed. It is easy to impute the motivation of “personal agendas” to those who lobby on behalf of what affects them directly, but this must never be used as a blunt instrument to attempt to shut down debate since individual experience is almost always reflected in whole sectors of a community. And finally, it is paramount that governance be impeccably constituted and at all times transparently accountable.
Regarding “consultative processes” the web offers a practicable way for informal consultation across a national community to take place, and the new national service organisation (which is at interim committee stage I believe) should ensure that the constituency feels enfranchised and can take ownership of the plan as it evolves. Leadership needs to take decisions of course, but it should nonetheless listen to all available and reasonable views and respond to them in a timely way even if only to explain why certain views cannot be incorporated. It could be jazz’s 2020 Summit.
On the matter of funding, Peter gives too little emphasis to sources other than government. Corporate sponsorships and the seeking of private philanthropy (even at modest levels) remain under-developed in jazz compared to classical music. Peter specifies an objective to raise “public funding allocated to jazz to a total of $2.4m [per annum]” from its current level which he has analysed at $1.3m. While funding to jazz clearly needs to increase – and that would include Government funding – it would have been better to ascertain the total of public and private funding and set a benchmark for this aggregate figure to rise to. This would allow for a possible change in the mix between public and private funding within an overall total funding goal.
Further to this, though it does not detract from his overall argument, it is unfortunate that there is an arithmetical error in one of Peter’s tables that understates the total Australia Council core jazz funding to principle jazz organisations for 2002 by $26,000. To careless addition, add the incidental matter of less than rigorous proofreading: “classical music and operate [sic] predominate”
Better research would have revealed that Peter’s clear implication that ABC Radio National’s The Music Show only interviews international – and not Australian – jazz artists is wildly incorrect.
Australian jazz artists interviewed on the program include Alister Spence, Matt McMahon, Phil Slater, Andrea Keller, Paul Grabowsky, Mike Nock, Bob Sedergreen, Julien Wilson, Tony Gorman, Sandy Evans, Barney McCall, David Theak, The Necks, Judy Bailey, Cathy Harley, James Greening, Andrew Robson, James Muller, Bernie McCann, Bob Barnard, Michelle Nicole, Gai Bryant, Tim Stevens, Aaron Choulai, Alan Browne, Tony Gould, Colin Hopkins, Peter Knight and myself.
The show’s reviews of jazz CDs, by Andrew Ford and Jessica Nicholas, though “occasional”, are nonetheless regular – broadcast every three months, as is the case with classical reviews.
None of these errors or omissions weaken Peter’s argument about media marginalisation, but it is nonetheless important to give credit where it’s due.
As one would expect, the book is well written, though some abrupt changes of tone and style make for a somewhat bumpy ride. One tone – which appears only momentarily – is unfortunate. Peter refers to vocalist Kristin Berardi being the subject of an item on the 7:30 Report and tells us that “some say that that only happened because, behind the scenes, ‘there was a friend who had a friend’”. The jazz scene, like any other, is rife with unsubstantiated gossip but none should be reproduced in a serious essay of this kind.
Later in the book Peter discusses the Australia Council cutting all funding to the NSW and national jazz co-ordination programs in 2001 and says “Despite assurances by Music Board officers that the decision was made ‘on the points’, suspicion remains that the Board, desperate to find money for new clients, saw in the jazz community’s disunity an opportunity it could not ignore”. Such a serious suggestion regarding the Board’s motivation should not be couched this way. If “suspicion remains” we need to know who other than Peter is suspicious or otherwise he should be bold enough to attribute the suspicion only to himself and not include invisible others. And one wonders how he can say without attribution that The Necks and Paul Grabowsky “have both been careful to construct their public profiles by distancing themselves from the jazz scene”. In the case of Paul Grabowsky it is odd to presume such premeditated PR spin in the activities of a genuine artistic polymath.
Despite these flaws I believe the essay to be timely and one of the most commendable achievements (other than the music itself) that the Australian jazz scene can point to in recent times. It – and the energy Peter will undoubtedly bring to the new national jazz advocacy body and in formulating the consultative plan – will go a long way to redressing the situation that Peter eloquently laments at the close of the essay.
“As American critic Gary Giddins puts it, ‘Jazz musicians have virtually no access to the machinery of capitalism’. In Australia, at present, they have no more than a small, uncomfortable and precarious seat at the table of subsidised music. They deserve much better”.
Australian jazz is lucky that 40 years ago Peter Rechniewski as a schoolboy wandered into El Rocco Jazz Cellar and clearly fell in love with the music, and that this passion has endured all the intervening vicissitudes.
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Mark Isaacs is an internationally-acknowledged pianist and composer in jazz and classical music. He has received an Australia Council Fellowship and other awards. He served for two years on the NSW Ministry of the Arts Music Committee and created and maintains the jazz discussion website Ozjazzforum, now in its eighth year. Mark has curated the jazz program at the Brisbane Powerhouse, including the Brisbane Jazz Festival.
Photo: Mark Isaacs
