Now for something not so very different. During a stint at the important SIMA residence at Strawberry Hill Hotel, Mark Simmonds had traditional jazz tapes playing before his appearances and between sets. Some listeners were dismayed. I was not.
Sidney Bechet’s playing had more in common with Mark’s than with many of the cranky jazz players who scorned the music that SIMA presented, and the collective ethos of classic jazz was one of the inspirations for the avant-garde.
While the traddies, as, fondly or dismissively, they came to be known, had their own prejudices, in their music they pursued the same convergence of individual feeling and style with group spirit that has informed all creative jazz.
Indeed, all music in which improvisation has given the individual player a personal voice within the whole, and the possibility of changing or influencing the direction of the whole as it evolves.
This is particularly true of traditional forms, where the instruments have defined roles but also much freedom within those roles.
When I first heard traditional jazz I was taken and shaken by the way things seemed to explode in several directions at once. We are used to this apparent chaos now, and it took the New Thing or Free Jazz to bewilder and exhilarate us in the same way. But there is something in all great music that never wears out.
Taking their music into pubs and halls or playing in back rooms, organizing festivals, playing on beaches and from the backs of trucks or the wide open touring cars of old, the traddies created the contexts in which subsequent developments have been heard.
In the early days of the serious traditional jazz revival movement in Melbourne, they were often aligned (paradoxically as it may seem) with modern movements in painting.
Sidney Nolan, Graeme Bell and others combined in joint concert/exhibitions. When modern jazz and rock and roll arrived they became the old guard, but in many ways they had created a context for them too.
Read the full on the SIMA website.
Find out more
www.australianclassicjazz.com
