The winner of the first National Jazz Writing Competition is John McBeath
(pronounced Macbeth) who writes from his home in the Adelaide hills in South Australia.
The competition, an initiative of novelist Miriam Zolin, is specifically for written reviews of Australian jazz gigs and CDs. The winning entry was drawn from a shortlist of ten and the entries received this year covered a wide range of experience and abilities…
“We were thrilled to get the number of submissions we did,” says Zolin. “I really didn’t know what to expect, since nobody has ever done anything quite like this before. There are a few writing competitions out there, but as far as I can see, nothing as specifically aimed at reviewers, until now.” The interest was enough to guarantee that the competition will continue in future years – good news to writers and jazz enthusiasts who might be enticed by a $750 prize and publication in The Bulletin magazine.
The announcement of the winner was made on the first night of this year’s TAC Wangaratta Festival of Jazz – a decision that Zolin says was no accident. The seeds of the competition were sown at last year’s festival when she received the email to tell her that her Aunt, living in Provincetown in Massachusetts in the USA, was ill. Her Aunt – Robyn Watson – passed away as a result of the illness and Zolin was charged with taking care of her affairs, during which time she discovered that Watson had been a great supporter of the Arts in Provincetown. Zolin felt the need to find a meaningful way to remember Watson, back here in Australia. As a writer, and jazz enthusiast, it made sense to do something that included both these art forms. The initial idea of a writing competition that was ‘somehow related to jazz’ crystallised into a jazz reviewing competition after a conversation with Mike Nock. Soon afterwards, she found that Adrian Jackson, the artistic director at the Wangaratta festival was enthusiastic about the idea-enough to provide some very practical assistance by scheduling the announcement of the winner as part of this year’s festival. He also put Zolin in touch with The Bulletin, who agreed to provide a proportion of the prize money and publication of a winning review in the magazine.
The judges, John Pochee, John Clare and Allan Browne, were also keen when invited to make up the judging panel. Clare is one of Australia’s most experienced jazz writers and Browne’s and Pochee’s experience as musicians positions them well to judge the quality of reviews. The entries were judged on a blindfolded basis (the judges did not know the names of the entrants when they were judging entries) and points were awarded according to a range of criteria, including a knowledge of jazz, knowledge of the local scene and of course the ability to write an interesting and informative review. Zolin was impressed by how smoothly the process went. “I told the judges what we were looking for, but basically left it up to them to grade the entries. There really wasn’t alot I could tell these guys – they knew what they were doing and that was demonstrated by the final results, which were quite consistent across all three individuals. They took the job very seriously and I think our choice of judges was spot-on.”
One of John McBeath’s reviews will appear in The Bulletin on the 9 November edition.
Remaining reviews by McBeath, along with a selection of the best shortlisted entries, will appear on jazz.org.au from 1 November.
About John McBeath
John McBeath started listening to jazz when he discovered ragtime at age fifteen. He took up piano, then alto sax and clarinet and also studied theory, harmony and arranging. At 21 though he gave up playing music with the realisation that ability was never going to match expectations, although he still plays a ‘fairly bad’ piano. His personal preferences run to rhythmic post bop, and pretty well anything jazz-flavoured that is cutting edge, especially if it’s original and Australian. John worked in radio for 12 years doing general announcing work and eventually managed community stations in Cairns and Alice Springs. Along the way he started writing music, film and theatre reviews. He moved to Adelaide in 1997 and in 2002 began writing freelance jazz reviews for The Adelaide Advertiser, which led to jazz writing for The Australian newspaper and other publications.
The TAC Wangaratta Festival of Jazz continues this weekend.
