Dadaists, bodgies, widgies, reds and jazz

Bodgie Dada and the Cult of Cool
By John Clare (aka Gail Brennan)
UNSW Press, 1995. 218 pp., $39.95 (hb)
Companion 2-CD compilation available on ABC Music through EMI
Reviewed by Norm Dixon Gail Brennan — as writer John Clare is best-known these days — writes regularly in one of Sydney's give-away music newspapers. His column, "Ad Lib", is compelling. On the surface it reviews the latest in the jazz scene but inevitably Brennan veers off on always fascinating, often eccentric, sometimes infuriating tangents that touch on Australian society, cultural tolerance, a hatred of ignorance (for which he regularly and entertainingly vilifies the jazz critic of the Australian), and many other subjects. The one constant is an immense knowledge and genuine enthusiasm for creative, challenging improvised music. It is in this spirit that Brennan tackles Australian jazz since 1945 in this thoroughly enjoyable and informative book. This is not an academic tome nor a dreary litany of who played with whom when but a lively first-hand account of developments in Australian jazz, the people who created it, and those who have been attracted to it. Brennan does not claim that Bodgie Dada and the Cult of Cool is the definitive history of antipodean jazz, and early in the book refers readers to other sources to fill in the gaps. Brennan's vocation as an enthusiastic tribune for jazz began when he was a working-class kid who developed a passion that defies the inaccurate but common image of jazz being solely the music of fuddy-duddies in straw boaters and striped waistcoats. What becomes clear reading Bodgie Dada is that Australian jazz, through most of its evolution, has been a music that has attracted rebellious young people. In part — and this is what makes the book so interesting — Bodgie Dada is an anecdotal history of rebel subcultures in Sydney and Melbourne and how they have interacted with the jazz community. Those recounted include the Dada-like antics of musicians immediately after World War II; the attraction to young Australian musicians of bebop, the stridently black consciousness-influenced jazz movement that developed among African American players in the 1940s; and the attendance of bodgies and widgies — a uniquely Australian suburban post-swing/pre-rocker/beat-like subculture — at jazz venues beginning in the '40s. To make a living, jazz musicians also played in rock & roll bands in the late 1950s and rock bands in the '60s and'70s. Psychedelic rock and free jazz intermingled. There was never really a strict separation between jazz and pop audiences. The "underground" nature of the scene led to brushes with Sydney's gangsters. Brennan brings to life the famous clubs (such as El Rocco, Jazz Centre 44 and the original Basement), the atmosphere and the personalities of these changing times without ever glossing over their shortcomings or absurdities. One interesting snippet is Australian communism's relationship with jazz. In Australia in the mid-'40s, there was a revival of New Orleans jazz — what today is dubbed trad or dixieland. Its best-known exponent, still a household name, was Graeme Bell. The trad revival was fuelled by a hostile attitude to commercialised popular music, an opposition to racism and a sympathetic view of African Americans. It was popular among young people, left-wing artists and intellectuals and radical activists. "We went to an earlier style [of jazz]", Brennan quotes Bell as saying, "because it was a kind of missing link here. There hadn't been much free, collective improvisation. We saw this as a democratic thing ... I still think that jazz stands for that kind of freedom and interaction." Bell explicitly linked his attitude to the form of jazz to politics: "To be modern or anti-conservative during the prevailing climate was to be anti-fascist and therefore left wing". Bell became associated with the Communist Party's youth group, the Eureka Youth League (EYL): "I thought this was a way the world might be changed ... the jazz we were playing at the time was seen as quite a radical thing." A leading member of the EYL was Harry Stein, also an accomplished jazz drummer, who helped launch the Eureka Hot Jazz Society in 1946. Bell's band played at its first function. The EYL invited Bell and his band to be part of the EYL's delegation to the 1947 Prague World Youth Festival and raised the funds needed to get them there. According to historian Bruce Johnson, writing recently in the journal Perfect Beat, the Bell band dominated the event, playing to very large audiences. Bell's two-week Czechoslovak tour turned into four months. After Prague, the fresh approach Bell brought to jazz made him a star in Britain and also fanned a left-leaning trad revival in Britain. Bell's stay in Czechoslovakia "virtually started the jazz movement" there, Johnson wrote. Incidentally, just a few years later Moscow issued anti-jazz edicts, and trad jazz in Eastern Europe soon took on deep anti-Stalinist overtones. When Bell returned to Prague in 1993, he was "rapturously received, including by contemporary youth, as the father of the Czech jazz movement". For fans of today's Australian jazz scene, Brennan provides useful accounts of the background and evolution of the most prominent and influential players and groups, such as Bernie McGann, the catholics, Ten Part Invention, Sandy Evans and Tim Hopkins, to name just a few. Essential also is the companion 2-CD compilation with cuts selected by Brennan. It makes reading the book doubly enjoyable being able to sample the music at the same time. The music ranges across all periods of Australian jazz. It contains some real revelations, most notably the late Charles Munro's magnificent Mingus-like precursor to world music-influenced jazz, the "Islamic Suite". The brilliant contributions of Bernie McGann are a highlight.