Sounds from the Corner: Australian Contemporary Jazz on CD

Roger Dean

Sydney: Australian Music Centre, July 2005

Reviewed by Jenny Game-Lopata

Sounds From the Corner is a snapshot of 250 Australian CD releases since 1973 aimed at encouraging international interest in Australian music. In the author’s words, the collection is seeking to represent the full stylistic range of Australian contemporary work, and to provide several levels of comment thereon. The selection criteria stipulate that  musicians have at least two currently available CDs as band leader (excluding traditional and mainstream jazz styles). Entries were selected from a questionnaire circulated to 112 musicians, critics and promoters (with 15 responses) and from informal interviews with the author’s “close collaborators”. Sounds from the Corner also incorporates a number of appendixes including an essay on the Australian music scene and a somewhat disturbing summary of responses to the questionnaire. Dean regularly cites his own professional experiences as a point of reference for the collection.

Despite a full page being devoted to each CD entry, most only merit a few lines of commentary. A select few entries have additional remarks under the unnecessary sub-heading ‘differentiations.’ These large tracts of empty space represent a lost opportunity for the book to distinguish itself. The comments are clearly engaging but inconsistent, reflecting the vague nature of the selection criteria and reinforcing the book’s confused identity. The entries are a teaser, providing brief descriptions but not quite enough information as might be found in a review format intended to encourage readers to buy a CD. While comments are sometimes technical, they are not substantial enough in analytical detail to sustain the interest of academicians. This brevity generates the overuse of umbrella terms such as ‘rhythmic’ to describe styles that include a regular pulse and ‘mainstream’ (a term used surprisingly often given the criterion that mainstream jazz was not within the scope of the collection). Similarly, although ‘world music’ is another category beyond collection’s scope, there are many titles that comfortably fit this description - perhaps the result of the natural reticence of both musicians and commentators to openly label or categorize musical outcomes. Sounds From the Corner strongly emphasises free improvisation (non idiomatic), free jazz and traditional jazz improvisation styles, but includes world music and funk where high profile jazz musicians are involved.

Dean has not included his own responses to the questionnaire, but discloses that his view is “strongly coherent with the consensus of responses” as he has summarised them. Despite the breadth of the CD selection, the summary of the questionnaire reveals informants to be reserved, negative or proudly imitative when questioned on distinctive features of Australian jazz. Responsibility for this is placed squarely at the feet of educational institutions. Although a valid point with regard to some educational institutions, it is not the case for all and does not take into account the preferences of promoters, general public and individual musicians themselves who are surely responsible for their own artistic and collaborative choices.

As Jazz and improvised music is made in a socio-cultural environment that is routinely self-selective, it is not surprising that informants are acquainted with few female and almost no indigenous musicians. Barriers to entry for these groups are transparent given the antiquated views expressed by informants such as: Australian male improvisers have exceptional physical power and stamina impacting on wind instrument performance in terms of sound, tone production, tonal projection and dynamic resonance (Sandy Evans is noted as the “possible” exception that proves the rule) and the physiology of different ethnic groups also effects wind-players’ performances – stated with the clear implication that some are better than others. As a female wind player myself, I can assure the undecided reader that the stamina required for a few hours of performance on stage is laughable compared to the stamina and physical strength required to sustain several hours of childbirth.

Dean’s attempt to address issues of gender and ethnicity is tokenistic at best, given the complex and controversial nature of these topics. One can only hope that he and his more contentious informants do not speak for the entire industry. It is certainly time that ethnic diversity and gender is seen as a positive reality, opening opportunities for variety and to banish the assumption that all players want to or should sound like particular American or British idols. Dean’s book fails to observe that such attitudes are unlikely to invigorate any art form in contemporary Australian society and are ironically a far cry from those of the social revolutionaries that generated this music in particular, free jazz. Refreshingly, in the final section of the questionnaire, Michele Morgan makes the progressive comment that non-Western cultures offer alternative structures to the “interminable development climax denouement structures”.

In his essay Australia and Contemporary Jazz and Improvisation Dean reiterates the already well documented distinguishing features of approximately fifty years of free jazz verses free improvisation and details the extreme economic marginalization of jazz and improvisation music and musicians worldwide – a no-brainer for anyone already involved in the industry. The essay also reaffirms the fact that Australian jazz is a “white male” tradition amid dubious claims that it empathises with African American subjugation and achieves creative breadth and development through the colonial Australian larrikin bush culture.

Sounds from the Corner’s CD anthology is a good source of general knowledge about the artists involved, full of interesting snippets of information about local and interstate musicians. It is impossible to gauge, however, the reaction this book will generate from its target international market, since it does not contain enough information for students or academics to authoritatively speak about Australian music, and promoters are unlikely to book artists on the strength of it.  Sounds From the Corner is nevertheless likely to play an important role in alerting outsiders to the existence of Australian jazz musicians and ‘sounds downunder’.

Music Forum Vol 12 No 2