The Write Advice 052: SARAH WATERS

I write a synopsis for myself really, to get my ideas organised –– but I might never refer to it again.  I usually start at the beginning of a book and just work my way slowly through it, several chapters at a time, annotate them, then rewrite them and print them out again –– I might do that three or four times per section.  It's quite a laborious way to do it –– going over and over sections that will probably change later on, when I come to rewrite the book as a whole.  I sometimes wish I could work in a different way –– be a bit looser about it.
 

Mslexia: For Women Who Write [date unspecified]
 

 

Use the link below to visit the website of bestselling British writer SARAH WATERS.

 

http://www.sarahwaters.com/

 

 

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J is for Jazz 010: BERNIE McGANN

BERNIE McGANN
2012

 

 

Bernie McGann is one of the greatest of all jazz musicians, either here or anywhere…He represents the essence of the music; uncompromising and thoroughly schooled in the tradition, while creating his own response to it…He’s like a great painter who’s developed this style, and then refines it and refines it.  But everything that he does is unmistakable because of the style.

 

PAUL GRABOWSKY

Pianist/Composer & McGann collaborator

 

 

The death of alto saxophonist Bernie McGann (who preferred to be known as 'Bern') on 17 September 2013 robbed Australian jazz of one of its true pioneers, a brilliant self-effacing giant whose career spanned more than five decades and saw him create and perfect a unique, instantly identifiable sound that was, by turns, dark, dry, angular, chaotic and, when the tune called for it, achingly romantic.  For many jazz fans he was the dominant figure in Australian improvised music, a musician who never stopped stretching his own boundaries and those of everyone he played with despite being almost totally ignored by the mainstream media and achieving what can only be described as an very modest degree of commercial if not critical success.

 

McGann was born Bernard Francis McGann in the southern Sydney suburb of Kogarah on 22 June 1937.  His father, who was a semi-professional drummer employed by day as a sheetmetal worker, moved the family to the working class western suburb of Granville when he was two years old.  It was in Granville, in a house that faced the perpetually busy Parramatta Road, that he grew up, immersed in the music of Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Mary Lou Williams and other prominent North American jazz and swing artists.  (He also attended Marist Brothers High School in Parramatta, where my father was his classmate, before leaving in his early teens to take a job as an apprentice fitter and turner.)  He took piano lessons as a child, then switched to drums before finally taking up the saxophone at the age of eighteen, influenced –– as were aspiring musicians all over the world at the time –– by the smooth, ultra-modern sound of Paul Desmond, then at the peak of his popularity as the alto saxophonist of the Dave Brubeck Quartet.

 

THE BREEZE AND I
BERNIE McGANN QUARTET

BERNIE McGANN [alto sax]; WARWICK ALDER [trumpet];

BRENDAN CLARKE [bass]; ANDREW DICKESON [drums]

Recorded live, 28 June 2011 

 

McGann was playing well enough by the late 1950s to take his place alongside other emerging Australian jazz talents like drummer John Pochée and trumpeter Errol Buddle at a late night Sydney venue called El Rocco –– really just a cellar with a neon sign proclaiming it a 'jazz club' –– located in the Sydney red light district of King's Cross.  El Rocco, which had opened in 1955 as a café serving instant coffee to the city's bohemian elite, soon became the city's premier jazz venue, home to virtually every great musician –– Judy Bailey, Don Burrows, Bobby Gebert, George Golla, New Zealand pianist Mike Nock, the list is seriously impressive –– who would go on to make his or her mark on jazz throughout the 1960s, the 1970s and beyond.  

 

McGann's professional relationship with many of these musicians would be strong, but none more so than that the partnership he developed with John Pochée, whose flawlessly in-the-groove drumming would become crucial to the sound of both the Bernie McGann Trio and the Bernie McGann Quartet.  It was with Pochée, as a member of a band called Heads, that he earned his first residency at a Melbourne club called the Fat Black Pussycat in 1964.  Their stay in Victoria was brief, however, and they were back in New South Wales the following year, gigging regularly in Sydney venues like Club Eleven, the Taxi Club and the Mocambo in what was then the unfashionable and still largely working class suburb of Newtown.  In later years, McGann would feature prominently in Pochée's own mini orchestra Ten Part Invention, frequently performing and recording with the group as well as in the smaller group The Last Straw they co-founded in 1974.

 

SPIRIT SONG

TEN PART INVENTION

Recorded live, 1993

 

 

McGann, who made his first jazz recordings in 1967 for a compilation LP titled Jazz Australia, supplemented his income during the late 1960s and early 1970s by working as a session musician and performing as a member of the rock/soul group Southern Comfort.  Around this time he also moved to the small bushland community of Bundeena south of the city, working by day as its postman and often taking his saxophone deep into the bush of the nearby Royal National Park to conduct his daily practice sessions.  At the Sydney benefit concert held for him in September 2013, immediately following the heart surgery which unbeknownst to everyone would shortly cost him his life, John Pochée remembered being sent off to find him one day, only to discover '…a solitary chiselled figure atop a large rock platform blowing out across the vast expanses of bush.'  This habit of honing his sound alone in the bush, far from where anyone but the occasional possum or wallaby could hear him, was crucial to his musical development and helped prepare him for what became his most productive decade, with his trio and quartet producing several internationally acclaimed recordings and backing an impressive roster of visiting musicians including Freddie Hubbard, Lester Bowie, Dave Liebman, Sonny Stitt and Dewey Redman.   In addition to touring extensively both in Australia and overseas throughout the 1980s –– including successful visits to the UK, North America, Czechoslovakia, Poland, India and Malaysia –– McGann also found time to play himself in the 1988 Kevin Lucas docu-drama Beyond El Rocco.  By 1990 he was arguably the most famous 'unknown' jazz musician in his native land, with another successful tour of the USSR helping to cement his international reputation as a player of astonishing depth, power and sometimes staggering individuality.  

 

 

     

Rufus Records
1998 (reissue)

 

 

The ensuing decade saw McGann consolidate his position as Australia's leading saxophonist with the 1991 release of Ugly Beauty, his first new trio album for many years and one which featured several of his own strikingly angular compositions in addition to a selection of thoughtfully chosen standards.  The album gained him an ARIA award and the 1992 Mo Award for 'Jazz Group of the Year' –– awards he would win again in 1994, 1995 and 1997 for his albums McGann, McGann and Playground before becoming the first non-classical performer to win the prestigious Don Banks Award in 1998, an annual $60,000 prize given to '…a senior artist of high distinction who has made an outstanding and sustained contribution to music in Australia.'  The same year saw the publication of a biography, written by poet, novelist and social historian Geoff Page, titled Bernie McGann: A Life in Jazz by the Armidale-based Kardoorair Press (a book which, sadly, no longer appears to be in print). 

 

    

 

BERNIE McGANN: AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL TREASURE

Short film about the saxophonist 

 

 

Despite his originality and often breathtaking technique McGann was at heart an oldschool musician who believed in playing wherever and whenever he could, making as little fuss about himself as he seemed to make about his music.  He was quintessentially Australian in his attitudes and, by all accounts, in his personal likes and dislikes, which included a fondness for the game of pool and the lifelong habit of rolling his own cigarettes.  He was, according to his friends, laconic, modest and '…capably self-reliant,' a man who once quipped, after attending yet another award ceremony, 'Win an ARIA Award and you can't get a gig.'  He was, above all, a survivor, somebody who obviously possessed the talent and ability required to transform him into an internationally renowned superstar had he chosen to relocate to New York or Paris instead of continuing to ply his trade in a small jazz backwater like Australia.    

 

McGann never lost the power to astound and dazzle audiences or, more significantly, his fellow musicians.  As John Pochée said of him when asked what it had been like to play with him for over forty years:  'Bernie can still raise the hairs on the back of my neck.'  That's the kind of praise that would have mattered to a man for whom the pursuit of the human and the personal was infinitely more important than any accolade he received from the critics or those responsible for handing out music prizes and grant money.

 

The last word on McGann's legacy should perhaps come from pianist Paul Grabowsky, with whom he recorded the stunning ballad album Always in October 2005.  It was an unusual project for both musicians, but one well worth the time and effort required to bring it to fruition, given the beautiful but still unmistakably McGannesque music they created together.

 

It was Dale Barlow who in about 1982 first made me think about Bernie.  How he was the true original, the swingin' postie, the Australian Bird, more kookaburra than nightingale, how he sang his own song.  You can hear echoes from across the pond:  Parker, of course, Ornette, especially Sonny Rollins, but I've heard him sound cooler as well, almost like Lee Konitz.  What really matters is that here is Australian jazz's Fred Williams, its Patrick White, a poet who evokes a dry, brittle and shimmering Australian landscape off the back of Tin Pan Alley and Vera Lynn...Something for always.

 

 

   SALAAM
BERNIE McGANN QUARTET

BERNIE McGANN [alto sax]; WARWICK ALDER [trumpet];

BRENDAN CLARKE [bass]; ANDREW DICKESON [drums]

Recorded live, 28 June 2011

 

 

 

Use the link below to read the obituary of BERNIE McGANN (from which much of the biographical information required for this post was obtained), published in The Australian on 23 September 2013 and a short clip from the 1988 film Beyond El Rocco:

 

 

 

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/original-and-inventive-giant-of-the-alto-sax/story-e6frg8n6-1226724669503

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXwTm1nDAbU  

 

 

 

 

 

Many fine recordings by BERNIE McGANN and his various bands can be purchased online by visiting the website of Sydney-based jazz label Rufus Records.

 

 

Special thanks to those who take the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.  

 

 

 

 

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J is for Jazz 005: SARAH VAUGHAN  

 

J is for Jazz 009: LEE MORGAN

 

 

 

 

 

Last updated 2 October 2021 § 

 

Poet of the Month 018: LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

 

 

 

 

 

CONSTANTLY RISKING 

ABSURDITY

  

 

 

Constantly risking absurdity
                                           and death
    whenever he performs
                                      above the heads
                                                             of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
                          climbs on rime
                                      to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
                                            above a sea of faces
    paces his way
                         to the other side of day
  performing entrechats
                                and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
                                   and all without mistaking
        any thing
                        for what it may not be
    For he's the super realist
                                       who must perforce perceive
           taut truth
                       before the taking of each stance or step
    in his supposed advance
                       toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
                                                 with gravity
                                            to start her death-defying leap
And he
      a little charleychaplin man
                                 who may or may not catch
      her fair eternal form
                              spreadeagled in the empty air

       of existence

                                                                       

  

 

 

 

 

A Coney Island of the Mind

 

 (1958)

 

 

 

 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York on 24 March 1919.  His French-born Jewish mother was committed to an insane asylum shortly after his birth, while his Italian father died when he was barely six months old.  Ferlinghetti spent his early childhood in the French city of Strasbourg, where he was raised by his maternal aunt Emily, who later brought him back to New York where he was placed in an orphanage until she found work as a governess, caring for the only daughter of the wealthy Bisland family.  Her nephew was left in the care of the Bislands after 1926 and attended local schools in Bronxville, New York before graduating with a BA in Journalism from the University of North Carolina in 1941.

 

Ferlinghetti enlisted in the US Navy following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and served in both the European and Pacific theaters of war.  (He also visited the Japanese city of Nagasaki six weeks after the atomic bomb was dropped on it –– an experience which turned him into a committed lifelong pacifist or, as he describes it, 'a philosophical anarchist.')  He enrolled at Columbia University after the war and lived in Paris between 1947 and 1951, where he earned his PhD at the Sorbonne.  Following his return to North America, he married and moved to San Francisco, where he taught French and wrote art criticism while working on translations of poems by the French surrealist writer Jacques Prévert.  Many of these were later published in the magazine City Lights owned by Peter D Martin.  In 1953, he and Martin joined forces to open the City Lights Bookstore –– the first all-paperback bookstore in the country and a place that would loom large in the mythos of the emerging Beat movement which included (but did not necessarily define) writers like Jack Kerouac, William S Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso.  

 

Ferlinghetti went on to found City Lights Publishing, which published the work of many of these 'new' poets and writers in its groundbreaking 'Pocket Poets' series.  Allen Ginsberg's Howl –– the fourth book in the series –– was seized by officers of the San Francisco Police Department in 1956 on the grounds that it was an obscene publication.  Ferlinghetti was arrested for selling an obscene book to a police officer and stood trial for this alleged offence in municipal court, only to be acquitted by the presiding judge in October 1957 in what became a landmark decision in the fight to uphold every US citizen's constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech.  The poet remained highly active in the fight for social justice and the anti-war movement during the 1960s and remains, at ninety-five, an outspoken critic of US foreign policy.  The author of over thirty books, Ferlinghetti is also a well-respected painter who held a one-man exhibition, titled 60 Years of Painting, in the Italian cities of Rome and Reggio in 2010.

 

 

 

Use the link below to read more poems by North American poet LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI:

 

 

http://www.poemhunter.com/lawrence-ferlinghetti/  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Last updated 18 March 2021