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.  

 

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:  

 

 

 

J is for Jazz 007: GRAEME BELL  

 

J is for Jazz 005: SARAH VAUGHAN  

 

J is for Jazz 009: LEE MORGAN

 

 

 

 

 

Last updated 2 October 2021 § 

 

J is for Jazz 007: GRAEME BELL

GRAEME BELL
c 1947

 

You are the Australian, you're making the music, you're putting the band together to make the music, and to make a band sound. And then what comes out then, the other end…almost unbeknown to you, is an Australian sound. 

 Talking Heads 

ABC TV –– 21 August 2006 

 

The first Australian performance of the strange new music known as 'jass' or 'jazz' took place on 15 June 1918 at Fuller's National Theatre on Castlereagh Street in Sydney.  The featured performer was an English 'lady baritone' named Belle Sylvia, backed by a quintet led by a North American violinist named Billy Romaine who had been working the city's thriving variety circuit ('variety' was the British and hence the Australian term for vaudeville) since 1912.  A reporter for The Sun newspaper wrote that '…the gay quintette…caused a riot with the audience' but it would take nearly another thirty years for Australia to produce its first fully authentic homegrown jazz superstar.

 

His name would be Graeme Emerson Bell.

 

FREE MAN'S BLUES
GRAEME BELL & HIS AUSTRALIAN JAZZ BAND

GRAEME BELL (piano); ROGER BELL (cornet); 
ADE MONSBOURGH (valve trombone, vocal);

DON 'PIXIE' ROBERTS (clarinet); JACK VARNEY (banjo); 
LOU SILBEREISEN (bass);

DAVE CAREY (drums) 

Recorded in London 
May 1948  

 

Bell was only three years old, living in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond with his parents –– his mother was a well-known contralto singer, his father an amateur actor and variety performer –– when the exciting Ms Sylvia and her band took the stage in Sydney that night.  His first exposure to jazz came courtesy of his younger brother Roger, a self-taught drummer (and later cornet player and vocalist), who was at that time a student at Scotch College in Hawthorn –– the same school where the elder Bell had excelled at sport and art before leaving in 1929 to take a job as a clerk in an insurance office.  Roger and his clarinet/trombone playing friend 'Lazy' Ade Monsbourgh needed a pianist to flesh out the lineup of their newly-formed jazz band and persuaded the classically trained Graeme to join them.  'Eventually,' Bell remembered in a 2006 television interview, 'I got to like it.  But I never imagined it would be my profession.'

 

By the end of 1935 the group was playing regularly for dances and had become the featured entertainment in some of Melbourne's most popular nightclubs.  Bell still considered music a hobby, however, and dreamed of making a name for himself as an artist, only abandoning this dream when he realized that working as a paid musician would also allow him to supplement his meagre earnings as an insurance clerk.  He kept his day job at T&G Insurance for what he called '…nine boring years,' dividing his free time between playing with the band and taking art classes with painter Max Meldrum at the National Gallery of Victoria which allowed him to meet and befriend many emerging young Australian artists, among them Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd.  Despite his success as a musician, he never lost his early love of art and even ran his own Sydney-based gallery for a brief period during the 1970s.

 

In 1941 he fronted his own band –– Graeme Bell's Jazz Gang –– but soon disbanded it to travel to the town of Mackay in central Queensland to entertain Pacific-bound Australian troops who were stationed there.  (He was disqualified from serving in the armed forces for health reasons.)  He married the first of his three wives in 1943 but his music career, plus the work he did for the army and the frequent absences from home that both occupations demanded of him, placed enormous strain on the marriage, which ended within a year.  Back in Melbourne by then, fronting yet another new band, Bell gained a weekly residency at the Heidelberg Town Hall and another at the Palais Royale pavilion located in that city's famous Carlton Gardens.  (Sadly, this beautiful Victorian building was demolished in the 1990s.)  Not only did playing these higher profile gigs expose the pianist to a larger audience, they also allowed him to quit his day job and led, within a few months, to him making his first recordings for the Ampersand label owned and operated by lawyer/jazz fan William Miller.  By the end of 1943 Bell's combo had also become the house band for the Eureka Youth League (which had formerly been known as the Communist Youth League), performing after its weekly meetings and at the various social and fundraising functions it sponsored.  In time, these performances became so popular that Bell asked the League's permission to start his own club-within-a-club which he named, with his usual panache, the Uptown Club.

 

The immediate post-war era saw Bell's career take another gigantic if unexpected leap forward when he and his band –– now re-christened Graeme Bell and His Australian Jazz Band and featuring his brother, Monsbourgh, Don 'Pixie' Roberts on clarinet, Jack Varney on guitar and banjo, Lou Silbereisen on bass and Russ Murphy on drums –– were invited to perform at the World Youth Festival in Prague.  Although they had to run a raffle to help them raise their passage money, the now remarried Bell (who would also become a father for the first time while overseas) and his bandmates left for Czechoslovakia (via London and Paris) in 1947, playing the festival before touring the country and recording –– at the insistence of a fanatically devoted Czech fan –– for the classical Prague-based Supraphon Gramophone Company.  These recordings included original tunes by Roger Bell and Monsbourgh and one of the pianist's own compositions, the catchy and evocative Czechoslovak Journey.  To this day, many European musicians still regard the 1947 visit of the Bell band as the event which marked the rebirth of European jazz following the ravages of World War Two.

CZECHOSLOVAK JOURNEY

GRAEME BELL & HIS AUSTRALIAN JAZZ BAND

GRAEME BELL (piano); ROGER BELL (cornet); 

ADE MONSBOURGH (valve trombone);

DON 'PIXIE' ROBERTS (clarinet); JACK VARNEY (banjo); 

LOU SILBEREISEN (bass);

RUSS MURPHY (drums)

Recorded at Rokaska Studio, Prague 
September 1947

 
 
The band relocated to London in the winter of 1947, living for a time in the house of English trumpet star Humphrey Lyttelton (who once quipped to a friend that he '…had Australians like other people had mice').  Lyttelton was the leading light of the new British Trad Revival movement and, like him, his Australian house guests soon found themselves performing regularly in the English capital, performing live on BBC radio and starting their own club in Leicester Square where they played what they and their manager chose to promote as 'Jazz for Dancing.'  Although their so-called 'desertion' of traditional or Dixieland jazz for swing and a smattering of pop tunes saw them scorned by some jazz purists, their performances were received so enthusiastically by entertainment starved British audiences that they quickly came to be regarded as the hottest, loosest, most exciting band in London.  They combined playing to packed houses in their own club twice a week with a weekly engagement at the London Jazz Club and regular forays into the provinces where their music proved to be equally popular and a welcome antipodean antidote to the dreariness of life in socially and economically depressed post-war Britain. 

 

In February 1948 they were invited to return to Paris –– a city they had visited twice before on their way to and from Prague –– where they entered the recording studio again courtesy of Charles Delaunay, friend, manager and future biographer of the already legendary Django Reinhardt.  The eighteen Paris sides and those they recorded following their return to London –– combined with what one English critic described as '…the gale of fresh air' their presence blew through the staid and perhaps overly reverential British jazz scene –– set the seal on their reputation as the most exciting thing to emerge from Australia since the cricket player Donald 'The Don' Bradman.  

 

They returned to their homeland in 1948 but were back in London in November 1950 to begin another tour.  As Bell himself explained:  '…it went off like a rocket.  We were brought back again to Europe by a London firm of agents in 1950, and played all over the continent, too.  And that tour lasted till 1952.  During that period, we accompanied a black jazz singer, Big Bill Broonzy.  And that was a wonderful experience for us. That was in Germany [on 15 September 1951].'  Shortly after this tour, however, the original Australian Jazz Band band officially broke up, Roger Bell and Ade Monsbourgh striking out on their own while the pianist sailed back to Australia to form a new band which subsequently toured several Australian military bases in Japan and South Korea.  (The cold was so severe in Korea, Bell once reminisced to a friend, that the horn players had to thaw the spittle out of their mouthpieces over a camp stove before they could even think about trying to play their instruments.)
  

 

WAS LEICESTER SQUARE?
GRAEME BELL & HIS AUSTRALIAN JAZZ BAND

GRAEME BELL (piano); ROGER BELL (cornet); 
ADE MONSBOURGH (valve trombone);

DON 'PIXIE' ROBERTS (clarinet); JACK VARNEY (banjo); 
LOU SILBEREISEN (bass);

RUSS MURPHY (drums)
Recorded in London
May 1948

 

Bell's success and the constant touring needed to sustain it made it difficult for him to settle down to any kind of normal family life and, with his second marriage to Catherine Watson now showing signs of strain, he decided to base himself at least semi-permanently in Australia, settling in Sydney where he was soon being asked to write arrangements and back singers for various hotel and nightclub engagements.  He also found time to give piano lessons –– he was teaching seventy-five students a week at one point –– start his own record label Swaggie Records and become a concert promoter, booking the renowned North American cornet player Rex Stewart to tour and record with him as he would later do with old English friends like Humphrey Lyttelton.  He was also given the opportunity to interview his hero Louis Armstrong during one of the latter's three visits to Australia.  '…I was invited into the VIP room by Channel Seven,' he recalled in 2006, 'when they were interviewing him, and the interviewer passed the microphone over to me and said, "Here, Graeme, you know more about this than I do."  Next minute I'm sitting down on the couch interviewing Louis Armstrong for the Channel Seven news.  Now, that is one of –– if not the –– biggest moment in my whole career.'    

 

The emergence of a second UK Trad Revival movement in the early 1960s, led by highly successful acts like Acker 'Stranger On The Shore' Bilk and Kenny Ball and His Jazz Men, prompted Bell to re-form the Australian Jazz Band under the new name of The Graeme Bell All Stars.  This threw the pianist into uncharted territory in some respects, making him a true bandleader for the first time instead of playing his usual role as its easygoing if high profile spokesman.  'With the first band,' he explained, 'Roger…and Ade Monsbourgh were really the musical leaders…But I was the nominal leader, and I inherited some of my parents' showbusiness ability to operate from the stage, talk to the audience…conduct the traffic.  But when I formed the All Stars, I was my own man.  And that was the creative period of my life, really.  And I learnt how to try and get the best out of musicians to produce a band and produce a sound.  My own piano playing became quite secondary to the whole thing.'  The All Stars would continue to perform into the 1980s, while Bell himself continued to play as often as he could physically manage to play, still delighting audiences at the age of ninety and beyond while consolidating his reputation as the grand old man of Australian jazz –– something that was formally recognized when the newly-instigated Australian Jazz Awards were officially named 'The Bells' in his honour in 2003.  His autobiography, which it took him five years to research and write, was published in 1988 with a full discography of his more than 1500 recordings compiled by his friend, the musicologist Jack Mitchell.

 

Graeme Bell died of a stroke, at the age of ninety-seven, on 13 June 2012.  While he may not be considered a groundbreaking stylist by some of the snootier members of the jazz press, he was beloved and respected as few musicians, jazz or otherwise, ever are in Australia or anywhere else.  His music may have been 'light,' 'cheerful' and even possessed of a '…happy Aussie outdoor feel' as he himself once described it, but it was never anything less than indicative of his lifelong passion for the sounds which had seduced him as a young man and then become his life's work.  The editors of DownBeat magazine probably provided him with a fitting epitaph when they wrote: 'Bell's is unquestionably the greatest jazz band outside America.'  While this is perhaps no longer the case, as the always modest pianist/composer probably would have been the first to agree, the statement assumes a new significance when you stop to consider that he'd never played a gig in the USA (due to problems with that country's Musician's Union) at the time it was made.  

 

'Many times in my life,' Bell told a journalist in 2004, 'I've thought it was time to withdraw a little and, other times, I've thought I should disappear altogether.'  I, for one, will always be grateful that he didn't surrender to these impulses.  Without his example to follow, it might have taken much longer than it did for Australian jazz to find its own unique voice and develop its distinctive sonic character. 

 

 

 

Biographical Sources:
 
 

'How Jazz Came To Australia', article by JACK MITCHELL published in the Sydney Jazz Club magazine The Quarterly Rag (2004?)

 

'Trailblazer Still Hooked', article by ANDRA JACKSON, The Age (3 September 2004)

 

Graeme Bell (1914-2012), obituary by HARRIET VEITCH, The Sydney Morning Herald (18 June 2012).

 

Graeme Bell (1914-2012), obituary by IAIN SHEDDEN, The Australian (14 June 2012)

 

Roger Bell (1919-2008), obituary by RAY MARGINSON, The Sydney Morning Herald (8 July 2008)

 

Big Walkabout in London, 1948-1951 liner notes by MIKE DURHAM (Lake Records LACD 166, released 2002)

 

The Historical Prague & Paris Recordings, 1947-1948 liner notes by PAUL ADAMS (Lake Records LACD 262, released 2008)

 

Wikipedia entry 'Graeme Bell' (unnamed author)
 
 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read more about the life and work of Australian jazz pianist and composer GRAEME BELL:

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeme_Bell  

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 

 

 
J is for Jazz 010: BERNIE McGANN

 

 

 
J is for Jazz 004: JACK TEAGARDEN

 

 

 
J is for Jazz 002: DJANGO REINHARDT

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last updated 2 October 2021 §