Nearby on stage, illuminated by blue and pink lights, was a Yamaha piano and Nord Wave synthesiser, a set of drums, a double bass on a stand, and an upended tenor saxophone. Leaning against a piano leg was an open backpack full of sheet music. The 616 club has twenty or thirty tables and a standing area, with a jumble of air-conditioning ducts running overhead. Attendance was reasonable, but not crowded. The audience was mostly middle-aged or older.

The day before, Nock had learned by chance of the death of a woman who had captivated him in America forty years ago. It prompted a reflective mood. Chatting between the sets he remarked that someday soon he wanted to begin an account of his career, of his life in music, not to glorify himself but to understand his lifetime playing jazz.

Perhaps he had not been the best jazz pianist of his generation, he said, but he had never wanted to be. All the same he had been pretty good. Listening now to some old tracks he was sometimes surprised to hear how good. The best jazz pianists of his time, perhaps better than him, he thought, included Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea. He pondered a moment. Maybe not Chick.

A few weeks earlier Nock had told me he planned to compose more and perhaps perform less. At eighty-three “my fingers don’t move the way they used to,” he complained. “My memory is not so good. I worry about myself sometimes. There is a time you have to pack it up. I would like to bow out then.”

Nock probably doesn’t expect anyone to take these melancholy thoughts seriously. Once seated at the piano, his baseball cap shading him from the stage lights, he sheds his years. Body inclined to the piano, fingers darting over the keys, head twisted towards the saxophonist, bassist and drummer on his right, eyes half closed, teeth bared, one foot tapping, singing inaudibly to himself, cackling with delight as the music builds, Nock’s lively presence resembles photos of him at the piano in Sydney before he left for America more than sixty years ago. Age amuses him. Introducing his band at a 616 performance a few years ago, he stumbled over the name of his bassist, a late substitute. “A senior moment,” he told the audience, tapping his head in disbelief, “and at my age!”

The 1 September performance marked the tenth anniversary of the opening of 616, which Nock had played with the same band in 2013. Karl Laskowski was on tenor sax, Brett Hirst on bass, and James “Pug” Waples on drums, all of them younger than Nock by many decades. They mostly played Nock’s compositions, including “Vale John,” a piece from his new Hearing album. They also played Ornette Coleman’s 1958 Jayne. It was edgy music that left plenty of room for improvisation and extended solos from Nock and Laskowski, as well as Hirst and Waples. Along with Cecil Taylor, another free jazz exponent, Coleman was one of Nock’s early musical influences.

Nock might disregard age, but even so his latest album is not a young pianist’s music. The thirteen lyrical, spare pieces on Hearing, released on ABC Jazz in July, are mostly his own compositions and all are played solo on piano. Their mood is often elegiac. They are the creation of a mature artist unconcerned by flourish and display.

Playing one of the tracks from Hearing on his Sydney 2MBS program, jazz writer and presenter Frank Presley described Nock as a piano “genius.” Even allowing for the customary overstatement of the jazz world, it is high praise. It is wonderful music, each note distinct and thoughtfully played, with Nock’s characteristic depth beneath its surface.

The album brings reminders not only of his long career, of the development of a style drawing on free jazz, bebop, hard bop and fusion, of nearly thirty years of playing in the United States when jazz was in one of its most creative phases, but also of his love of Bach. At home “I play a lot of Bach these days, the inventions, partitas, fugues — I play a lot, badly,” he says. Bach is a “compendium of stuff. As a reference tool it is the best, a great springboard.” “You might hear a bit of Bach” in his recent album, he tells me “because it is there.”

Nock was unavoidably absent from 616 for a while after being knocked over at a pedestrian crossing, his shin pinned underneath a heavy SUV. (“It was, like, a truck!” Nock says indignantly.) Otherwise he played there from time to time even during the pandemic. If you stopped by on one of those nights and hadn’t heard Nock before, you could find yourself listening with astonishment to the piano player on the raised platform, in the obscuring pool of blue and pink lights, shoulders hunched over the keyboard.

The quality of his playing, his musical inventiveness, his fluency and command are all out of the box, of a quality you had no reason to expect to find under the air-conditioning ducts of an office building in Ultimo.

You could ponder this and also realise with bewilderment that the pandemic meant there were just twenty or thirty people in the room, sometimes fewer. It was like being in front of a Cézanne with only one or two other people in the gallery. Nock was untroubled. Between sets he chatted to friends at the tables, beer in hand, chuckling. He is remarkably modest, though there has always been tension between his boundless musical ambition and the injunction in his New Zealand childhood that he should never skite.

It is nearly forty years since he returned from the United States. What he brought back with him, what he gave so much to acquire, what distinguishes him as a musician, was a quarter century of music-making with the best jazz musicians of his generation, with skills impossible to acquire in any other way embedded in his mind and fingers. He brought back the experience not only of listening to the best players of American jazz in the sixties, seventies and eighties, and of knowing them, but also of creating his own part in the greatest years of bebop, hard bop and fusion jazz, a time now past yet still as much a part of our contemporary culture as Impressionism.

He returned in 1985 with those skills, that knowledge, together with a long catalogue of his recorded music and plenty of his own compositions on dog-eared bundles of paper, and otherwise with a few keyboards, a Hanon piano exercise book he had been using since he was seventeen, and not much else by way of physical possessions or financial substance.

Nock’s American career followed the curve of a great phase in jazz. He landed in Boston in 1961, the year after Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue, around the time of Hank Mobley’s Soul Station and John Coltrane’s Giant Steps. It all seemed to happen at once. Nock was playing when Mingus was still in his forties and Bill Evans and Ornette Coleman barely in their thirties. Louis Armstrong was still playing. Sidney Bechet had died in France only a few years earlier.

By the time Nock left in 1985 it was all fading away. It was the year before Miles Davis made the electronic-funk album Tutu, book-ending a jazz era that had begun not long before Nock arrived and ended not long after he left. Many love the music that came before and came after, but that wasn’t what came in between. With thirty more years of playing and teaching since, Nock has continued to explore, to move on, yet his style, his values, arise from an experience in jazz now impossible to replicate.

Born in New Zealand in 1940 and raised in the small North Island town of Ngaruawahia, Nock was introduced to the piano by his father, an amateur player. As the pianist tells it, he was soon enthralled by jazz, listening with wonder to the broadcast of the 1953 Toronto concert of Charlie Parker and Bud Powell on piano, Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, Charles Mingus on bass and Max Roach on drums. “Here is some truth,” he thought. “Here is something that is definitely happening.” When Nat King Cole visited New Zealand two years later, the fifteen-year-old took himself to Auckland to hear him.

Shocked by the sudden death of his father in 1952, he had experienced a spiritual crisis, abandoning the Catholicism of his boyhood. Music “became my religion.” Yet formal musical training was out of reach. Unlike many of his contemporaries, including Jarrett, Hancock and Corea, Nock was entirely self-taught. “I had been playing for ten years,” he recalls “before I knew what a scale was.”

He blew out of New Zealand at eighteen, terrified by the risk that his life might be insignificant. He was, he told his biographer Norman Meehan, “afraid of being a nonentity,” a particular problem for a New Zealander enthralled by the most American of musical forms, jazz.

Talented, energetic, always learning, Nock was successfully performing in Sydney and Melbourne before he was twenty, playing piano in bands backing visitors Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan, forming the then well-known 3-Out Trio and recording the album Move in 1960. “It was a huge hit,” recalled Nock, adding characteristically, “in many respects it’s been downhill ever since.” Nock’s ambition was to move to the United States, the home of jazz. “I do have a big ego,” he reflects. “I was pretty arrogant. I was single-minded to the exclusion of everything else. I think that explains my success. I was headstrong.”

At twenty-one he was on his way to Boston’s Berklee School of Music on a scholarship from Downbeat magazine. He soon dropped out of Berklee but remained in Boston four years, playing in local clubs and in backing bands for visitors including saxophonists Yusef Lateef, Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Stitt and Zoot Sims, and clarinetist Pee Wee Russell.

By 1964, he was the pianist in Lateef’s band, touring the United States and playing on Lateef’s remarkable Live at Pep’s albums. Settling in New York he played local clubs, toured with singer Dionne Warwick, and was delighted when Art Blakey engaged him for Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, replacing the departing Keith Jarrett. It still rankles with Nock that he was hospitalised with hepatitis after one performance with Blakey. “I was in great health — up to that moment!” he laments. The job passed to Chick Corea.

With a group led by West Coast saxophonist John Handy, Nock again toured, before settling in San Francisco in 1967. Handy’s admired album Projections, released in 1968, featured Nock on keyboard. In San Francisco, Nock formed what was widely regarded as one of the first jazz-rock fusion groups, Fourth Way. The band made several admired albums and played a celebrated appearance at the 1970 Montreux Jazz Festival, before dissolving in 1971.

Four years later Nock was back in New York, this time often playing solo. In the late seventies he reached a new peak with the Mike Nock Quartet, a band that included saxophonist Michael Brecker. The quartet’s 1978 album In, Out and Around recorded Nock at his magical best in those New York years, notably on “Hadrian’s Wall” and “Shadows of Forgotten Love.”

While there are excellent piano solos from Nock, some of the most pleasing tracks are those in which the interplay between sax and piano is most inventive. Nock also played the saxophone as a teenager, so he knows what the saxophonist wants and plays to it. That is most evident on the title track but true of all the tracks on the album. “In, Out and Around,” Nock thinks, has “stood the test of time.” He credits Becker but adds, “I was playing pretty good in those times.”

With a US bassist and drummer Nock recorded Ondas in Oslo a few years later. The album was released by ECM Germany. He wrote all six compositions on the album, so they represent both his compositional accomplishment and his style after twenty years of playing at the top level. The album includes a longer version of “Forgotten Love,” and “Land of the Long White Cloud” — both played with wistful restraint.

At a time when there were white bands and black bands, Nock was an unconcerned outsider. Yusef Lateef and John Handy are both Black. Nock mostly played with Black musicians. Even now, long after he left the United States, his language trails the culture in which he was immersed. He speaks of his “stoodents,” of having “atta-tood.” His colleagues are cats (or black cats). Good music is cool.

Nock’s engagement with music was so complete that great events of America passed him by. He arrived in the United States a few years before John Kennedy was killed, and was there for Los Angeles riots, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the freedom march from Selma to Montgomery, the Vietnam war and Robert Kennedy’s assassination. He was all but oblivious. “It is amazing,” he says, “particularly since I was working with Black musicians. I have learnt more about those events watching ABC documentaries since I’ve been back than I ever did living through it in the States.”

By 1981, still only forty-one, Nock could claim a hard-won place in the world of American jazz. He had worked with many of the greats and learned from them, including Sonny Rollins, Roy Eldridge, Lionel Hampton and Benny Goodman among many others. He had formed and led two widely admired bands in quite different jazz genres, and been part of many celebrated recordings. He had become an accomplished soloist and composer, as well as a band pianist. He had been panned sometimes but far more often praised by reviewers, including favourable mentions in Downbeat.

All the while he had been growing, refusing to stay still, refusing to be part of commercial music, developing a style that was recognisably his own. While his music is usually melodic, he doesn’t often play jazz standards. “I play them sometimes,” he says, “but not too often because, hey — why?” Even Rollins recorded “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top”; it is hard to imagine Nock doing so, although he says he has “huge respect” for standards and the American songbook. His own compositions are tuneful but not memorably so, and usually built from simple, repeated chord forms. They are the building blocks of a mostly improvised musical structure. With an average length of around thirty-two bars, a Nock composition might take less than a minute played straight through. A seven- or eight-minute track based on his melody is mostly improvisation around it.

Nock has always had an ambivalent relationship to solo performing. He seems to prefer the music made when he plays with others, even when (or especially when) they are playing his own compositions. “I was not burning to make a solo record, or to be a soloist,” he says of Hearing. He also thinks of music-making as a cooperative activity.

Refusing classification, Nock seeks “freedom of expression” using “all the elements” of modern jazz. Though an accomplished technician, Nock more commonly refers to feeling than technique when talking about jazz. “Jazz is an attitude,” he says, “it transcends style. You play who you are. The best jazz musicians are also inspiring people.” Technically skilled music “doesn’t interest me.” He wants to “communicate feeling.” He quotes the advice often attributed to Armstrong: it ain’t whatcha say, it’s howcha say it.

By the early 1980s, when Nock had been playing in the United States for twenty years, jazz had long given way to pop and rock among young audiences. Jazz record sales were on their way down to a level just above classical and just below children’s music. The internet was only a few years away, and with it would come file sharing and the long, slow and irreversible decline in physical album sales.

Always uncertain, Nock’s career became perilous. As a studio musician in New York he found work, but not always the kind of work he wanted. In Manhattan he lived in tough and scary neighbourhoods. From time to time he was mugged. Thieves broke into his apartments. Relationships crashed. Married twice and divorced twice, he wanted more stability in his personal life. He did not own a home or significant financial assets, his income was meagre. If he thought about getting by in America as he grew older, he would have been troubled.

At the end of the eighties he moved out to New Jersey to join his then partner and her children. An hour’s drive west of New York City, Basking Ridge is an affluent white community in which Nock felt alien. His income at the time was never more than $30,000 a year in today’s US dollars, not enough to contribute much to household expenses. “I was living outside the gig zone for New York,” he recalled, and work dried up.

With few bookings or prospects of them, Nock’s life hit rock bottom. He had performed at the top level in the United States but, as Meehan records, financial success, strong sales, popularity, “passed Nock by.” He had depression, panic attacks and no money. His partner left for the west coast. Across America countless jazz musicians put away their instruments and turned to other trades. Unattached, unfunded, Nock tried Europe for a while, and then left for New Zealand.

His decades in America had given Nock what he sought — the opportunities to play the piano, to be in bands with other accomplished musicians, to be of good standing in a society of other players of stature, to practise his craft, to develop his art. Money didn’t mean much to him, which was good because there was never much. “Sure it was a hard life,” he reflects, “but what’s wrong with a hard life?”

In New Zealand he played gigs and took part in TV documentaries. Then came a call from an old friend, inviting him to take a teaching residency at the Queensland Conservatorium. He found he quite liked the chance to encourage eager young players like he’d been thirty years earlier. Not long after, eminent reed player, band leader and teacher Don Burrows called to offer a job at the Sydney Conservatorium. “Are you kidding?!” Nock responded when Burrows asked if he was interested in the job. Of course he was interested! Nock would teach generations of students there for nearly thirty years, retiring at seventy-eight. It was the first time he’d had a steady income in his entire life.

The early years back in Australia were difficult. “It took me a while to think about being back here. You don’t have the stimulus here in jazz, especially compared to New York. I’ve withdrawn a lot. I was always thinking about going back.” Looking back now, though, he thinks “the most fruitful period of my life has actually been back in Australia.”

He has been in Sydney for thirty-seven years, a lot longer than he was in the United States or New Zealand. He may have missed New York, but Nock has been able to compose as well as teach, perform, and record well-received solo albums and ensemble music. For a while he also worked selecting music for the jazz division of Naxos records. Over time he became more comfortable playing and teaching jazz in Australia. It was an opportunity to “share what I learnt. Later it was a dream, with lots of opportunities to play. I got together a band, all sixty years younger than me. An unexpected blessing at my age.”

His personal life bloomed. Twenty-five years ago, a decade or so after he came back to Sydney, Nock married Yuri Takahashi, a former cultural diplomat for Japan, and a specialist in Burmese language and cultural studies. She took her PhD in Burmese Studies at Sydney University and now teaches at the ANU. A fan, they met at one of Nock’s performances.

Their home is a semi-detached brick cottage on a quiet street in the inner-western Sydney suburb of Ashfield, an area of Federation cottages and low-rise flats. It is the first property Nock has owned, ever. They have kept many original elements — kitchen food lockers, decorative plaster cornices. Nock is also a painter and his colourful abstractions decorate the walls. The rooms are heaped with musical instruments and equipment, records and CDs, sheet music, books.

A sunny Saturday morning in August this year finds the couple at home in Ashfield, Nock sitting at his Kawai piano in a living room crowded with instruments. Around him are three young players — Ben Lerner on saxophone, Nick Jansen on bass and George Greenhill on drums. The group meets more or less weekly. Today they are practising a melody Nock wrote sixty years ago.

“I wrote the song when I lived in Boston,” Nock remarks. “It’s difficult. Even I have trouble with it these days. Difficult, but a simple melody.”

“Deceptively simple,” says Greenhill.

Nock plays the tune on the piano, then the group joins in.

Nock stops. “We weren’t getting that right.”

“You don’t mind if I am a bit late for those quarter notes?” asks Lerner.

“You asked me to be very big at the start. Maybe less full on?” queries Greenhill.

“Definitely, yes,” says Nock.

Lerner suggests playing a tune for an hour “until the drumming is completely right.”

“Yeah, put it on a loop until it is fucking perfect,” Greenhill agrees.

“What is perfect in jazz — there is no perfect,” Lerner responds.

“The better people know a line, the more you can stretch the melody,” Nock observes, changing the subject and playing the melody of another composition.

Nock isn’t pleased with his own playing. “It’s a bitch, that song. I don’t know what happens. This doesn’t sound right. I have to change my technique to play that little bit. I have to keep my fingers flat.” He critically examines his fingers.

“Don’t question yourself, Mike,” urges Greenhill.

“We are in the refinement stage of this,” says Nock. “A big learning curve for us. Let’s get the melody right.”

“That’s it!” says Nock, after another try. “It’s kinda crazy.”

“Not crazy!” insists Jansen.

“It’s feeling better,” Nock agrees. “Let’s lay out the song more clearly.”

“Mike, we are here to learn from you,” Greenhill says encouragingly.

“Yes — Mike Nock and his Three Problems,” adds Lerner.

Nock has been playing the piano now for over seventy years. At eighty-three he says he is at a “funny stage of my life — a golden era” with “lots of things changing.” He finds himself “thinking about things more.” Since he is “running out of time” he is “more interested in what I am doing now” rather than planning for the future. He may play less, compose more. “I want to write more music,” he says, though his days are still “pretty full.” He practises often to keep his fingers flexible, and swims as often as he can. The road accident reminded him of “how quickly things can change.”

Sound of mind, in reasonable health, still playing, still composing, still mentoring, Nock is tranquil. “It is easier to ride the horse in the direction it is going,” he has decided. As for the ups and downs of his career, Nock judges that “it worked for me. I’ve had a blessed life.” •

The post Blessed life appeared first on Inside Story.

Before he began making records under his own name, Stevens was part of Browne–Haywood–Stevens, a trio with the late, great and hugely influential drummer Allan Browne (nearly three decades Stevens’s senior) and bassist Nick Haywood, and they played standards among the original music.

“I was staunchly anti-standards since Browne–Haywood–Stevens wound up,” Stevens tells me, “mostly because of the precedents set by Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett. Because I’m a white guy who loves a trio, everyone compares me with those two; I have a classical background also, which is something else I share with them. It really used to irk me.”

But it wasn’t an antipathy to standards that drove Stevens so much as a desire to contribute new material.

“As a student I’d go and hear Al Browne’s band Onaje, and it played an entirely original repertoire. Richard Miller wrote most of the music that band played and I loved hearing those tunes. A gig at Mietta’s in 1990 with Al, Gary Costello and Paul Grabowsky featured original compositions that totally blew me away. They had titles like ‘Happy Go Lucky Country’ and ‘Colonial Sketch No. 1’ and their obvious relationship to this place was stunning and hugely influential.

“So I wanted to be the guy who wrote the book, and in my trio with Ben Robertson and Dave Beck that’s pretty much what I’ve done, unless we’ve been improvising freely. The notes to the new album state that I can’t recall playing a single standard with them. Because I can’t.”

On three recent solo albums, however, Stevens has worked with a different kind of standard: hymn tunes. He began with a sort of musical memoir, based on a range of hymns and other music he had known since childhood, then followed up with albums of Christmas and Easter hymns.

“The whole church thing began,” he explains, “because the Melbourne Recital Centre offered me a solo gig and when I suggested things I could do, for some reason I said ‘standards’ even though I wasn’t all that keen. That was the one they went for, so I thought about it a bit and got back to them saying, what if I took the standards from the English Hymnal? Would that do? And they said, yes.”

Stevens’s approach to the hymns, as often as not, was to provide long preambles that explored the mood of the hymn, ruminating on certain melodic phrases or harmonic progressions before revealing the tune itself at the end, and that’s also how he tackles some of the “real” standards on this new album.

A couple of the tunes are given sprightly salsa/rumba treatments. One is Vernon Duke’s “Taking a Chance on Love” (the song that provides the album with its title), the other — somewhat less likely — is Jerome Kern’s “All the Things You Are,” which launches into an increasingly manic stream of syncopation from which the melody occasionally pokes its head. But it is the subtle harmonic twists that Stevens introduces that offer the main surprises.

“Instead of doing it as it was written,” Stevens says, “where the bridge finishes on E and then you get a C7 chord to go back to F minor, I play instead a C#7 and play the last eight bars commencing in F-sharp minor. So the chorus finishes in A. The next chorus begins with F-sharp minor, and its bridge finishes on F. So it’s easy there to go straight back to F minor and finish the chorus as written. I don’t know anyone else who’s done this, and I showed it to Ben Robertson who was shocked and delighted. That has maintained my interest in a tune that is played far too much and is one of the first ones I ever had to learn as a student.”

I mentioned Duke and Kern above, but Stevens would be the first to point out that “Taking a Chance on Love” was also written by lyricists John La Touche and Ted Fetter, while “All the Things You Are” has words by Oscar Hammerstein II. Actually, Stevens wouldn’t be the first to point this out. There’s a story of a Manhattan showbiz party where someone referred to “Jerome Kern’s ‘Ol’ Man River’” only to receive a tug on his sleeve. “Excuse me, young man,” said Oscar Hammerstein’s widow, “but I thought I heard you mention Jerome Kern’s ‘Ol’ Man River.’ Mr Kern did not write ‘Ol’ Man River.’ Mr Kern wrote ‘Dum dum dum dum.’ My husband wrote ‘Ol’ Man River.’”

While we might not hear the words to the tunes on Stevens’s album, they are anything but “Dum dum dum dum.” All the lyricists are credited, the lyrics are available to read on the album’s Bandcamp page, and you frequently sense them in Stevens’s playing. Indeed, he tells me that “I’m Gonna Laugh You Right Out of My Life” was included because of the lyrics. It’s an early Cy Coleman tune (well before “Witchcraft” and “Big Spender”) with words by one Joseph Allen McCarthy (you see why he insisted on the “Allen”). The tune is lovely, too, and Stevens brings out its pathos, doubtless while singing to himself lines such as “If I find you and I really meant that last goodbye / Then I’m gonna laugh so hard, I’ll cry.”

Like many an artistic project in 2022, The Ace of Hearts Is High had its immediate origins in the Covid pandemic. Right at the start of the first lockdown, on St Patrick’s Day 2020, Stevens posted a video of himself playing “Danny Boy” on his Facebook page and was surprised by the positive response. So he kept going, until eventually he had more than 200 “quarantunes.” Because it quickly became a daily routine, he found himself falling back on tunes he already knew, many of which were standards, including quite a few by George and Ira Gershwin and a handful of Irving Berlin tunes from the 1936 Hollywood musical Top Hat, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

The first nine tracks on the new album were among those quarantunes (including the Gershwins’ “Lady Be Good” and two from Top Hat), but the album’s final track was not. Indeed it was an afterthought, added in the studio when, as Stevens explains, it struck him the album “didn’t have a waltz.”

The joke here is that the track in question, “When You Wish Upon a Star,” isn’t a triple-metre song. At least it wasn’t before this album. But under Stevens’s fingers, it becomes the lightest of waltzes, concluding with a magical coda, a sort of rapt chiming that reminds us these songs from the Great American Songbook are played by the same man who previously found his standards in the English Hymnal. •

The Ace of Hearts Is High is available digitally, and will be out on CD soon.

The post Meeting standards appeared first on Inside Story.

Corea became famous by having a finger in so many musical pies. And he did it all at the highest level. He could play straight-ahead bop like his great idol, Bud Powell, and Latin rhythms with the naturalness of his Cuban contemporary, Chucho Valdés. His electronic keyboard work for Miles Davis in the late 1960s was pioneering and morphed into his own band, Return to Forever, first as a purveyor of Latin jazz-pop, now sultry, now madly dancing; later as something rockier and more driven. Corea’s classical forays, although occasionally unnecessary (like his Mozart concertos with Bobby McFerrin), included the vital and inventive collection of Children’s Songs inspired by Béla Bartók’s books of Mikrokosmos. It was through these that he found his widest audience, many of whom quickly became his interpreters.

Corea liked to speak of “experiments.” He had an insatiable musical curiosity and an often playful spirit of enquiry. But he was always serious about the work. Even in the Mozart concertos, the improvised doodles before each movement and the spontaneous embellishments of the melodic lines were based on eighteenth-century practices of preluding and ornamentation.

Corea’s first album as leader, Tones for Joan’s Bones, was released in 1968 (two years after its completion) and featured a quintet line-up, à la Miles Davis, with a rhythm section complemented by trumpet and sax. But that same year he recorded a second album that properly revealed his credentials. Now He Sings, Now He Sobs was, on the face of it, a classic jazz trio recording with Miroslav Vitouš on bass and Roy Haynes on drums, but the playing was fresh and bold — melodically, harmonically and rhythmically — and age has not wearied it. The sheer confidence with which Corea launches into the mercurial preamble to the first track — a minute of melodic fragments, dense chords and changing metres that seems to involve echoes of jazz gone by — is still breathtaking.

A great deal of Corea’s later career can be traced back to that album, which produces remarkably unified trio playing from three musicians who hadn’t previously worked together, amid a welter of apparent musical contradictions: the sings/sobs dichotomy of the I Ching–derived title is a pointer to Corea’s variety of approach. This is a creative musician laying out his wares.

Between the recording and release of the album, Corea joined Miles Davis’s group where, in short order, he would become a necessary part of the trumpeter’s exploration of jazz–rock fusion. On Filles de Kilimanjaro, he played an RMI electra-piano on “Mademoiselle Mabry,” and in early 1969 he was one of three electric keyboard players (with Herbie Hancock and Joe Zawinul) on Davis’s groundbreaking, proto-ambient In a Silent Way. Later that same year he was back in the studio with Davis and Zawinul for the Bitches Brew sessions.

Although it’s often paired with In a Silent Way — the albums, made just months apart, have many of the same personnel — Bitches Brew is a very different affair. Corea’s contribution to the former had largely been as a sprinkler of fairy dust, but on Bitches Brew he was, in effect, an extra drummer. The rhythmic precision of his playing is sometimes overlooked by those who think of him primarily as a tunesmith, but it is what unifies his progress through a lifetime of different jazz encounters.

While still in Davis’s band, Corea and bassist Dave Holland were already forming Circle with drummer Barry Altschul and reed player Anthony Braxton, their free-jazz experiments making further use of Corea’s percussive playing. Yet no sooner was Circle up and running than Corea formed Return to Forever, the band that in its first manifestation — and particularly with its second album, Light as a Feather — would bring him his greatest mainstream success. Corea played a Fender Rhodes electric piano with Joe Farrell’s flute and soprano sax, Stanley Clarke’s astonishingly agile double bass (on the first album Clarke had played electric bass), Airto Moreira’s ever-inventive percussion and Flora Purim’s heart-stoppingly simple vocals.

What to call it? Brazilian lounge jazz? Some of it was, but most of it wasn’t. Some of it was like a wild cosmic dance. For Corea himself, it was an experiment — everything was an experiment. He couldn’t have cared less about style.

“The whole idea of style is a red herring,” Corea told me on The Music Show in 2006. “Style is always a result of the idea, and of the experiment itself. So what results in a band like the first Return to Forever was not a style that was thought about at all, it was a feeling of music and a certain expression in communication and atmosphere… among the musicians themselves.

“This resulted in choices like: ‘Well, I think I’m going to use the Fender Rhodes for this, and gee Joe, why don’t you play the flute in this part? The flute sounds really nice with the Fender Rhodes: let’s do that. And, Stanley, instead of playing electric bass, why don’t you play acoustic bass on that piece? That’ll give it a different sound. And Airto, would you please play that samba beat that I like so much?’ Things like that finally ended up in the sounds that you hear. You listen to it when it’s all done — specially thirty-five years later — and you want to give it names, like ‘What style is that?’”

Light as a Feather contains tracks that look back and forward. Most obviously, there’s “Spain,” based, like Miles Davis and Gil Evans’s “Sketches of Spain” on Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, and really a homage to Miles. But there’s also “Children’s Song,” with its Orff-like ostinato pattern pointing to those piano pieces that were still more than a decade away.

For Chick Corea, jazz — music — and his career were always in the present tense. All those experiments had continued potential; nothing was ever let go. Musical friendships were nurtured and rekindled. Just as the world had him pegged as an electric keyboard player, he formed a piano duo with his old friend, Herbie Hancock. A still older friend, the vibraphonist Gary Burton, with whom Corea had once worked in Stan Getz’s band, formed another duo with him. In the 1980s, the trio with Vitouš and Haynes was reformed. Return to Forever indeed.

Throughout it all, through all the experiments, Corea’s piano playing remained central, and it was grounded in an unwavering technical ability; even in his eightieth year, there was no evidence of decline. And at the heart of his technique was rhythm. •

A transcript of Chick Corea’s interview with Andrew Ford on The Music Show is available here.

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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When Andrea Keller, herself now a composer, pianist and band leader, heard Bailey play with her pianist colleague Roger Frampton in the 1980s, it was Keller’s first live jazz gig. “The music resonated so deeply with me,” she explains, “that it became the beginning of a new passion and intrigue that continues to this day. Also, at a vitally impressionable age I was seeing Judy — one of the most accomplished jazz pianists in the country, a rare female working in a sea of men, a mum — she showed me that all is possible.”

So we must add to Bailey’s other accomplishments her significance as a role model, not only for young women but also these days for senior artists who see no reason to retire — who might, in any case, be in the prime of their creative lives.

“I really believe that Judy is an unstoppable force,” Tim Firth, the drummer of Bailey’s trio, once said. “If a nuclear bomb was dropped on the earth, there wouldn’t be anyone left except Keith Richards, Judy Bailey and maybe a few cockroaches.”

That was in 2015, when saxophonist and composer Jeremy Rose put together a tribute to his former teacher on her eightieth birthday and asked friends and colleagues to share their thoughts. A few weeks ago, when I recorded a conversation with Bailey for The Music Show on Radio National, nothing seemed to have changed. Uppermost in her mind was the following week’s recording sessions of her new scores for Jazz Connection, the student big band of which she is musical director, and with whom she performs at Sydney’s Lazy Bones Lounge on the fourth Sunday of each month.

“We must mention the recording sessions,” she said with the air of a much younger composer given her first break in the studio. Her enthusiasm is boundless and infectious. She is also a detail person. My producer had asked Bailey for some suggestions of music to play during our interview. By way of reply, an email arrived with a list of excerpts from nearly twenty tracks, each with careful timings for start and/or fade points in the music.

Judy Bailey’s development as a jazz musician began with something of an epiphany. It was 1949, and she was a thirteen-year-old growing up in Whangarei, the most northerly city in New Zealand, and taking classical piano lessons. The National Broadcasting Service (now Radio New Zealand) was making test broadcasts ahead of the opening of its Whangarei studios.

Bailey remembers the moment vividly. “I heard — on the Bakelite radio that lived on the Formica bench in the kitchen — the George Shearing Quintet,” she told me. They were playing “East of the Sun (and West of the Moon),” a song she knew and a favourite of her father’s. But after the first chorus came “all this other stuff.” It was improvisation, of course, and Bailey had heard nothing like it before. Knowing the song’s structure, she found she was able to follow what Shearing was doing at the keyboard, and she was instantly beguiled.

The following week, her jazz education was ramped up a notch when the Stan Kenton Orchestra came on the radio. “I thought I was going to faint,” she said. “I still get goose bumps remembering it.”

When 1XN (later Radio Northland) announced open auditions for local talent, Bailey’s father drove his daughter to the studio one afternoon after school. She had no idea where she was going, but when she arrived she was ushered into a room with a grand piano. She’d never played such a fine instrument in her life, but she clearly impressed the producers. They booked her for an appearance on the station’s opening night. She duly performed “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” a song turned into a big hit by another Judy.

Perhaps more significantly, the producers gave her access to the record library, and her education began in earnest. In short order, she also landed her own show with a singer. “A Date with Judy and Wendy,” a half-hour program, was broadcast live each week.

By 1960, it was time for Bailey to spread her wings. She set off for London, but never arrived. Stopping in Sydney, she discovered a thriving jazz scene. Outside El Rocco in King’s Cross, the queues would stretch round the corner into William Street; inside they served what Bailey remembers as “the worst coffee” while bands played the best jazz.

“Don Burrows, Errol Buddle, George Golla, John Sangster…” Bailey began to reel off the names of the legendary figures of 1960s Australian jazz who appeared at the club. In no time she had joined their ranks. She also found herself in high demand on radio and television.

More than half a century later, this era of “light entertainment” is hard to recall, but in music the term generally implied some form of jazz, with swing still predominant but new forms of jazz by no means excluded. TV networks had their own bands and orchestras. The ABC, for instance, ran big bands in both Melbourne and Sydney in addition to its six state symphony orchestras. At Channel 7, Tommy Tycho had a band and a string orchestra. There was John Bamford’s orchestra at Channel 9 and Jack Grimsley’s at 10.

Bailey, who was quick, bright and efficient, and had a fantastic — and now legendary — ear, worked for one after the other, as pianist, arranger and composer. At the ABC she had a stint with the Don Burrows Septet.

But fashions change. Swing bands were already on the way out, even before the arrival of rock and roll. Gradually, live music disappeared from the TV schedules, and with it went the bands. Jazz clubs closed (and opened and closed again). A jazz paradox emerged.

In 1973, the jazz course began at Sydney Conservatorium with Judy Bailey a founding member of its teaching staff. Today, she is still showing up for work, and over the past forty-six years she has trained many hundreds of musicians. The talent pool in Australian jazz has turned into a lake — more, a lake district. But the work is no longer there. The jazz musician’s phone doesn’t ring as it once did. Without the bands and the TV and radio work, and with the existence of jazz clubs always in peril (they still open and close), musicians must be entrepreneurial. In order to work, they must first make the opportunities.

Bailey is well aware of the paradox of so much talent and so few venues, but she continues to believe strongly in what she’s doing, and argues passionately for music as part of the school curriculum.

“Sport fuels the body and school feeds the intellect,” she said, “but it’s music that nurtures the soul.” Moreover, improvised music, she believes, nurtures it in a special way. It’s to do with trust. Trusting others and trusting your instincts. But in order for one’s instincts to be free, not only must musicians absorb the technique, they must also learn to forget it.

“We are creatures of habit,” Bailey told Jeremy Rose in 2015, explaining that if a performer has practised hard, and learned to play certain melodic ideas in every key, then these will tend to go into his or her memory bank and surface in improvisation. When that happens, it isn’t really improvisation.

“I know a lot of players work this way, and good luck to them, but what I’ve noticed is that as a musician accumulates a whole series of practised patterns and ideas… they start to sound like, well, ‘licks,’ and no matter how skilfully or how fast those licks are delivered, they are still just licks, and they become very boring. And, unfortunately, those licks tend to make their appearance at moments that are not necessarily part of the actual flow that the player ideally should be trying to create. The licks appear at, if I can put it this way, disjointed moments, so that… the improvisation starts to take on a fragmentation.

“Now, there again, fragmentation in itself is not a crime, and in fact, if a player feels, say, in a quirky mood, then they can create a solo that is fully fragmented, full of little quirky ideas, jumping one on top of another, scattered here and there. But it is still possible to maintain an actual flow through that succession of quirky ideas.”

Bailey’s need for flow — for a through line, a sort of musical logic — has found her composing more and more, though she insists that improvisation and composition are “pretty much the same” for her. It’s all about “making stuff” and still comes down to instinct.

“I’m trying to allow the music to have its way,” she told me, “to have its head, to say what it wants to say without me getting in the way.”

I asked her about the compositional spark, the moment the light goes on, a piece of music comes sharply into focus, and a new piece suddenly begins to exist.

“Yes, I know that spark,” she replied. “That can happen when you feel you’re on a roll and it just happens. You make no attempt to stop it because it just feels right. It’s trusting in instinct. But then again there can be times when the intellect is saying, ‘I want the piece go this way’; and the music is saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no, forget that. It’s got to go this way!’ And the intellect says, ‘Yes but I didn’t have any plans for it to go that way.’ And the instinct is saying, ‘Tough! Just be quiet and go with it.’

“I’m more and more inclined to do that. When I’m aware that there’s a fight going on upstairs, I’m learning to trust that gut feeling. Going with the instinct rather than giving in to the intellect.”

“Giving in?” There was a pause as Bailey pondered my challenge.

“Succumbing,” she decided.

Trusting your instinct and trusting your ears, Bailey says, are the same thing. It comes down to trusting the music itself. But how do you teach such things? Perhaps the answer is to trust your students. One of them was bassist Ben Waples.

“Playing with Judy helped me to realise the absolute importance of using your ears,” Waples told Rose. “I don’t think we ever spoke about what notes/scales to play over what chord.”

Judy Bailey is very much a melodist. On The Spritely Ones, a solo album of original material recorded for the Tall Poppies label in 1998, her playing of the title track is unfussy and unselfconscious, but above all it is continuously melodic. The melody leads her — she allows it to provide that through line; the music is her guide, not the other way round. And note the spelling: “spritely,” not “sprightly.” They are variants, of course, the two words meaning much the same thing, but they are weighted differently — there’s a difference of emphasis.

“Sprightly” suggests what this eighty-three-year-old woman is, physically and mentally: down to earth and businesslike; getting on with things; heading off, a spring in her step, to the next lesson or rehearsal or recording session.

“Spritely” implies something otherworldly. Perhaps this is where the music comes from. Perhaps this is the instinct she trusts to override her will, rather than “succumbing” to her intellect. •

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It started with Duke Ellington’s 1957 album, Such Sweet Thunder — a twelve-part Shakespearean suite — and continued in 1964 with Cleo Laine and John Dankworth’s Shakespeare and All that Jazz. Among numerous originals, Laine and Dankworth included two of Ellington’s instrumentals from Such Sweet Thunder, the solos of which had been composed so strictly in sonnet metre that Laine was able to sing the words of actual Shakespeare sonnets to them (compare Ellington’s “Sonnet to Hank Cinq” with Laine’s “Take All My Loves”).

The Melbourne-based composer and pianist Andrea Keller has drawn on classic poetry for her song cycle Still Night, an hour-long meditation on death and grief. There’s no Shakespeare, but Keats is here with one of his Elizabethan-style sonnets. There’s also Yeats, Proust and Dylan Thomas; Walt Whitman, Sara Teasdale and E.E. Cummings (twice, his poetry framing Keller’s work); the eleventh-century Japanese poet Izumi Shikibu and the contemporary Australian Richard James Allen. Some of the words are familiar — Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” is the best known — some of it not. I confess I hadn’t even known Proust wrote poetry.

Keller’s approach to the words is essentially lyrical, and while their mood might best be described as elegiac, there is something uplifting, even ecstatic about the music. It is partly a matter of the voices she employs. Vince Jones and Gian Slater have different vocal timbres, yet both are rather breathy, so their voices blend beautifully, Slater’s ethereal brightness gilding Jones’s grainier tone. A third voice, belonging to Julien Wilson’s tenor saxophone and bass clarinet, is in some ways the most expressive of all, because Wilson has more room to improvise, offering wordless commentaries on the poems.

Keller’s word setting is quite classical. Her approach to Keats’s faux-Shakespearean sonnet “When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be” is to stress the stresses, so, as with “Hank Cinq,” you could substitute the words of a different sonnet and they would fit the notes. “Do Not Go Gentle” is a villanelle (the first and third lines of the opening tercet alternating as the final lines of the subsequent tercets), and Keller plays with this by retaining the same melodic contours for each appearance of those lines, much as Stravinsky did in his more lapidary setting of the same poem. In fact, she goes further, making a conventional refrain of “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” always having the line sung twice. It’s an example of that understated ecstasy.

In addition to those mentioned and Keller herself on piano, the fifth member of the ensemble is that inventive guitarist Stephen Magnusson. Sometimes with Keller’s piano, sometimes apart, Magnusson provides an underlay of shifting colour, but he also has solos, and his work on “If Death Is Kind” (to words by the American poet Teasdale) is especially luminous. In this song, Keller also lets her singers off the leash, death’s kindness inspiring them to playful arabesques against Magnusson’s guitar.

The question is as tired, and probably pointless, as it is old, but in the case of Still Night it’s more interesting than usual to ask whether any or all of this is jazz. As an improvising pianist Keller appears, very largely, at jazz venues, and so do the musicians she’s teamed up with here. These songs are substantially notated, especially the vocal parts, but all require improvisation, and even the notated vocal lines are sometimes treated quite freely. (Of course, no two singers would sing Schubert the same way, either.) It is worth noting that the combo lacks both bass and drums, so the music sounds as though it belongs more in the Melbourne Recital Centre (where it had its first performance) than in Bird’s Basement.

There is no answer to this question — there never is — but it opens up a broader issue. In the work of Paul Grabowsky and Mark Isaacs, Tim Stevens and Emma Stevenson, Peter Knight and Phil Slater (and many, many more), the notion of jazz has not disappeared, but broadened to include all manner of music. The embrace of what we used to call high art — whether it’s Isaacs writing symphonies or Grabowsky and Stevens exploring Bach or Keller herself drawing on Bartók — is part of this, and so is putting poetry to music, which is no longer the exclusive domain of the classical composer (let’s not forget, by the way, Paul Kelly’s recent collaborations with Yeats, Dickinson, Tennyson and Slessor, and a whole album of Shakespeare).

But most of all, it’s increasingly hard to say what a “classical” composer is. Almost as hard as it is to say what jazz is. ●

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To the public, a conservatoire-trained classical musician would, perhaps, seem the very model of proper musicianship. All that study, all that theory. But classical musicians aren’t really called on to put their theoretical training into practice. If they have good instrumental techniques and can read music, they can simply play what’s in front of them without thinking too much about chord structures and harmonic development (of course, the best ones do).

On the other hand, to play all but the freest of free jazz, you must take your knowledge of chords and modes into your performance. It’s how you know which notes will fit and which won’t. And this is not even to mention the memorising of changes for hundreds of standards, so that you can, at the drop of a hat, play “Taking a Chance on Love” in B flat.

Because of my admiration for jazz musicians, I’m always keen to ask them questions on The Music Show but feel diffident when it comes to writing about jazz. As for composing for jazz musicians, the idea is terrifying. Yet that’s what I’ve now done.

As I was saying only last month, composers must take risks. We must write for new instruments and new voices (new to us, at least), invent new forms or perhaps take an existing form we have never before contemplated; we must collaborate with performers, writers, film-makers, painters, even other composers. It’s how we stay sharp, how we distract ourselves from ourselves, how we focus on the music.

In the last few years, I have written, for the first time, for brass band, for church organ, for guitar (the instrument I find the most demanding of all), for electric guitar (a concerto, no less), and for the national carillon in Canberra. Each came with its own set of conventions — in the case of the brass band, its own culture — and each obliged me to find fresh technical (and therefore musical) solutions to issues of orchestration or harmony or even the writing of a melody line. But confronting the Monash Art Ensemble was the scariest challenge of all.

Paul Grabowsky, the ensemble’s founder, and I had discussed the possibility of a piece for his players for some time, and I had temporised. It wasn’t until I decided the piece might be a group of songs, and indeed found the words for them, that it seemed safe to proceed. As a teenager, I had been charmed by the work of three Liverpool poets, Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough, collected in volume 10 of the Penguin Modern Poets series under the title The Mersey Sound. I was hardly alone in my enthusiasm. The volume sold in unprecedented numbers for a poetry anthology, doubtless helped by its title and the fact that it appeared in 1967, the same year as Sgt Pepper. At the last count, the tally was half a million copies.

Coming back to these poets and their work, I found a sequence of love poems — three happy, three sad — that made the structure for my Monash piece, Comeclose and Sleepnow: Six Liverpool Love Songs. Something about the precision of the diction, coupled with the colloquial informality of the expression, seemed to suit these words for my purpose.

It was Paul’s idea to invite the excellent improvising singer Gian Slater to perform the vocal line, not that there’s much scope for her improvising beyond a general indication to feel free to change notes and pull the rhythm around. For the band, however, there’s plenty of room. Some sections of the piece are precisely, even intricately, scored, but in other places, the fourteen improvisers are let off the leash.

It wasn’t easy to set them loose. Leaving bars blank but for the word “improvise” or “embellish” or simply “solo” goes against the grain for a composer who is used to controlling everything. On a few occasions, I had written music that I then rubbed out and replaced with one of those words. After all, improvising is what these players do best, and to compose well for them, you must leave them room to be themselves.

Is it jazz? Who knows? I suppose that’ll be up to the players. ●

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For a tune to be useful as a vehicle for jazz, it clearly helps if it is rich in harmonic potential. The chords need not be dense and chromatic, but the relationship of melody to harmony must at least be malleable. The famous standards from the great era of American songwriting in the 1930s and 40s fit this bill. They may not have been composed with jazz in mind, these Broadway (and Hollywood) tunes of Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern, Gershwin and Porter and Richard Rodgers, but they have lent themselves to jazz over and over again. It was a tradition that continued until the 1960s, as John Coltrane drew inspiration from songs in The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins. Besides musical theatre, the popular end of jazz also provided some standards: the songs of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn are good examples; Hoagy Carmichael wrote a few.

But there’s more to this than musical possibility. The other thing that is essential for a song to qualify as a standard is ubiquity. Because it will be the jumping-off point for improvisation, it helps if the original tune is well known. It’s a point of orientation for the listener as much as the singer or player. The trouble is that however good those old tunes may be – and many of them are of immense quality – their greatest popularity is behind them. In jazz academies, students may continue to memorise the changes to “All the Things You Are” and “Autumn in New York,” “Lush Life” and “Stardust,” but the songs no longer feature much on the radio, let alone on the playlists in people’s phones. In this sense, they are far from standard.

It is hardly news that younger jazz musicians are looking elsewhere for material. Brad Mehldau has played tunes by Paul Simon and Oasis, Soundgarden and Radiohead. Particularly Radiohead. In fact, so popular is that band among jazz musicians (The Bad Plus, Robert Glasper and Yaron Herman are among those to have drawn on the Radiohead songbook) that you could be forgiven for thinking Greenwood and Yorke the new Rodgers and Hart.

But when it comes to reinventing the standard, guitarist Bill Frisell is in a league of his own. Frisell has always been unpredictable, combining restless enquiry with a deceptive musical charm. He has worked with a wide range of musicians, from a raft of ECM names, most notably Paul Motion – later together with Joe Lovano – to John Zorn, Elvis Costello and pop musicians of varying hues. Like his late colleague, the bassist Charlie Haden, he has also regularly veered off into country music and folk, sometimes in Haden’s company.

Frisell’s 1992 album Have a Little Faith included Aaron Copland’s ballet Billy the Kid, fragments of “The Saint-Gaudens in Boston Common” from Charles Ives’s Three Places in New England, Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman,” an epic reworking of Madonna’s “Live to Tell,” John Philip Sousa’s march, “The Washington Post,” Muddy Waters’s “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” Victor Young and Edward Heyman’s “When I Fall in Love” (most associated with Nat King Cole) and the folk song “Billy Boy.” All America is here. Have a Little Faith is a cavalcade of music and history, and one of my favourite albums, not only for its sheer variety, but also for the seemingly mystical invention of its arrangements, featuring Guy Klucevsek’s accordion and Don Byron’s clarinet alongside Frisell’s guitar.

Frisell’s journey through popular (and unpopular) music of all kinds has continued. There was East/West, a compilation putting “Heard It Through the Grapevine” and “Shenandoah” alongside blues and country songs and standards by the likes of Gershwin and Henry Mancini, and All We Are Saying, an album of John Lennon tunes. And now there’s When You Wish Upon a Star, a disc that celebrates a childhood spent watching TV, with the themes from popular programs such as Bonanza and films including To Kill a Mockingbird, Psycho, Once Upon a Time in the West and The Godfather.

This is good standard material, there’s no doubt about it. There’s something incomplete about movie music taken out of its context in a film, and Frisell and his colleagues find new ways to finish it (the colleagues include violist Eyvind Kang and vocalist Petra Haden – Charlie’s daughter). As though to demonstrate this, the album begins with two tracks that offer contrasting approaches to the same bit of music, Elmer Bernstein’s innocent, folksy theme for To Kill a Mockingbird. But the other reason these tunes make good standards is that it’s music most people would recognise even if they couldn’t immediately identify it. It ticks the ubiquity box, at least for people of Haden’s generation.

It won’t last, of course; it can’t: ubiquity depends on shared experiences, and we no longer all watch the same TV shows and films. If we still require standards for jazz, younger generations will have to look elsewhere. But in the meantime When You Wish Upon a Star is Bill Frisell at his deceptively charming, enquiring best. •

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I DON’T get out as much as I might. I live in the country with a toddler and even getting to my own concerts is sometimes tricky. In particular, Melbourne is a long way away. These are among my excuses for not really knowing who Monique diMattina was or what she actually did.

My experience of diMattina was based entirely on her album Sun Signs, which appeared in late 2011. Having never heard of her, I assumed this was her first CD. And I really liked it. Sun Signs was, for the most part, an album of thoughtful, gentle, delicate solo piano music, composed and played by diMattina. It was on the JazzHead label and clearly some of it was jazz, but the music was anything but obvious. If I tell you that on the first track, “Sun,” the pianist edges closer and closer to the “Nimrod” theme from Elgar’s Enigma Variations before finally coming right out and quoting it, you will begin to see what I mean. Elgar and jazz piano are not natural bedfellows.

So I played the CD on the radio, I gave it as a present to friends, and finally I lent my copy to someone whose identity now eludes me (if you’re reading this and you are that person, you know what to do). The point is, I was a fan. But of what, exactly? And of whom?

When, a few weeks ago, a new album by diMattina appeared, I leapt upon it. Into the CD player it went and, blow me down, she was singing. Quite well. With a band. In New Orleans. How wonderful, I thought – still clinging to my belief that diMattina was some wistful wood nymph of refined jazz sensibility – she’s gone and released a breakout album!

But the truth – and please refer to paragraph one again before you condemn me – is that Sun Signs was not diMattina’s first album. It was not even her third. It was her seventh. And it, rather than this delightful stomp through New Orleans jazz, was more like her breakout moment. She does not generally muck about with Elgar. In fact she has long been a singer, and a songwriter to boot, as listeners to Melbourne’s community radio station 3RRR know well.

Her regular slot on 3RRR is called “Shaken Not Rehearsed” and during it listeners will phone in with ideas for songs. DiMattina takes away the most likely idea and, within the hour, turns it into a new song, which she then performs on air. The songs are generally inspired by events, large and small, in the listeners’ own lives, and so the topics will range from complaints about work (in fact, trench digging) getting in the way of sex, to a broken love affair, to a child’s fantasy about a cat terrorising her neighbourhood. These are all real examples, respectively entitled “Dig a Hole,” “No More Coffee” and “Black Cat,” and as it happens they are all on the new album.

It’s called Nola’s Ark (for those of you who don’t watch Treme, NOLA is New Orleans, Louisiana), and most of the songs are diMattina originals, the bulk of them products of her 3RRR slot. That’s some journey, when you think of it: from a listener’s phone call with an idea for a song, to a studio in New Orleans with some of that city’s top session musicians. In microcosm, indeed, it seems to sum up the very business of creativity. You can start with anything. No idea is too small, even the most unpromising of them can generate a spark and a spark is all you need to begin. Art is not about ideas, it is about what you do with them, how you transform them. In this case, the transformation includes the trumpet of Leroy Jones, who normally works with such luminaries as Harry Connick Jr and Dr John.

So what of diMattina? Well she’s no wood nymph! Her piano playing is bold and inventive, occasionally boisterous, showing the influence of all manner of New Orleans players. I hear, for example, touches of both Tuts Washington and Huey “Piano” Smith. Her singing voice, meanwhile, is pitched somewhere between Billie Holiday and Rickie Lee Jones, though her phrasing and a certain wryness in the delivery regularly remind me of Blossom Dearie.

But the most impressive thing about diMattina – and remember, I will always hear her work filtered through my initial exposure to Sun Signs – is her range. As I’ve commented before in Inside Story, Australia has an extraordinary oversupply of talent in jazz, particularly among piano players. Still, I can’t think of anyone else who would move quite as cheerfully between the styles of music to be found on these two CDs by Monique diMattina. •

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AUSTRALIAN jazz is a small scene but immensely rich. To list the piano players alone is to name some of the country’s best musicians in any field. Consider the wealth and range of talent in this incomplete list: Chris Abrahams, Joe Chindamo, Aaron Choulai, Bobby Gebert, Tony Gould, Paul Grabowsky, Marc Hannaford, Jackson Harrison, Colin Hopkins, Kevin Hunt, Mark Isaacs, Barney McAll, Matt McMahon, Andrea Keller, Mike Nock, Tom O’Halloran, Alister Spence and Tim Stevens.

The last mentioned, a gifted improviser and an especially thoughtful musician, has a new solo CD that has been demanding a lot of my spare time during the past few weeks and affording me much pleasure. It strikes me as one of the most original and radical recordings of improvised jazz I have heard. So if I tell you that it sounds neither especially improvised nor very much like jazz, that is not intended as a criticism, more an indication of just how original and radical it is.

Life’s Undertow: Improvisations (Rufus Records RF108) doesn’t sound improvised because there is a harmonic cogency that, in the faster and more dissonant pieces, seems quite remarkable. It is one thing to improvise a slow, tonal piece and have it all hang together, and obviously it is a comparatively straightforward matter to improvise on the template of a blues or a standard (I don’t say it is easy to do well or with originality). For that matter, it is perfectly possible to blast your way through a fierce, fast, free-jazz explosion of sound and get by with a heady mix of gesture and energy – the notes don’t have to add up. But Stevens’s music on this disc is different.

With barely a blue note in ear shot and scarcely a phrase that might count as swing, the music makes regular recourse to a harmonic language that seems to belong to composers such as Bartók and Hindemith, the latter’s Ludus Tonalis coming to mind each time I listen. The textures are spare, almost always in two parts, and in a piece such as “The Line’s Tension” there are passages of genuine, functional counterpoint. Writing good counterpoint – where two (or more) lines of music intelligently coexist – is tricky enough, but making it up as you go along is impressive.

The disc begins with “Sublunary,” a disarmingly pretty waltz that might feel at home in a 1960s French movie. Elegant, yet stark, a simple tune is picked out above an equally simple line of rocking accompaniment. Eventually the right hand plays chords. But that’s all, that’s the piece. In “So Even Though,” Stevens builds big, dense chords, ratchets up the harmonic tension impressively, before allowing it to dissipate in a hymn-like sequence of gentle modal block chords above which Messiaen-like clusters of notes flicker and glitter. “Campervan of Dreams” is held in place by a repeated G sharp enfolded in a continuously shifting series of luminous harmonies.

You see, it’s always twos; even when the music doesn’t consist of two lines of music, there is that binary sense: the modal blocks and the glitter; the fixed note and the shifting harmonies. “Subsistent Things” is really a single melody, always evolving (I think of the artist Paul Klee “taking a line for a walk”) and passing in and out of chords that colour it or change its direction – again there’s that duality, the melodic line and the chords.

At the end of “Subsistent Things,” the music dissolves into a rapt sequence of sparkling harmonies that are simultaneously reassuring in their luminosity and yet slightly unnerving because they never quite settle. It would have been an enigmatic end to an album that has always had you guessing, but “Subsistent Things” is only the penultimate track. There remains “Synapse,” a hymn tune – or possibly a folk song – that brings the CD to a proper close. It is, I think my favourite single piece of the ten in this collection and it rounds things off simply and very neatly.

Is it too neat? Probably. Should it have been left off in the spirit of “killing your darlings”? I dare say. Would I, in Tim Stevens’s shoes, have been able to resist its inclusion? Certainly not. Am I glad it is there? You bet.

(For the record, I should mention that Stevens thanks me on the cover in a list of “supportive mates,” though we have met, I think, just the once in a radio studio. Still, given the quality of this music, I am extremely proud to be associated with it.) •

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TOWARDS THE END of a track on his newly released trio recording, Yesterdays, pianist Keith Jarrett plays a melodic phrase that sounds as though it has escaped from the Oasis song “Wonderwall.” It brings the listener up short, because of course Jarrett is not that kind of jazz musician. Younger players such as Brad Mehldau might tap pop music from Paul Simon to Radiohead, or even “Wonderwall” itself, in search of potential new standards, but Jarrett remains a traditionalist. His idea of a standard is little different from Bud Powell’s or Bill Evans’s. It’s either a classic bebop tune by the likes of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk or Powell himself or it’s from the Broadway/Tin Pan Alley pantheon of composers such as Richard Rodgers, Harold Arlen and Jerome Kern. Certainly nothing much after the 1950s. On Yesterdays, it is actually Kern’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (from 1933) that yields the presumably unwitting fragment of “Wonderwall.”

The concept of the standard has long been a matter of contention in jazz circles. Most concepts in jazz are more or less contentious – jazz musicians and, particularly, jazz fans are an opinionated lot – but the standard is something of a special case, because it goes to the heart of the matter. Jazz is an improvised music and, some say, it should pour out of its performers, spontaneous, free and unhampered by a dependency on the harmonic template of a song composed eighty years ago by George Gershwin. Others would argue that if the music is merely spontaneous and free there is no special reason to label it jazz. It is only the templates – harmonic, melodic, stylistic, instrumental – that situate the music within that particular genre. And anyway, knowing your standards is to jazz musicians what drawing is to visual artists. It’s a training; it keeps them honest. You see why this is contentious. And since no one in this discussion is actually right or wrong, the contention will always continue and much time will be wasted.

In one sense, however, standards really are like drawing. If you ask a group of very different artists to draw the same vase of flowers, you will quickly discover their various aesthetic preferences, their technical differences and similarities, even the contrasting ways in which they see a bunch of peonies in water. It’s much the same with jazz musicians. The rich variety of jazz available today can seem baffling in its stylistic range. The neophyte can listen to half a dozen different players and quickly get lost in the range of styles and approaches. But ask those same six players to give you their versions of “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” and you gain perspective, you hear exactly where they’re coming from. And because players tend to have their favourite standards, tunes to which they return over their whole career, it is also possible to gain a historical perspective, to hear a player changing across ten, twenty or thirty years or, perhaps, within the space of a few days.

It is now twenty-six years since Jarrett first invited bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Jack DeJohnette to record standards with him and in that time twenty trio albums have been released on ECM, including a few that contain free improvisations. Over the years quite a few tunes have returned like old friends. A short list of Jarrett favourites might include “Autumn Leaves,” “When I Fall in Love,” “If I Were a Bell,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” “You Took Advantage of Me,” “Scrapple from the Apple,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “Stella by Starlight,” the last four of which, in fact, turn up on Yesterdays.

Most of Jarrett’s albums are recorded in concert. All the tracks on Yesterdays come from a Tokyo concert in April 2001 (the final track was actually recorded at the sound check), and it’s worth noting that four of Jarrett’s last five trio albums have come from concerts in that same year. We might infer that the trio was on something of a roll. Certainly here it’s in very good form indeed, alternately exploring the lyricism of Carl Fischer’s “You’ve Changed” (with a lovely, loping, melodic bass solo from Peacock), “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and the album’s title track, and energetically displaying its bebop credentials on tunes by Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Horace Silver. One of the particular delights of the recording is the way in which Jarrett and his colleagues demonstrate the line that runs from bebop back to ragtime. On Gillespie and Parker’s “Shaw’nuff,” for example, Jarrett’s left hand goes in for some athletic stride playing, while Rodgers and Hart’s “You Took Advantage of Me” begins as pure ragtime, moving gradually into a fast bop workout – a manic real-time analysis of the tune’s melodic and harmonic nuts and bolts – before slipping back into ragtime. (The trio performed a similar feat with the same tune, though at a slower tempo, on their previous release, My Foolish Heart: Live at Montreux, also recorded in 2001 but three months after the Tokyo session on Yesterdays.)

“You Took Advantage of Me” was composed in 1928 for a Busby Berkeley show, Present Arms, and it has its roots in ragtime. Jarrett’s approach, then, is historically apt. But in mixing up the syncopations of ragtime and bop, Jarrett is also demonstrating a belief in the oneness of jazz, and this philosophy seems to lie at the very heart of his playing, even when he is unaware of it or wants to repudiate it. It is certainly at the heart of his solo playing.

WHEN JARRETT is not working with his standards trio, he plays solo improvisations. Indeed he is probably more famous for these than for his work with the trio, simply because what he does here has a sensational, even gladiatorial quality. Alone on stage with nothing in mind, Jarrett coaxes and coerces sounds from his piano that will send him off on a unique journey of musical exploration. On the face of it, this is the polar opposite of playing standards and Jarrett himself is most insistent that not only does he not know where he is headed at the start of the evening, but at the end he doesn’t know where he has been. He enters something approaching a trance-like state in which his characteristic high-pitched vocalisations are as involuntary as his writhing on the piano stool and occasional levitations over the keyboard. When he listens back to a recording of the event, he is as interested to hear what he has created as his audience was on the night.

In the documentary film Keith Jarrett: The Art of Improvisation (2005), the pianist stresses that the music he plays in these concerts comes from him alone: Jarrett’s mind in Jarrett’s body is sending impulses to Jarrett’s fingers: there is no will involved, no conscious choices being made. The pianist will have no truck with the idea that all music is about other music: these improvisations, he maintains, give the lie to that piece of mythology.

Well, yes and no. André Malraux once pointed out that no one becomes a painter by looking at landscapes. You become a painter by looking at paintings. It is no different with music. Other music lies behind it. Doubtless Jarrett’s state of mind and physical fitness on the day contribute to his improvisations, as does the nature of the piano at which he is sitting, the design and acoustic of the hall, and – most important of all – the more or less palpable intensity of the listening from the audience. (Jarrett is famously sensitive to the last.) All these things are significant, and yet however good Jarrett is feeling on the night and however hard the audience is willing him on, one note must still be placed after another. It is not as though Jarrett’s fingers are producing music the like of which has never before existed. On the contrary, the meters and rhythms, textures and harmonies, chordal voicings and melodic contours that emerge from one of these improvisations can almost always be traced back to earlier music. If the memory is able to function while we sleep, dredging up images and sounds in the form of dreams, it can certainly contribute to a piano improvisation, no matter how much the player might be “in the moment.”

Jarrett’s solo improvisations also draw on what we might think of as “standards.” These are forms, styles and archetypes that are as much a part of this pianist’s make-up as a knowledge of the chord changes in old Victor Young tunes. Jarrett might not be conscious that he is mining the rich seams of American musical history, but that, in part, is surely what he is doing. At a performance at the Vienna State Opera in July 1991 – on a CD called simply Keith Jarrett: Vienna Concert – the opening chords conjure the luminous, white-note harmonies of Aaron Copland, who himself drew on older templates such as New England hymnody and Appalachian (Celtic) folk song. This type of music often turns up in Jarrett’s improvisations, sometimes forming the “still centre” of his “turning world,” sometimes, as in Vienna, providing the launching pad for an astonishing display of spontaneous musical invention that leads to faster, busier, louder, more complex, more rhythmically driven music, before subsiding into a lengthy and still more hymn-like coda.

Jarrett’s improvisations are a subtle compendium of American style. Jazz from ragtime to bebop to cool at some level underpins most of his playing. Blues harmonies are regular visitors. Even the minimalism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass rears its head when Jarrett seizes on a particular riff and locks it into a holding pattern. Of course other, less obviously American templates also turn up on some nights. On the Vienna Concert CD, for example, the second improvisation begins with a scale that might be Japanese and later leads to harmonies redolent of Arvo Pärt, a composer whose music Jarrett (in classical mode) has played and recorded. His long involvement with Bach’s music is also surely relevant when it comes to his ability to improvise intricate counterpoint.

In Tokyo’s Metropolitan Festival Hall in October 2002 – on a DVD entitled Keith Jarrett: Tokyo Solo – the performance kicks off with a passage of atonal counterpoint that sounds rather like a randomised reimagining of one of the more complex passages of Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto (we shouldn’t forget that even this is an American piece, composed in 1942 in Hollywood). This passage is another staggeringly impressive piece of invention from the pianist, all the more so for coming out of the blue. He walks on stage, sits down and out come thousands of notes, each one perfectly placed and apparently judged – if spontaneous judgement isn’t too much of a paradox – to produce a thrillingly nervy, edge-of-the-seat effect. But once again the music eventually comes to rest in a sort of Coplandesque reverie. There are usually moments of balm in a Jarrett performance and they often feature block chords moving stepwise as in a hymn, emphasising a gentle modality and often enough giving rise to a melodic line that seems to belong to the ages. And of course it does. That is the point. He may not know it and may wish to deny it, but Jarrett can hardly avoid tradition.

Like Tennyson’s Ulysses – and like the rest of us – Keith Jarrett is a part of all that he has met. He might enter a state of unknowing at the beginning of a night of improvised music, but everything he has learned and experienced lies deep in his memory, ready to colour his spontaneous outpourings and to help make sense of them. Just as conventional standards provide context and perspective in jazz, so these archetypal “standards” bring perspective to these improvisations. For the art of improvisation – like the art of its far slower and more painstaking counterpart, composition – is also the art of memory, however subconscious. •

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