‘Jazzing’ and Australia's First Jazz Band

Abstract

A growing tendency to study Australian popular musics as an aspect of Australian cultural studies has begun to bear fruit in the form of long overdue appraisal of the socio-cultural and musical significance of these musics. Yet in our justified enthusiasm for the exciting horizons made visible by this development, it is possible to forget that music research can serve more traditional but nevertheless important functions. In the study of popular musics, in particular, knowing how music was played can be more important than knowing what piece of repertoire was performed. For example, discovering what was ‘done’ to music in performance can tell us about the sound of unrecorded genres and can facilitate (for whatever reason) the reconstructed performance of these genres. Knowing that specific performance gestures (such as ‘flattened’ or ‘blues’ notes) were applied can of course increase our understanding of the social, cultural, and even the political nature of specific musics. In this article I am mostly concerned with applying this notion of ‘doing things’ to music to the retrieval of musical information about a specific ensemble. This more or less indigenous ensemble, which was promoted in 1918 as ‘Australia's First Jazz Band’, has captured the imagination of Australian jazz writers and is widely considered to represent the beginning of Australian jazz (Bissett 1979, p. 9).