Wordy-Gurdy

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, December

2011-12-22T08:03:00.005+11:00

Bye-bye for now-now!

After five-plus years of a regular monthly 'Wordy-Gurdy on the radio' we're hanging up the mic as we move into new publishing projects in 2012. We’ll be dropping in every so often, though.

We played some highlights, some listener favourites, some rarities from five years' worth of shows. You can find the annual playlists by scrolling down here, with 2011 up shortly, as well as sorting by the Radio label on this blog.

Of course steel guitar featured heavily in music predominantly from the South and Hawaii, but we ventured up to LA, for the inimitable Chuck E Weiss, and back in time, for treasure unearthed by Oxford American magazine. We’re waiting breathlessly for the 2011 Southern music issue with CD, this year focusing on Mississippi, but there’s a 30-track taster available online, as well as a whole treasury of videos and writing.

Listen here (half an hour in). And here's to a holiday season that's better than great!

‘Radio blues’, Ken Emerson, Slack & steel (Liko Records)

‘Goodbye old Missoula’, Willis Alan Ramsey, Willis Alan Ramsey (Shelter Records)

‘He sends me’, Nellie Lutcher, Oxford American 10th anniversary Southern music CDs, 2008 (Oxford American magazine) 2009

‘This little girl’s gone rockin’’, Rosie Flores, Girl of the century, Bloodshot) March 2011

‘I told you I love you now get out’, Maryann Price with Tom Morrell & the Time Warp Tophands, Jugglin’ Cats (WR Records)

‘If you ain’t lovin’ you ain’t livin’, Chris O’Connell with Tom Morrell & the Time Warp Tophands, Jugglin’ Cats (WR Records)

‘She’s so tight’, Wilson Pickett, A funky situation (Atlantic)

‘Rocking in the kibbitz room’, Chuck E Weiss, Extremely cool (Ryko)

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, November

2011-11-18T15:58:00.000+11:00

No-name November

Perhaps in keeping with a story I’m writing called ‘Nothing’, this show had no name and no theme – but it surely evolved. The show could now justify being called Evening Up the Score. The half hour zoomed by with just four thrillifying tracks from recent releases featuring women, often shamefully overlooked when it comes to ‘best of’ lists.

The Texan queen of cool, Jolie Holland, contributed two tracks from this year’s Pint of blood. And of frontliners on Californian stringbender Tommy Castro’s star-dusted collection from his legendary blues cruises, we cherrypicked guitar goddess Debbie Davies, who set the stage alight at last year’s Wangaratta Fest (we flash-reviewed this year's just gone) and, not quite so familiar, Sista Monica Parker with some supersize vocals.

Jolie Holland, Pint of blood (Anti):
‘Rex’s dream’ (Townes van Zandt)
‘The devil’s sake’ (Holland)
Nominated by stablemate Tom Waits for the Shortlist Music Prize, Holland came on our radar as cofounder of the Be Good Tanyas. Leaving after just one album, she’s forged a solid solo CV that includes a half-dozen albums, credits for lyrics and performance of ‘Flood of dreams’ in the film King of California and collaboration with Booker T Jones on the album What a wonderful world. Pint of blood resides in that space between dream and awakening, yet quoting Holland verbatim on her Facebook page: ‘Its so strange that the press has been playing this telephone game about the idea of "pint of blood" being "loose"--its the only record I've ever made where most of the tracks were to a click--a metronome. The least "loose" record I've ever made.’
Catch her talking about the making of the album here.

Tommy Castro presents the legendary blues & soul revue (Alligator):
‘Never say never’, Sista Monica Parker (vocals)
‘All I found’, Debbie Davies (vocals & guitar)
Award-acing guitarist/singer/songwriter Tommy Castro took the best of the best of the no-holds-barred jam sessions recorded on the road with his Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise outfit, which roams the waters of the Pacific and Caribbean annually. Other stars on the album include Rick Estrin, Janiva Magness, Joe Louis Walker and Theodis Ealey. If we’d had 10 minutes more, a sensational track featuring Michael ‘Iron Man’ Burks would have knocked our socks clear to Antarctica.

Listen to the show, starting half an hour in.

Next month’s show 21 December

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, October

2011-10-21T15:39:00.000+11:00

For this special show, we spoke with songwriters extraordinaire Yvonne Norman and Rita Grimm (now Moak) in Bossier City, Louisiana, across the Red River from Shreveport. The music cultures of Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma spill into this fertile area, ArkLaTex aka Arklatexoma, where the four states meet. It’s no wonder that filmmakers flock to its forests, bayous and waterways.

Yvonne and Rita were contracted to Fame Studios, Muscle Shoals in the years when songwriters took their songs to recording studios and hung out there, honing their creations. Fame’s founder Rick Hall coached the duo, driving home the ethos of rewriting again and again to perfect the hook.

With a catalogue comprising 600 songs, the sisters have had their work recorded by the likes of Wilson Pickett, Dobie Gray, Mac Davis and Bobbie Gentry. Songs have been covered to make international hits by artists such as Sylvia Vartan (France, ‘Thunder in the afternoon’) and even integrated into rap (‘She’s so tight’).

Thanks to host Roger Taylor, taking over the cockpit from the globetrotting Helen Jennings.

Tracks
‘Why are people like that?’, Maria Muldaur, Steady Love Sroney Plain, 3:14
‘Thunder in the afternoon’, Mac Davis
‘She’s so tight’, Wilson Pickett
‘Thunder in the afternoon,’ Bobbie Gentry

Gigs
Station Hotel goodbye, 3-8pm, Saturday, Prahran
The Moonee Valley Drifters 4-8pm, Sunday, Royal Derby, Fitzroy
MBAS PBS 106.7 FM Blues Performer of the Year Finals 5-10pm Sunday GH (Greyhound) Hotel, 1 Brighton Rd St Kilda

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, September

2011-09-21T21:15:00.003+10:00

September songs: six of the best

Well, it was six seasons in a day. Listen. From the bluesman-goes-country of Watermelon Slim to a tearaway josh with fellow Clarksdalian Super Chikan to tender ditties from Georgian Robert Burke Warren and NSWelshman Darren Jack. (Oh and here's a cool link to Watermelon Slim at the Green Parrot.)

In the June show we listened to Emmylou Harris’s ‘My name is Emmett Till’. The Backsliders reprise that terrible US event last century when a black boy was brutally murdered and his white killers acquitted of wrongdoing. (And it’s not like we don’t have blood on our hands here.) I asked Dom Turner what inspired him to write it. ‘Just so we never forget,’ he said.

Songs ‘Cowboys are as common as sin’, Watermelon Slim, Ringers (Northern Blues) ‘Moonshine’, Watermelon Slim & Super Chikan, Okiesippi Blues (Northern Blues) ‘Don’t worry’, Darren Jack, Better place (indie)
‘Emmett Till’ and ‘Failed preacher’, Starvation box, the Backsliders (Fuse)
‘Jacksong’, Robert Burke Warren, …to this day (Jackpot Music)

Gigs reviewed Dom Turner & Ian Collard, CD launch, Saturday 17 September, Union Hotel Brunswick Coming up the Lowbrow Medal Shindig, Monday 26 September, 7–11.30pm at Handsome Steve’s House of Refreshment, Abbotsford Convent; Celebrating the Station Hotel, Saturday 22 October, 2pm, Station Hotel, Prahran

Listen to the show.

Next show 19 October live interview with Yvonne Norman in Louisiana, songwriter extraordinaire to the likes of Wilson Pickett, Dobie Gray and Bobbie Gentry in the years when songwriters went to studios and hung out there, honing their creations.

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, August

2011-08-17T08:36:00.000+10:00

Arcin' it up in Arkansas

Continuing our report from the South with some blues mixed into true soul and other musical and literary treats from the Natural State.

Music: ‘The thrill is gone’, Albert Smith, True soul: deep sounds from the left of Stax vol 2 (Now Again)

‘Scratch my back’, Frank Frost, Live in Lucerne (ROAD Records)

From Keep it to yourself – Arkansas blues vol I: solo performances (Stackhouse)
Delta tradition: Helena, Pine Bluff, Little Rock, Osceola
‘King Biscuit Time – opening theme’, ‘King Biscuit Time – closing theme’, WC Clay
‘Standing round crying’, Willie Wright
Southwestern hill country
‘Educator’s blues’, Trenton Cooper
‘Roaring Twenties rag’, ‘Hill Country blues’, Nelson Carson

Reading: Our own sweet sounds: a celebration of popular music in Arkansas, Robert Cochran (University of Arkansas Press)
Oxford American magazine (Conway, Arkansas)

Further listening: Tyrannosaurus Chicken (Mudstomp Records)

Next show 9:30–10 am Wednesday, 21 September

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, July

2011-07-20T16:22:00.001+10:00

Mississippi in the morning

Robert Johnson would have turned 100 this May. The blues still drenches his Mississippi Delta – the ruler-straight horizon and the gently decaying ghost towns and the sun-baked fields of cotton and corn. Some musicians still drift home and away, along that mighty river and beyond, and some never left.
This month – music gathered from Clarksdale, Mississippi.

Music
From Big Head Blues Club, 100 Years of Robert Johnson (Big Records):
‘Cross road blues’ (feat BB King)
‘Sweet home Chicago’ (feat David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards)

From Big George Brock, Live at 75 (Cat Head):
Intro (feat Sonny Payne)
‘Cut you loose’, Big George Brock
‘Bring the blues back home’, Big George Brock

From Mistakes were made: Five years of raw blues, damaged livers & questionable business decisions (Broke & Hungry Records):
‘Everything’s going to be all right’, the Mississippi Marvel
‘The wolves are howling’, Wesley ‘Junebug’ Jefferson
‘Pretty baby’, Terry ‘Harmonica’ Bean

Books
Hidden history of Mississippi blues, Roger Stolle, the History Press
The land where the blues began, Alan Lomax, The New Press, New York

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, June

2011-06-08T22:25:00.001+10:00

Emmylou Harris drives a Hard Bargain: her latest offering reviewed

We're a week early as we're off to the South next week!
On today’s feature album, Emmylou Harris’s Hard Bargain (Nonesuch) Harris offers the most expressive song yet about her brief time with Gram Parsons, beginning 40 years ago. See the Gram Parsons project website for the full interview quoted about how they met – from her point of view.

‘Love hurts’ (alternate take), Gram Parsons & Emmylou Harris, The complete Reprise sessions
And to follow, a two-minute interview with Parsons:
‘How I met Emmylou Harris’, Gram Parsons, GP + bonus tracks

From Hard Bargain: ‘The Road’; ‘Big black dog’; ‘My name is Emmett Till’
On the same subject as the last track (which I consider immeasurably more finely crafted) is Bob Dylan’s olde-folke 1960s song ‘The death of Emmett Till’. This was such a brutal and horrifying occurrence that this website considers it crucial to never forget it actually happened.

‘Oh yes that’s right’, True Gospel Wymics
‘Holding On’, Sister Ernestine Washington, Oxford American 11th annual Southern Music Issue

From San Francisco I’m heading way across the country to Little Rock Arkansas and thence to Petit Jean Mountain for the inaugural Oxford American Summit for Ambitious Writers. Anyone who’s managed to get their hands on Charles Portis’s classic novel True Grit (1968), long out of print but since reprinted since the Coen Brothers’ film, would recognise Petit Jean as the place Mattie Ross liked to go coon hunting. And if I don’t get totally waylaid in beautiful Arkansas, from there it’s Heartbreak Hotel and Graceland and other Memphis sacred places, as well as a wander down the Blues Highway.

Gigs Moonee Valley Drifters will be doing their last show until mid-July – 9.30–12.30 Saturday, 11 June, Lomond Hotel, Nicholson Street, Brunswick

See you on 20 July with some souvenirs.

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, May rematch

2011-06-08T22:09:00.000+10:00

Radio fest rematch!

As if one session wasn’t torture enough, we went head to head with the kickinest-arse tracks we didn’t get to play last week. But how to choose? That was the torture. When in doubt, we went to the source, so often we time travelled way back.

Guitar The one that inspired this idea: ‘Levee Town’, Sonny Landreth, Levee Town
‘Calypso’, Robert Randolph & the Family Band, Unclassified

Bass ‘Bodas de Oro’, Ry Cooder & Manuel Galban, Mambo sinuendo, bassist Orlando ‘Cachaíto’ López, 4:38

Piano ‘Walking the blues’, Willie Dixon, Chess Blues 3 1954–60

Piano accordion ‘Love me do’, Flaco Jimenez, Sleepytown

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, May

2011-05-18T22:12:00.004+10:00

Radio festival play-off!

For the annual fundraiser, Helen and I went head to head with the kickinest-arse tracks we could find. After all, it is all about the music and if we’re going to ask you for funds, what better way than to show just what PBS106.7FM is all about – and that’s great music. Trouble is, how do you choose? So a rematch is scheduled… and these are the tracks I selected. And Roger Taylor was compelled to drive to the station, CD in hand, to throw down the gauntlet re guitar with Mick Taylor featuring on 'Can't you hear me knocking', Rolling Stones off Sticky Fingers. Go to PBS106.7 website for full list.

Many tracks are old school, naturally. What better than to go to the source, the inspiration?

Fiddle ‘Beaumont rag’, Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys, Take Me back to Tulsa boxed set

Harmonica ‘Double trouble’ (alternate), Muddy Waters, Chess Blues 3 1954–60
‘Bring it on home’, Sonny Boy Williamson, Chess Blues 4 1960–67

Guitar ‘Lady be good’, Sol Hoopii, Vintage Hawaiian music: steel guitar masters 1928–34

Bass ‘Down the road a piece’, Chuck E Weiss, Old souls & wolf tickets, bassist Willie Dixon

Piano ‘He sends me’, Nellie Lutcher, Oxford American 10th anniversary edition

Gigs
Saturday, 21 May 3–6pm Dancehall Racketeers: Andy Baylor fiddle & guitar, Rick Dempster steel, Lyn Wallis drums, Richard Mander bass, Liam O'Connell guitar & tenor banjo, Railway Hotel, North Fitzroy

Sunday, 22 May 7–10pm Moonee Valley Drifters, Mitcham RSL just off Marondah Highway just past the corner of Springvale Rd

Wordy-Gurdy’s first publication is launched!

2011-05-10T17:54:00.003+10:00

What a night. Wordy-Gurdy Press launched to great acclaim with our beautiful first publication, Indian Summers – Mumbai and Beyond by Ian Cochrane at Avenue Bookstore, Melbourne on 5 May.

Speaker Andrew Stewart's delectable insights into Mumbai, author Ian Cochrane's reading and telling of production tales, the scrumptious catering, the stylish venue with its warm and professional staff – perfect. Designer Jinny Coyle looked fabulous as did her cover design en masse. And my favorite host in the world, the inimitable Roger Taylor. Head count of 80, thanks to my mathematician poet friend Geoff Campbell. Photos coming, courtesy Kelly Fitzgerald and partner Lachlan.

Publisher speech
Thanks to you all for coming. I'm very excited. The most satisfying thing in publishing is holding in my hand something real, something tangible. Publishing is somewhat like writing in that you often don’t know where you’re going – but you do know when you are there. The vision shifts, evolves, and intuition takes over.

There’s been a lot of trumpeting about the death of the print book and of bookshops. Yet here we are launching a print book in one of Melbourne’s most thriving bookshops. E-books are here to stay and Wordy-Gurdy has plans for them, but Indian Summers was always meant to be in print. Indian Summers was always meant to feel good as well as look good. Something that reads easily, that you can flip through, mark the pages with the cover flaps, pore over photographs and slip into a bag or a pocket to read on the road. You need to know where you are – both with maps and page markers. But the text has to be worthy of it. I think it is.

We're proud to publish Indian Summers as our first book. And we couldn’t have found a better author than Ian Cochrane. The great writer and editor Arthur Plotnik said:

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.

Ian and I began playing with fire as author and editor in 2009. He had a mountain of writing on the go including these India stories and we pushed them, pulled them, lengthened and shortened them, as he considered various modes of publication. Now the fire was showing, the smoking was blowing away and they began to be distinctly shaped like a book. When you’re messing round with fire, you need to build two things with fellow players – trust and respect. And to that, add industriousness. Writing is hard work and Ian’s the hardest working writer I know. He really looks, he really listens, and he redrafts till it’s right.

This is where our designer, Jinny Coyle from Flux Design Studio, comes in. (Yes, we are related!) Jinny has been seduced by print too. From my vague brief she came up with a design that integrated colours, text and photographs and an elegant solution to the many captions. She added a henna overlay to the cover and repeated the motif throughout. This book is living proof that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

We’d imagined the book with a photograph bookending each story. But some stories ended up with plenty, others none, so Ian called on other photographers to fill the gaps. They kept growing until we had a hundred images. So I call this a pocket-sized coffee-table book. Jinny placed the photos so they worked together, both as collages and relevance to text. It’s printed in Australia using the offset process rather than the cheaper and less effective digital printing so we could retain the luminous quality of the photographs.

Indian Summers was reviewed in the last Weekend Australian by travel guru Susan Kurosawa:

The style is observational and anecdotal, his vignettes illuminated by the assorted zany characters he meets. Anyone who has ventured alone around India, with an open mind and a sense of humour, will find resonance in Cochrane’s adventures.

But I’ll add to that with a quote by writer and artist Robert Hollingworth:

I’ve never been there, but Ian Cochrane took me on an evocative journey as rewarding as the real thing – more so, since no tourist in India could gain the kind of personal insight intimately portrayed within these covers. A testament to the power of good books.

Indian Summers isn’t just about a trip to India. It encapsulates a lifetime of encounters with the country. Ian has woven time and place together and added context, both from history and India’s greatest writers. It reminds me of a glorious Indian embroidery.

Huge thanks to Gail McManus Graphics – for all Wordy-Gurdy logos. Thanks also to Chris Redfern and staff at Avenue Bookstore, Misuzu for food and Randall’s for vino.

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio: 20 April

2011-04-20T19:23:00.003+10:00

Wordy-Gurdy wrangled the radio waves with Mario Maccarone, who took over the turntable – spinnin' his faves, talkin' Marios Cafe turns 25 and walkin' the wet-dream roster of talent that graced Prahran’s Continental Cafe upstairs music room (1993–2001).
‘The Conti’ lives on in memory as a finely wrought venue with attention to detail in all it did, from its very first premise of offering gigs in a comfortable, stylish environment to marrying in good food and great service. The two Marios (Mario DePasquale is the other half) brought a food–music dowry to Marios: as well as sharing foodie history, Mario M was managing Bachelors from Prague and had noticed venues around the world that offered sit-down gigs that were more intimate than concert-hall seating.
They dreamed up a gorgeous stage, lush drapes and decor that looked just as good in daylight as evening; fabulous lighting overseen by none other than the grandfather of rock’n’roll productions, Chipmonck himself; plus world-class musician facilities. And it was indeed a memorable venue. Even now new venues bill themselves as ‘the new Conti’ but fail to live up to it.
An amazing array of local and international artists included Renee Geyer, Kate Ceberano, Vince Jones, Ross Wilson, Joe Camilleri, Stephen Cummings, Chris Wilson and Shane O'Mara – all regulars who spearheaded a who's who of Australian talent – and Amazing Rhythm Aces, Steve Young, Joshua Redman, Coco Robicheaux, Kurt Elling, Ron Sexsmith, Keiran Kane & Kevin Welch, Melissa Etheridge, Leo Kottke, Nick Lowe, Jimmy Smith, Luka Bloom, Loudon Wainwright III, Guy Clark, Charlie Musselwhite, Keb Mo', Harry Connick Jr, kd lang, Jimmy Webb, World Party, Alex Chilton, Taj Mahal, Mike Stern, Shawn Colvin, John Hammond and Jonathan Richman! ‘You’ve missed a few,’ Mario laughed.
Mario was in the studio to talk about the new Marios website, launching 28 April, which will build a section on the Conti. It will evolve as content grows, opening up an online community and sending out news and special events.
Tracks
‘We will fly away’, Coco Robicheaux, Spiritland
‘Before’, Joshua Redman, Passage of time
‘I got a woman’, Jimmy Smith, Home cookin’
From a live recording on a Bob Dylan theme at the Conti:
‘You got a lot of nerve’, Rebecca Barnard
‘It’s all over now, baby blue’, Stephen Cummings
Gigs
OK there’s Bluesfest stars galore, but our own locals shine:
Luau Cowboys Saturday April 23, 1–4pm Hickinbotham Winery, 194 Nepean Hwy, Dromana; 8.30–9.30pm Cornish Arms Hotel, Sydney Rd, Brunswick
Rocky & the Two Bob Millionaires Thursday 28 April, Thornbury Theatre, 859 High St, Thornbury
Jimmy Stewart’s solo at Town Hall Hotel, North Melbourne, April Tuesdays
Steel guitarist Chris Altmann will relocate indefinitely to Canada in May to tour Que Paso in USA and Europe. Big farewell, Saturday 7 May, John Curtin Bandroom, Carlton

Wordy-Gurdy Press – publishers!

2011-04-16T17:59:00.003+10:00

As I watch Melbourne turn autumnal, the rich colours of Wordy-Gurdy’s first publication seem to visibly transform the colour of the leaves beyond autumn, into the dusty, bright, lush reds and terracottas and magentas of India.

We held the first copies in our hands a week ago – designer Jinny Coyle from Flux Design Studio and me. We looked at the book then each other and stroked the matt cover coating and smiled. We played with the cover flaps, marking pages and then flipping back and forth, back and forth, watching the photographs change from Mumbai to beyond to New York City to Melbourne. We chinked our Champagne flutes and wished the author, Ian Cochrane, was here already, not tramping the wilds of New Zealand.

better than travel
I’ve never been to India, but I feel like I have now. As the writer Robert Hollingworth said:

Just a quick peruse, I thought, but an hour later I was still far away on the streets of Mumbai. I’ve never been there, but Ian Cochrane took me on an evocative journey as rewarding as the real thing – more so, since no tourist in India could gain the kind of personal insight intimately portrayed within these covers.

it all began with the editing
Ian and I began our author-editor relationship in 2009, with a novel he’s still working on and a conglomeration of short features, mostly travel – he’s an inveterate traveller. He got published in the Australian and we were off. We worked on some India stories, slashing their word length as stand-alone features, then we threw around the idea of publishing them as a continuous narrative. So some were lengthened, some were adapted and we had 13 stories.

Ian had first gone to work in Mumbai in 2007, when he was designing an onshore gas terminal on the Bay of Bengal. He worked there for four months and returned there in 2009 to complete the stories. So that seemed to fall into two parts, 'Mumbai' and 'Beyond', following a prelude set in 2009.

full colour
Ian didn’t want different paper stock for text and photographs so we settled on a satin finish. ‘Well,’ said Jinny, ‘if we’re paying for full colour, let’s have colour on every page.’

From my vague brief she came up with a design that integrated colours, text and photographs. She added a henna overlay to the cover and repeated it throughout.

a hundred images
I’d envisaged the book as 13 stories each bookended by two photographs. Ian had never planned for this book, though, so some stories had plenty, others none, and he called on other photographers to fill the gaps. Jinny placed the photos so they worked together, both as collages and relevance to text.

text as form and function
We wanted a beautiful object that felt good but also read smoothly. The font was all important, and that called for a serif font for body text and a sans serif for captions. Oh, and the captions also had to sit on the page without interrupting their grid of photographs. Jinny managed an elegant solution to this – with colour too!

two maps
Next we needed a stylish map for each section so many emails later we found and commissioned Martin von Wyss.

a pocket-sized coffee-table book
Ian wanted something you could slip into a pocket and pull out on the road. But it also had to be substantial enough for reading comfort and yet lean enough for carrying. So we settled on 198 x 128 mm with the cover flaps for page markers.

Indian Summers meanders through time and place, from this land of two million gods and back to Melbourne. You see, Ian’s nostalgic imaginings when he arrived in the mixed-up metropolis of Mumbai commingled with 1967’s Summer of Love – gurus, tie-dye and cheesecloth-clad women with flowers in their hair, youthful bearded men in patched jeans and psychedelic headbands.

For guidebooks he had an ancient, dogeared map bequeathed by his Scots grandmother, who always longed to see the Taj Mahal, and a remembered school atlas frozen in the days of the British Raj.

See more here.

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio: 23 March

2011-03-23T13:07:00.005+11:00

What fires the rockabilly filly? tête-a-tête with Rosie Flores

The dynamic Texan Rosie Flores played two songs live in a special extended hour-long ‘Wordy-Gurdy’ segment.

We also reviewed the orgy of steel guitars that ensued in the Legends of Steel gig, Saturday 19 March, as part of the Brunswick Music Fest.

It was an orgy of octaves when four steel guitarists took to the stage at the East Brunswick Hotel. The night kicked off with young multiinstrumental Chris Altmann on pedal steel in a rich and warm set channelling Parsons–Byrds–Young 1970s, with an uncannily Gram vocal by acoustic guitarist Dave Ong (Joni Lightning; also engineered Altmann’s album Que Paso) with Fee Brown doing Emmylou and the small combo completed by Tommy X (bass) and Dave Rose (drums). After the likes of ‘Streets of Baltimore’ and ‘You ain’t goin’ nowhere’ and the classic Santo & Johnny’s ‘Sleepwalk’, the audience was so mellow as to be yellow. Look out for Chris Altmann’s April Tuesdays solo gigs at Labour in Vain – one gig will see the reunion of this outfit and it’s highly recommended.

The curtains closed and charming host Andy Baylor – who was there to keep those steel players from fretting – continued the hoopla as the drapes drew back to reveal Ed Bates, Rick Dempster and Garrett Costigan arrayed across the stage, with Baylor playing bandleader to the hot little backing combo of Sam Leman (guitar), Andy Scott (bass) and Sharky Ramos (drums) as well as playing rhythm guitar or fiddle.

The first two numbers saw steel surfeit with everyone on stage for ‘Steel guitar rag’ and ‘Blues stay away from me’.

Rick Dempster took the stage with his Dobro-National lap steel and later twin-neck Fender for early hapa-haole Hawaiian marches and blues ranging from ‘Twilight blues’ to ‘La Rosita’ with Leman showing off his ukulele prowess, recently enhanced with some lessons in Hawai'i. Dempster’s been honing his skills since learning lap steel from Oz greats Les Adams and Jim Jensen. Along with Baylor, he formed the Dancehall Racketeers in 1981 and also played steel in Tom Forsell's Moonee Valley Drifters in the ’90s.

Ed Bates took us into the later half of last century from the Speedy West–Jimmy Bryant era, such as ‘Jammin’ with Jimmy’. Bates’s played/recorded pedal steel with the Crummy Cowboys, Joe Camilleri, Mark Seymour, Dan Warner, Michelle Nicolle and Maurice Frawley.

Garrett Costigan blasted the evening into psychedelic ’90s mode with some classic E9th pedal steel and guests Steve Hoy and Michelle Lang. David Lindley–influenced Costigan has played/recorded with Lisa Miller, Don Walker, Cyndi Boste, Stephen Cummings, Black Sorrows etc.

We were finally sated with steel after the grand finale ‘Hard time blues’. And the winning aloha shirt? Prize goes to Ed Bates, with a red-and-white-embroidered hula dancers on black.

And so to the brilliant Rosie Flores, award-winning singer, songwriter and guitarist. The most generous of performers, she gave us two songs live with guitar, and spoke of her life in Texas (there's even her own Rosie Flores Day!), as well as being the first Latina country artist, and refusing to be pinned down into categories. Try these for influences: for guitar, somewhere between Jeff Beck and Albert Lee; for songwriting, somewhere between Merle Haggard and Bob Dylan; and for singing, somewhere between Ella Fitzgerald and Tammy Wynette.

Listen to the interview here.

Songs
‘Chitlin con carne’, Andy Baylor, Hometown stomp (indie)
‘Steppin’ out’, Moonee Valley Drifters, Moonee Valley Drifters (Larrikin)
‘Coconut Island’, Junior Brown, 12 Shades of Brown (Demon Records)
‘Wheels of fortune’, Flatlanders, Wheels of fortune (New West)
‘Get Rhythm’, Rosie Flores, Girl of the century (Bloodshot)
‘This cat’s in the doghouse’, Rosie Flores, Girl of the century (Bloodshot)

Rosie Flores live, guitar and vocals:
‘Boxcars’ (Butch Hancock)
‘This little girl’s gone rockin’’ (Mann Curtis, Bobby Darin)

Next show 9:30–10am Wednesday, 20 April

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio: 16 February

2011-02-17T12:14:00.004+11:00

Love, love, love...That bug is catching! And there are multifarious faces to the condition…

But first, to review the 11 February gig of Return to Forever IV's Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy Tour 2011 at the Regent Theatre.

Reunited after a quarter-century in 2008,the jazz-fusion pioneers turned on two and a half hours that just kept on grooving. The first word that came to me was momentum – with a line-up headed by innovator Chick Corea on keyboards, multi-Grammy winner Stanley Clarke on bass, and replacing Bill Connors our own Frank Gambale, ex-Chick Corea Elektric band of the '80s and '90s, on guitar and Lenny White, from Miles Davis' Bitches Brew sessions, on drums, what was there not to dig?

And then there was master violinist Jean-Luc Ponty – morphing from Corea's keyboard intro via an invisible transition was truly magical.

Not an easy thing to compile a playlist, with one Corea comment going: 'These first three tunes were the first three tunes we played and now we're gonna play the next two tunes'. Among the old and new, we did catch titles such as Ponty's 'Mirage'. Strong performances all round, although drums seemed to be overshadowed.

And so, as all this intertwines with Miles Davis, we started out with a Davis–Corea track and continued with some songs of the season.

Tracks ‘Felon Brun’, Miles Davis, Filles de Kilamanjaro
‘Did you call her darling’, Jane Clifton, The marriage of style
‘Sweetie-O’, Chuck E Weiss, Old souls and wolf tickets
‘Silence’, Lefty Frizzell, Life’s like poetry
‘The dark end of the street’, Dan Penn, Do right man

Gigs This Friday 18–Sunday 20 Blackwood Fiddlers Convention. Highly recommended country getaway just an hour out of town – workshops as well as gigs and jams.
This Saturday 19, 5–7 pm The Luau Cowboys play a mix of bluegrass, some '30s blues, Hawaiian slack key, Cajun tunes and originals. Labour In Vain, 197a Brunswick Street Fitzroy.
24 February, 6 March, 6:30-9:30 pm: Warm, back-porch sounds with Adrian Kosky, Phil McNamara and US expat Carla Maxwell – Radio Springs Hotel, Lyonville, on the Trentham–Daylesford road. Expect instruments such as dulcimer and saw and a poetic range of originals. You can stay the night, eat and enjoy a stunning winelist too! Check Carla's blog for audio etc.

Next show: 23 March What fires the rockabilly filly? tête-a-tête with Rosie Flores (note 4th Wednesday in March, 9:30–10:15 am)

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio: 19 January

2011-01-18T16:52:00.006+11:00

A is for Alabama: meaning jazz, gospel, soul, hillbilly, blues, garage rock, r’n’b and a whole lot more.

Sure, it's Australia Day in a week, but for now, let's explore another place whose name kicks off the alphabet. We're stretching ourselves across the reach of a complex, diverse and contradictory catalogue of music.

Ain't no record-store categories here – try Dinah Washington doin' Hank Williams, or think sequin-totin’ hillbillies Maddox Bros & Rose. We quoted excerpts of some fine writin’ in the Oxford American mag – one feature per track plus opening pieces such as the editorial by editor Marc Smirnoff, who spent the last year listening to ’Bama music. And we managed to sneak in one extra track at the end: the cult figure Rev Fred Lane, who is neither a rev, a Fred nor a Lane. Read more on these and other artists at OA's website.

Alabama’s hall of fame includes Nat King Cole, WC Handy, Louvin Brothers, Chuck Leavell, Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, Dan Penn, Sam Phillips, Martha Reeves, Jimmie Rodgers, Percy Sledge, Dinah Washington, Jerry Wexler, Hank Williams and Tammy Wynette. Then there are the likes of Hank Ballard, Blind Boys of Alabama, Jimmy Buffett, Clarence Carter, Drive-By Truckers, Eddie Floyd, Lionel Hampton, Emmylou Harris, Merle Kilgore, Nicolette Larson, Shelby Lynne, Maddox Brothers & Rose, Jim Nabors, Spooner Oldham, Wilson Pickett, Lionel Richie, the Skeeters, Sun Ra, Toni Tennille of Captain & Tennille, Big Mama Thornton, Will Kimbrough, Allison Moorer – whew! – and a disproportionate number of American Idol finalists.

The show takes its cue from the theme of the Oxford American's 12th annual Southern music issue, which excludes most of these names. But there’s Nat King Cole’s brother, and we added a lovely jazz-infused Jimmie Rodgers classic better known in the Maria Muldaur incarnation, and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section with Dan Penn.

All we could offer is a taster – this show could go on for years!

Tracks:

Jimmie Rodgers, ‘Any old time’, A country legacy (Pair Records)

Dan Penn, ‘It tears me up’, Do right man (Sire/Warner Bros/Blue Horizon)

From Oxford American's Southern music CD no 12 :

Dan Pickett, ‘99½ won’t do’, 1949 Country Blues (Collectables Records, 1990), originally recorded for Gotham (1949)

Eddie Cole & his Gang, ‘Abalabip’, That’s Right! (Collectables Records, 1991), originally released as Gotham single (1950)

Dinah Washington, ‘Cold, cold heart’, Dinah Washington’s finest hour (Verve, 2000), originally released on Blazing Ballads (Mercury, 1951)

Hardrock Gunter & the Pebbles, ‘Gonna dance all night’, Gonna rock 'n' roll, gonna dance all night (Rollercoaster Records, 1995), originally released as Bama Records single (1950)

Maddox Bros & Rose, ‘Muleskinner blues’, America’s most colorful hillbilly band: their original recordings 1946–1951, Vol I (Arhoolie, 1995), originally released as 4-Star Records single (ca. 1948)

Rev Fred Lane with Ron ’Pate’s Debonairs, ‘Rubber room’, From the one that cut you (Shimmy Disc, 1998), originally released on Say Bay-Dew Records (1983)

Next show: Wednesday, 16 February, 9:30 am

Listen in online.

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio: 15 December

2010-12-15T15:53:00.003+11:00

It’s a wrap

For the last show of 2010, we looked back at some of our favourite artists and gigs of the year.

Starting at the end, the Station Hotel reunion in November proved, 40 years after its beginnings as one of our first pub-rock venues, that the entity of the Station was greater than the sum of its parts. The magical vibe was made up of more than the musos: door bitches, both male and female, were in attendance; so were groupies and many of the regular punters. The early days bred a scene that typified the mood of the early ’70s: idealistic, free, wild and crazy. The survivors were there, scathed or not, if they were still living – it was good to rediscover old pals like Heckle, Wolfman, Jack, Trev, Sudwix, Lena and the bearers of other nicknames not suitable for a morning show.

Mick Elliot’s Band featured Ian (Ferg) Ferguson and Trevor Young; the Pardoners, Sam See, Glynn Mason and Chris Stockley. Then there was Mike Rudd, Bill Putt, Robbo and Daryl Roberts with Spectrum to take the day out in a blaze of euphoria with the classic ‘I’ll be gone’.

At Queenscliff Music Festival Shawn Mullins did not disappoint. He’s a generous and charismatic performer as is Colin Hay, whose anecdotes seem to get funnier with the years. The entrancing Mama Kin warmed against the chilly winds.

Tracks: ‘Muskrat candlelight, Willis Alan Ramsey, Willis Alan Ramsey (Shelter)
‘I’ll be gone’, Spectrum, I’ll be Gonz (Cellar Music), 3:30
‘The ballad of Kathryn Johnston’, Shawn Mullins, Honeydew (Vanguard)
‘Girl of the century’, Rosie Flores & the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, Girl of the century (Bloodshot)
‘Nearly’, Nigel Kennedy, Blue Note Sessions (EMI)
‘Satin sheets’, Willis Alan Ramsey, Willis Alan Ramsey

Next show: 9:30am Wednesday, 19 January 2011: Oxford American’s 12th music issue: writings and music.

See PDFs of this and previous years’ playlists by scrolling to the bottom of the page here.

Hey, and thanks for listening and looking. Cheers!

Long time ago

2010-12-07T18:41:00.002+11:00

It hardly takes any time to traverse the 112km to Sorrento now. Selfishly, I don't know whether I want it to change as it becomes even more popular – it's one of those Victorian beachside towns that's part of every decade of my life.

We visited it in childhood, us six kids packed into the 'Black Maria' (actually a Holden), and reshaped the shoreline with our endless sandcastles. We hooned down there a decade later to find it little changed. And so on through the years, escaping the city for this favoured place in the sun, reeking of history and saturated in beauty.

The timeless landscape is still there, with its gnarled and tortured treeforms. The solid, gracious limestone buildings still stand. The Walk of the Rich & Famous still meanders along the cliff top.

Panoramas of the shoreline still bear a startling resemblance to its Italian namesake.

The shopping is still truly magnificent, with antiques and stylish goodies to delight even the chronically jaded palate.

Yet sky-high rates seem to be doing more to desecrate the landscape than anything else, with land sold off to within metres of dwellings, and the sounds of quickly rising new developments, built right to the boundary, echoing from daybreak to sunset.

Is this the new suburbia? Huge, tightly packed weekenders around the fringes of the country?

The Portsea–Sorrento Artists' Walk poises paintings by well-known artists on strategic viewpoints. But the selection criteria allow only artists who are part of certain collections, meaning their stay in Sorrento was usually only for a short time while painting. If an artist lived here and painted the place, it doesn't count. That's sad, I reckon.

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, November

2010-11-18T11:01:00.001+11:00

Review of Wangaratta Jazz & Blues and preview of Queenscliff Music Festival

Wangaratta Festival of Jazz, 29 October to 1 November, set the town alight, but it didn’t manage to dry it out – that weekend would have to be the wettest on record during the fest’s 21 years! The blues venue battled on through the torrential rain with marquee tops filling as fast as we could empty them and the Green Room awash with instruments and musos alike needing rescue from wet feet. But what it is about adversity? The Saturday-night acts played up a storm that left the heavens whimpering for mercy.

Accolade-ridden US guitarist Debbie Davies, who’s shared the stage with Albert Collins, John Mayall and Ike Turner, was indeed holdin’ court with our own Fiona Boyes in their Hot Licks Blues Revue and they weren’t lyin' – Fiona’s Fortune Tellers (Dean Addison, bass; Tim Neal, Hammond; Niels Rosendahl, sax; Mark Grunden, drums) rose to the occasion and the hot licks came thick and fast. Only the Backsliders could’ve followed this, and they left the crowd hollering for more. Other blues standouts: one sensational set I missed was grand old man Dutch Tilders, the man who needed no introduction, at 50 years on. There was newcomer guitarist Anni Piper, crowd fave Ray Beadle, and then there was Diesel, channelling the blues visually in his shirt and vest while keeping to what seemed like a fairly standard, albeit excellent, rock set. Continental Robert offered smooth grooves, and Nick Charles, polished picking.

The fest offered a rich melange of jazz sounds: playful sets by Kurt Elling and Yuri Honing Quartet, exciting new kids on the block with the Andy Sugg Group, Mike Nock New Quintet (Phil Slater, trumpet; Karl Laskowski, tenor sax; Ben & James Waples, bass & drums). Then there was the love 'im or hate 'im alto/soprano saxophonist and poet Oliver Lake, both in his Organ Quartet and solo in the cathedral. Festivalgoers were galvanised on one side or the other – he seemed to encompass the whole spectrum of jazz in each set.

At the Queenscliff Music Festival, 26–28 November, there’s a danger of missing some great music with the record-store-type categories on the program: take Atlanta Georgia’s Shawn Mullins, who’s marked as country, but Slim Dusty he ain’t. His latest album Light you up is #5 on the Billboard charts, while he’s playing venues like House of Blues in the US. The country genre has offered the most exciting developments over the last decades – have a listen and let your ears be the judge.

We’ll be catching him for sure, along with the Mercurials, Mary Gauthier, Colin Hay, Quarry Mountain Dead Rats, Black Sorrows, RocKwiz Live, Kim Churchill and Watusi – and that’s just for starters.

Gig of the month
Moonee Valley Drifters 25th Birthday Bash, Sunday 5 December, 2–5pm, East Brunswick Club Hotel. Catch some honky tonk, with swing, Cajun, and even Latinish rhythms. And don’t forget those dancin’ shoes... Guests include James Black; the Drifters include Tom Forsell, Paul Pyle, Nick Grant, Nick Summers and Dude Brockton with guests Brendan Shearson, Rick Dempster, Rob Grenville; $10 cover at the door.

Tracks
‘I wonder why? (Blues in D Natural)’, Debbie Davies, Holdin’ court
‘The blues has been my Life’, Dutch Tilders, Going on a Journey: Anthology of 50 years of playing the blues
‘Atras de tus ojos’, Debbie Davies, Holdin’ court
‘Sideshow’, Mary Gauthier, QMF CD1
‘Light you up’, Shawn Mullins, Light you up

Bye bye blackbird

2010-10-28T17:35:00.005+11:00

Street performer, Woodford Folk Festival 2003

When Wangaratta Jazz & Blues Fest rolls around, you know it’s a downhill cruise to year-end now.

You know you’re in for amazing music, warm country hospitality and some gourmet eats and drinks.

It’s always hot, sometimes wet. But always hot.

We’re heading up the Hume with dread in our hearts tomorrow, though, after the latest weather forecast of rain, and lots of it. Cold, ditto. Hmm, will it be like the 2002 Cropredy Fest in the UK, which is the only time that wellies became my closest friends? The festivalgoers huddled in their bivouacs, comforted only by the music and the excellent ales served from shining taps under a luxurious marquee. Come to think of it Woodford does a good dramatic outpouring of rain.

Looking forward to Backsliders closing at the Blues Stage this weekend.

Talk about good music, I’ve had a couple of great nights lately. Tuesday with the ubertalented Jimmy Stewart at the Gem, and Sunday with the final judging of the Melbourne Blues Appreciation Society’s 17th Blues Performer of the Year contest. The previous Monday I’d basked in the reflected glory of fellow judges Phil Manning and Max Crawdaddy for Heat 1. And the winners came from our shift – Sweet Felicia and the Honeytones will be going to Memphis to compete at the International Blues Challenge in February 2011. But that’s not to say the others weren’t good – what a hotly contested prize.

Anyway, time to dust off the wellies and get packed. See you for the Cup!

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio: 20 October

2010-10-20T13:21:00.003+11:00

Wang dang doodle: preview Wangaratta Jazz Fest and more treasures unearthed by Oxford American

Festival time again, and we salivated over acts coming up end of next week at Wang – international jazzers are headlined by the likes of ubersinger Kurt Elling and master sax symbol Oliver Lake. The blues stage will jump with our own Fiona Boyes back for a blues revue with Debbie Davies, plus Backsliders, master picker Nick Charles and a host of others: 29 October – 1 November.

And so to the Oxford American’s 10th anniversary of its music edition, with one CD of future masters, one of masters previously featured.

Tracks ‘Married blues’, Kurt Elling, Close your eyes, Blue Note
From Oxford American Southern Music CDs, 10th anniversary edition:
‘Heat’, Elton & Betty White
‘A jelly behind woman blows my mind’, Elton & Betty White (hear this)
‘Travelin’ blues’, Blind Willie McTell
‘Foolkiller’, Mose Allison
‘He sends me’, Nellie Lutcher
‘Lights’, Victoria Williams
‘Rock me’, Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Next show: Review of Wang and preview of Queenscliff fests, 17 November

Always in threes…

2010-10-12T15:21:00.011+11:00

I have a long-term relationship with my osteopath Michael – well, that’s another story. Anyway, last week, shooting the breeze – which can blow in any direction – we touched on our current strange state of being.

Suspense. It’s been a season of it.

First, a hung parliament. Two weeks of limbo while the wanna-be leaders canvassed for supporters.

Mistah wonders, where?

Then the Grand Final draw. Although the cries of outrage and demands for changing the rules were faintly ludicrous, more absurd was the ambience on 25 September. Living near the ‘G’, we are attuned minutely to the vibe. There was not the usual hooha later that day, just a subdued, even glum, silence.

The following week Caroline Wilson’s voice of reason stood out among the cries of outrage. Who would have missed this Melbourne-in-a-tizz week? The sunny day of the rematch, we heard the roars of the crowd and knew what was happening without needing to see. But it was impossible to resist the temptation to stroll through the East Melbourne streets spotting stray forlorn Saintsters, which swelled to fully-fledged droves as we stood outside the shrine. Grumpy staff didn't even allow the usual 3/4-time opening of the gates. 'There's 95,000 people in there!' muttered the moody minion. 'Not any more!' Rog said.

What would be the third thing, we wondered? Could it be the long chilly winter that never seemed to end? Michael reckons it’s been four extra weeks of cold, with muscles stiffening proportionately.

Perhaps it’ll be the Melbourne Cup. Or maybe the state election in November.

Anyway, the whole thing stirred a hankering for action, escape, some kind of change, perhaps spurred by reading Graham Greene’s Ways of Escape, perhaps by editing Lonely Planet’s Texas 3 and returning to Austin and San Antone in my head and pining for Asleep at the Wheel’s 40th-anniversary reunion in November in Austin.

Hair was within my sphere of influence. It was time. So off to Mario at Fluff for the big cut. Luckily Mario understands a fair degree of negotiation is required – we have a long-term relationship – and a glass of good wine steadies nerves as a pile of tresses amasses around the chair.

And afterwards the lightness of being was not unbearable at all.

The night of nights – Lowbrow version

2010-09-21T12:35:00.005+10:00

The stars were out last night in Abbotsford for the inaugural Lowbrow Medal Shindig at Handsome Steve’s House of Refreshment.

As we stepped over the ropes between the bollards, we entered Steve’s alternate reality where baby Freycinet was served with a black straw and men were men with Crownies. A unisex vanity unit was perfectly positioned for touchups: think Nair, VO5, Faberge Brut and an industrial-sized bottle of 4711. For spray-tan emergencies, a template with a face-shaped cutout was thoughtfully provided.

Styles we’ll see more of this season... the requisite decolletage was prominent, but also in evidence were rabid Magpie, Demons and Blues ensembles, as well as gangsta wear and suits with footballer-skew-whiff ties and an extraordinary white-blonde Dolly Partonesque wig. Most magnificent was the handsome one himself, resplendent in an olive-green velvet suit delicately flared on the trousers, with a pointy-collared tropical-patterned shirt that picked out the greens in combination with shades of mauve. Writer-ex-footballer Tony Wilson flashed his jacket open to reveal Dermott Brereton’s autographed training jumper as he shot the breeze with Cats Vice-Prez and ex-Cats and -Tiges star Gareth Andrews, who (most pertinently for this Tiges supporter) played at the ’74 Tiges premiership game.

Steve’s culinary prowess reached its pinnacle with the party-pie floaters. The red sauce infused strong accents onto the succulent pastry as it hovered in the plush, pea-green potage.

MC Roger Taylor introduced Neil Kelly (guitar) and Graeme Leak (theremin) who presented an astounding interlude of footy-club themes, ending the set with ‘My Way’. On the telly the action heated up for the muted broadcast of the Brownlows as Neil multi-tasked by firing up the barbie for some bangers and sauce, which were cooked to perfection by the glamorously decolletee ex–Nudel Bar impresario now Pilates instructor Helen Saniga.

Tony Wilson recounted the getting of the Brereton jumper followed by the tragic tale of broken Brownlow dreams, seeded by sleeping in the bed won by his football-royal father, Ray Wilson, when he polled the most votes for a Hawthorn player in 1966.

Music that followed, retrieved from an early-’80s LP of footballers singing pop songs of the day, made a strong argument for amnesia. (Or anaesthetic relief from Richard, at the bar.)

Steve, glowing with the aura of having the Cats VP in the room, gestured towards the 1967 Cats towel hanging on the wall (they lost the GF that year, remember), and spoke of how he wept on (not wet) it. And, amazingly, he was showing little sign (outwardly, anyway) of this year's pain.

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio: 15 September

2010-09-15T17:43:00.001+10:00

Let's boogie: spotlight on the South

From Alabama-born Willis Alan Ramsey's one and only album (so far) through Oxford American's 11th music masterpiece to last night's Jimmy Stewart 100th gig at the Gem, Collingwood – the music kept on coming, interspersed with snippets of features in the Oxford American.

Oxford American’s 11th music edition, containing 53 tracks, contains a 2CD set divided into Southern and Arkansas masters.

Jimmy Stewart’s 100th was a finals-fever showdown, much black and white in evidence, with Jimmy breaking through a banner, cheer squad at hand, before breaking into some rap to open the set. Of course there were orange segments at half time.

Jimmy's playlist is always beguiling: apart from some fine originals, he matches with aplomb songs like the Wizard of Oz Scarecrow song 'If I only had a brain' with a Joe Cocker–influenced take on Lovin' Spoonful's 'Darling be home soon' and Richard Thompson's 'Vincent Black Lightning'.

On Sunday 26 September he solos at Drunken Poet's fourth birthday bash: recommended.

Tracks

‘Geraldine and the honeybee’, Willis Alan Ramsey, Willis Alan Ramsey (Shelter)

From Oxford American’s 11th music edition:
‘Now what you gonna do’, Frank Frost

‘I ain't got time’, Fem Jones

‘Suite for Violin and Piano’, William Grant Still

‘Gano’, Oliver Lake Organ Trio (appearing at Wangaratta Jazz 2010)

‘Bring me all the love you got’, Claudia Whitten

‘Baby please don't go’, Billy Lee Riley & the Little Green Men

Next show 9.30am, Wednesday 20 October

Purple prose

2010-09-07T19:43:00.000+10:00

Spring is on its way! With the bright sunshine comes freelancer nirvana – or is it? – with molto jobs coming in at once, however methodically you blocked in the weeks all those months ago. Printing’s running late so proofing gets held back, assignments have come in late for marking, and marking always takes longer than estimated.

In the midst of all this, a 91-year-old friend, Una, sent Rog home with a handful of violets from her garden. They fitted perfectly into a charming, lopsided vase my sister Al made yonks ago – I had always searched for the right flowers for it.

The scent of the violets conveyed me to a time when I stirred my washing as it heated in a copper. The perfume took me to mossy, damp, woody places with shady secrets, where I rode my motorcycle wildly past trees dripping fragrant moisture. I twisted the machine along on the winding road in an effortless rhythm as I fled the calamities of urban youth.

It took me further back, to my grandmother’s side as her knobbly fingers transformed my ungainly efforts into embroidery, and my young eyes enabled me to thread the needles from the wooden reels of Coat’s cotton. Her dressing table held a silver hair-grooming set, mysterious silver-topped jars and the powder she patted on her limp, finely crazed skin. Her crystal perfume atomiser was connected to a pink-silk-crochet-covered balloon that I loved to squeeze, releasing a magical scent that made me forget the dry, dusty heat outside.

Violet is a tricky fragrance to capture in a long-lasting scent – apparently it supplies good middle notes but falls down somewhat on the base, fading in a couple of hours. But something’s in the air – violets are throwing off their musty reputation with companies such as Donna Karan parading a square-cut bottle of divinely purple-hued iris with violets, and a rebranded Yardley London rereleasing its 1913 April Violets.

And then there’s the most famous of them all, Violetta di Parma by Borsari. Originally Lodovico di Borsari managed to acquire its secret way back in 1870 from the monks who had distilled the essence of the flower for Napoleon Bonaparte’s second wife, Marie Louise. Word is she was as shy as the flowers she loved so much.

Shock horror

2010-09-05T22:50:00.001+10:00

Shock Music, Australia’s largest independent record label, has gone to the wall. Sadly, for in the past 22 years it’s become the go-to for roots music. The international labels it brought to us – Epitaph, Anti, Bloodshot, YepRoc, Sugar Hill, New West, Rough Trade, Rounder – soundtrack the genres that morph into the most exciting sounds to slip under the radar of mainstream popular music.

These labels foster the music that fuels the playlists of Melbourne’s prized community radio stations, RRR and PBS and CR. Sadly, one of the biggest creditors is Inpress, whose banner we used to share at Rhythms – Shock was our mainstay, too, and it will be missed.

As books seem to be trailing music in the small presses that are only just now proliferating – and it was almost a decade ago now that many of our most respected musos went indie – I wonder how long it’ll be before a largish publisher bites the dust? While the biggies print ever-larger print runs to remain buoyant, the digital age is making it more and more viable to self-publish. With digital downloads to blame for the woes of Shock and fellow sufferer Stomp, it’s only logical that the rise and rise of e-publishing is bound to asphyxiate profit margins for book publishers. Yet more and more bookshops appear on the streets – interesting times ahead.

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio:18 August

2010-08-17T22:23:00.018+10:00

Pick, slide and twang: time travelling with the blues. There's some old, some new, some borrowed and all blue, tinged with alt.country, swing...

From 1920s blues on a Hawaiian guitar to Melbourne's own Nicky Del Rey & the Snowtown Social Club, Clinkerfield, Miserable Little Bastards and Brothers Grim & the Blue Murders, we closed with an early Robert Randolph to segue into his latest T-Bone Burnett–produced release. And thanks, Matt, for the borrowed component!

‘Rain on the vein’, Clinkerfield, Wash Willie’s winter away with whiskey VI is from Clinkerfield's album a head full of rain & a heart full of puddles. This version recorded live on PBS at the Tote gig on 25 July.

The charismatic Jimmy Stewart, back from NYC and WA, continues his never-ending Tuesday-night solo residency at Collingwood's Gem Bar & Dining Room, with his 100th Gem show looming in September. Great food and we like the jugs of Lil Creatures too. Long a favourite of the Rainbow's Chick Ratten, Stewart is a performer with an encyclopaedic song book; he trolls through a century of musical styles in a night and, as we've shown in our first track with his band Clinkerfield, he has a fine songwriter's ability to speak the unspeakable. Jimmy Stewart, please cut that solo CD.

Two cautionary tales followed.

First up, ‘Don’t sell it – don’t give it away’, from Oscar 'Buddy' Woods, Slidin’ on the frets: the Hawaiian steel guitar phenomenon (Yazoo), who was inspired to take up the steel guitar after hearing a travelling Hawaiian troupe in his hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana.

Second, Jimmy’s other band, Miserable Little Bastards, with ‘Leave it alone’,
Wash Willie’s winter away with whiskey VI.

Brothers Grim are 'four blues hounds reviving ’20s blues in an unwholesome, moon-howling, sweat-dripping, groin-shaking fervour'. We heard ‘Dirty Dog’, Brothers Grim & the Blue Murders, Wash Willie’s winter away with whiskey VI.

Last Saturday night we caught the Moonee Valley Drifters turning 25 at the Old Homestead Inn, now the Recreation Hotel. Next week they're at the Lomond and Craig Horne & the star-studded Hornets take the baton at the Recreation.

‘Down yonder’, Nicky Del Rey & the Slowtown Social Club, Dead pig heaven – We caught up with Drifters guitarist Nicky Del Rey, so couldn't resist a track from his new outing, and even more specially cos it's penned by Louisiana's dearly departed Snooks Eaglin.

‘Calypso’, from pedal-steel maestro Robert Randolph & the Family Band, came from his 2004 Grammy-nominated album Unclassified. I remember him at the New Orleans Jazzfest when Sacred Steel was new in the steel-guitar lexicon, leaving the crowd first open-mouthed then standing and hollering for more.

Next show Wednesday, 15 September

Words without walls

2010-08-09T22:19:00.010+10:00

This year’s Byron Bay Writers Festival theme melded perfectly with the blue skies and unfettered nature of the sessions. As this was the last of the vibrant Jeni Caffin’s four events as Festival Director, I imagine she’d be stoked to be leaving on a pitch-perfect note.

After an unsuccessful move to Belongil Fields last year, it was good to get back to the Byron Bay Beach Resort, although it was mildly disorientating to be in a slightly different area – swung around ten degrees or so anticlockwise from the old entry point.

Now I’m thinking this may be my fifth – we’re talking 2007, 2006, definitely 2004, where I interviewed East Timor First Lady Kirsty Sword Gusmao and singer-songwriter James Griffin, and was it 2003 or ’02? So it was good to hear founding member Di Morrissey spill the beans on the fest’s raffish beginnings, 14 years ago, speaking at the launch party.

Uncanny for me was the way so many of my current quandaries popped up. What to do about your online profile? (It used to be Facebook was private, website was public. Then colleagues, family and friends all became 'friends' and my worlds collided – content began to swing in all directions and it simply got too hard. What to write and when?) Then the other tough question: should I write the book as fiction or nonfiction? And, what are you allowed to write about Aboriginal people in your life – who does the whole story belong to – do you have some rights as a participant? I’m thinking here of Philip Gwynne and his highly successful first novel, Deadly, Unna? ; the film script has brought on accusations of exploitation of the suffering of his childhood friends and their families for financial gain, making for one of the toughest times he can recall. Yet it was his life, too.

Mm.

Best laughs: well, there were lots, especially Tony Martin’s Melbourne: City of Lit vs Melbourne: Boganville. Best tanty: Madame Lash aka Gretel Pinniger vs biographer Sam Everingham. But that's not to say there wasn't a year's worth of ideas floating round – in fact lifetimes' worth.

I'm still buzzing after last Wednesday – being blessed with two most generous guests at a panel session (the Victorian Writers' Centre's 'Getting Your Poetry Out There'). I was lucky enough to host it representing of the Society of Editors (Vic) which copresented the session. Thanks, poet Peter Bakowski and publisher/poet Kevin Pearson from Black Pepper Publishing.

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio: 21 July

2010-07-21T17:22:00.012+10:00

To see a world in a grain of sand

After travelling the world, leaving the worlds of writing and academe and music and home, immersing myself in the world of Graham Greene's 1950s Indochina War–era Saigon, I was thinking about all the meanings we attach to this worldly word – Macquarie Dictionary alone has 20 definitions. So there was the show – and just as these five made great listening,there were at least another five that cried out for a play.

Tracks:
‘End of the world’, Julie London, EMI presents the magic of… (EMI)
‘Good old world’ (gypsy instrumental), Tom Waits, Night on earth original soundtrack recording (Island)
‘Sweet old world’, Lucinda Williams, Sweet old world (Festival)
‘It’s a big old goofy world’, John Prine, The missing years (Oh Boy)
‘All the time in the world’, subdudes, Live at last (High Street Records)
... and back by popular demand...
‘Northeast Texas Women’, Willis Alan Ramsey, Willis Alan Ramsey, Shelter Recording Co

URL:
A long piece from Elvis Costello on the late bass player John Ciambotti, who played on the John Prine and Lucinda Williams albums, as well as long ago with LA band the Clovers on Elvis's first album.

Time out

2010-06-23T20:11:00.002+10:00

Time for a holiday, time to escape the cold, time to get out of town. We'll be out of range and out of earshot from now until 12 July, so be seeing you! If you'd like to get in touch, please send an email via Wordy-Gurdy and we'll get back to you on the 12th.

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio: 16 June

2010-06-16T17:37:00.008+10:00

Featuring Willis Alan Ramsey

We reviewed two stunning gigs at Stonnington Jazz Fest: some new discoveries brought to light with established artists. Paul Williamson’s Hammond Combo featured a stellar line-up of guests to take us way into the stratosphere with his blues-soaked jazz, and we were halfway there with the opener, the unbelievably gifted young Sarah McKenzie Sextet. The luminous Kiwi songstress Tina Harrod opened for steel-guitar maestro Lucky Oceans guesting with Joe Chindamo’s Coen Brothers Project. From Harrod's latest CD we featured a cowrite with bassist-bandleader Jackie Orszaczky, to whose memory the album is dedicated. Exactly what a festival should do – bring us musos from all corners of this continent.

Our feature CD was the soundtrack of the 1970s for far too few people: Willis Alan Ramsey, the greatest unknown album ever. That’s no small claim. I can back it up with two things: one, rehearing a CD version after finding the least worn-out of my several LP copies. Roger Taylor used his new Akai turntable and presto! A CD to accompany any occasion plus tracks for my iTunes. The new technology enables my favourite LP snap, crackle and pops – a perfect blend of old and new tech. The album stood the test of time to the extent that it didn’t leave the car player once it was rediscovered. Two: the telephone didn’t stop ringing this morning with listeners wanting to know more. Good news is that WAR is reportedly working on a new album; bad news is that the CD version released a decade ago is now selling for U$110.

Checking a YouTube version of ‘Spider John’, recorded 3 May 2008 at Threadgills, Austin TX, I found a comment that ‘apparently [Willis] got asked a lot if he was going to make another album, and he was famous for answering “Why, is there something wrong with the first one?”.’

I’d have to agree that the year he spent recording resulted in a timeless product, one of my desert island discs. As with US writer Hal Johnson: see his review on Amazon (scroll right down). The connection forged by Ramsey with Leon Russell’s Shelter Recording Co resulted in the album being made there, Russell himself supplying piano on ‘Goodbye Old Missoula’.

We ended with a track off Leon Russell’s 1973 album under his Hank Wilson persona, the classic Hank Williams homage that came at the height of his rock’n’roll career, causing no small kerfuffle. Of course, Russell had been in cahoots with Willie Nelson for years, cohosting the first Fourth of July picnic and undertaking many projects with Nelson. A renaissance musician if ever there was one.

CDs ‘Move on’ (J Orszaczky & T Harrod), Tina Harrod, Temporary People (Vitamin)
‘The ballad of Spider John’, ‘Goodbye old Missoula’, ‘Angel Eyes’ (Ramsey), Willis Alan Ramsey, Willis Alan Ramsey, Shelter Recording Co
‘Goodnight Irene’ (Ledbetter/Lomax), Leon Russell, Hank Wilson’s back, Shelter Recording Co

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, May

2010-05-19T18:58:00.009+10:00

Jackey Coyle’s 'Wordy-Gurdy' on Helen Jennings’ Roots of Rhythm, PBS 106.7 FM
9.30–10am Wednesday, 19 May

Two whole hours of ‘No. 9’!

For our PBS Radio Festival show, we decided to highlight shining tracks that lurk on a CD, often unnoticed after their flashy precursors, hidden towards the end.

We redressed those bitter twists of fate that sentence gems of songs to shine, unnoticed and unheralded, at the ‘dark end of the street’. This is the ‘Wordy-Gurdy’ segment of the two hours.

‘A little Italy rag’, Amazing Rhythm Aces, Too stuffed to jump (ABC Records)
‘How long blues’, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, A stranger here (Anti/Shock)
‘Down the road a-piece’, Chuck E Weiss, Old souls & wolf tickets (Ryko)
‘Oliver Galop’, Blind Tom played by Jack Davis, Oxford American Southern Music CD, 2005 (Oxford American)
‘The clock’, Johnny Ace with the Beale Streeters, Charlie Gillett’s The sound of the city: Memphis (EMI)
‘This is always’, King Pleasure, Moody’s mood for love (Blue Note)
‘Corner stone’, the Skatalites, Guns of Navarone: the best of the Skatalites (Trojan Records)

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, April

2010-04-21T22:36:00.004+10:00

Jackey Coyle’s Wordy-Gurdy on Helen Jennings’ Roots of Rhythm, PBS 106.7 FM, 9.30–10am on the 3rd Wednesday of the month
Wednesday, 21 April

Spotlighting Charlie Gillett

In memoriam: this great English DJ, the first to document the rise of rock’n’roll in his 1970 book The sound of the city. We devoted this show to his 2CD set The sound of the city: Memphis. From the early years of Stax with the dream house band of Booker T & the MG’s and main man Otis Redding through to AGP – formed by ex-Stax and Muscle Shoals all-round man Chips Moman – tracks connected the dots along to Alex Chilton – who died within days of Charlie Gillett last month – and the Box Tops’ megahit, aka the perfect pop music hit at 1:53, with songwriter-producer Dan Penn’s work. And of course, what greater rap could the Amazing Rhythm Aces' 'Third rate romance' have than a mention by Chuck Berry? In an interview with Charlie, that was the only song he could recall from radio that year.

This 2002 CD, along with its Sound of the city housemates New York City, New Orleans and Chicago, is somewhat of a collectors’ item now. Best place to try is Amazon UK.

See two blogs back for part of the interview recorded when I visited Charlie at his London home in 2002.

Tracks
‘I’ve been loving you too long (to stop now)’, Otis Redding
‘Your good thing’, Mable John
‘Over easy’, Booker T & the MG’s
‘Dark end of the street’, James Carr
‘The letter’, Box Tops
‘Third rate romance’, Amazing Rhythm Aces
‘Po’ black Maddie’, North Mississippi All Stars

Next show 19 May ‘No. 9’ – shining tracks that lurk on a CD, often unnoticed after their flashy precursors, hidden towards the end. We will redress those bitter twists of fate that sentence gems of songs to shine, unnoticed and unheralded, at the ‘dark end of the street’.

2010-03-31T17:53:00.004+11:00

Tim Mckew Toasts Noel Coward: Melbourne International Comedy Festival
by Jackey Coyle and Roger Taylor for ArtsHub

Tim Mckew has been dressing up with amazing attention to detail and performing in Melbourne and surrounds since the mid-1970s. Long before the existence of the so-called ‘gay bar’, he was a permanent fixture at those outrageous monthly Friday-night ‘camp dances’ at North Carlton’s iconic San Remo Ballroom. Over time this is where he vamped his craft. Dressed in drag, Tim would shoot the light fantastic, kicking over glasses on tabletops in his wake and wowing audiences both straight and gay. Sexual preference just didn’t matter. But as time passed and gay became de rigueur, Mckew changed tack.

An interest became an obsession and Noel Coward, the famous gay playwright and wit of the golden age of the 20th century, became Tim Mckew’s alter ego, six years ago. After various performances as Coward – including afternoon teas at the Windsor Hotel and an appearance in a purple smoking-jacket on ABC TV’s Collectors late last year – Tim Mckew Toasts Noel Coward happened on the 37th anniversary of his death. At Melbourne’s Kelvin Club, a private members’ sanctum steeped in old-world cosiness and tradition, it was the first of three consecutive Friday nights (excluding Good Friday) as part of this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Following pre-dinner drinks downstairs in the fringe-lamped dimness of the bar and billiards lounge, we ascended the sweeping staircase to the wood-panelled dining room. Seated in front of a portrait of the young Queen Elizabeth II, we were soon replete with a dinner of soup, perfectly baked rack of lamb and fine wine.

The performer and his accompanying musicians, Peter De Ryk on piano and Paul Dooley on trumpet, entered stage right from the gilt-lettered President’s Room, entreating the audience to be upstanding and join them in a rousing version of ‘God Save the Queen’.

With the rapid-fire repartee of Stephan Elliot’s recent film Easy Virtue in mind, the audience was treated to a scintillating voyage of Coward’s looking back from the grave – no stand-up comedy for him, he preferred it ‘lying down’. Mckew’s delivery of Coward’s modern-day one-liners and monologues was inspired, but it was when he came to perform Coward’s standards such as ‘Let’s Fall in Love’, ‘Mad About the Boy’ and especially ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ that you truly believed you were in the presence of Coward himself.

While De Ryk was solid on piano, it was Dooley’s sublime trumpet playing which provided an excellent foil for McKew’s vocals and gave the singer time out for some fancy footwork and nimble soft-shoe shuffle.

Underscoring Mckew’s immersion in Coward’s era, early 20th-century themes such as the fascination with spiritualism were not ignored, and the sirens that accompanied the opening bars of ‘London Pride’ were a poignant reminder of the devastation wrought upon London by the World War II bombings.

The second half opened with Mckew attired in an extravagant party costume incorporating tri-colour sleeves, a wacky headdress and a bucket-sized martini glass. A second costume change saw him red-accented in a cream suit for the standout number, a hilarious version of ‘Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs Worthington’, leaving the audience fully primed to sing along with ‘I’ll See You Again’ at Mckew’s behest (lyric sheet supplied) – Just The Echo Of A Sigh… Goodbye.

Outside, the Friday-night Melbourne cacophony took us back to the 21st century.

A recommended interlude.

Tim Mckew Toasts Noel Coward
The Kelvin Club, Melbourne Place, Melbourne
Fridays 9 April and 16 April
Bookings 03 9654 5711 (no online bookings)
More information

The sound of the city

2010-03-25T23:01:00.012+11:00

Goodbye, Charlie Gillett. It’s hard to believe – he seemed to just go on and on. From his definitive 1970 history of rock, The sound of the city, to his radio and festival world music shows to his twenty or so double-CD collections – The sound of the city and World series, last year's Honky Tonk compilation etc – he never lost his passion, his conversation with his listeners and the music. As with the radio shows, so the CDs – Gillett always took pleasure in sitting one track next to another and creating a flow – the perfect DJ.

In 2002 I made the pilgrimage to his Clapham, London home. The sunny basement room had floor-to-ceiling walls of CDs, sliding sideways to reveal a second layer behind. Tall, tanned, white-haired, he exuded energy in faded lipstick pink T-shirt and pale shorts.

The resulting six-page profile was published in Rhythms that October.

Talking about how he programs his radio show, I asked if he addressed an invisible listener, a ploy many radio commentators use. This is part of his answer.

‘When I started I felt like a complete impostor, pretender, who do I think I am? So it isn’t until I start getting a reaction from listeners, I feel OK; I’m doing the right thing. And each time I go on to a different station, I have the same uncertainty about who’s there. And I change, depending on what station I’m on, as I get the feedback.

‘So right in the beginning, I was just playing records that I liked back in 1972, so stretching back over the previous 15 years, I s’pose. It’s funny because at the time it seemed like a really long time span to go back from 1972, 15 years was going back to 1957. And so I guess it was more like 25 years. At the time I was 30, and it was more or less the records that spanned my own lifetime.

‘And I guess the point of the 15 years was going back to the rock’n’roll, to the music of my adolescence, and I often think it’s a strange lottery – who’s popular at the time you’re 13 or 14, because that’s going to affect you forever. And I was lucky that I had Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Fats Domino, and I felt so sorry for people who were only two or three or four years younger than me, for whom it was Connie Francis and Bobby Dee. In such a short time, it totally changed. And you couldn’t have the same relations, no matter what you felt about Bobby Dee and Connie Francis, it wasn’t remotely how people felt about Elvis and Little Richard and Chuck Berry. And then it changed again, if you were 15 when Dylan and the Stones and the Beatles came along, lucky you. And it does go in its funny little phases, and five years later it’s James Taylor, but it’s not the same as Bob Dylan by a long way.

'So when I started playing, I was playing the music that I loved, and it drew the people who felt the same way about the same music. And I always knew I wasn’t unique, but it was extraordinary to find that there were so many people who felt the same way. I had been a lonely person as a teenager; I lived on a farm – up in the northeast – so there were no other teenagers within five miles. So radio was an incredibly powerful medium – I really reacted to it. I still remember records… I know every word of ‘Tutti Frutti’ or whatever, because in an absurd way, it goes in and stays there.

'And then, musicians started sending in tapes of music that they were playing at home, ‘cause they liked this music and they realised that if I liked that music, maybe I’d like what they were doing. That was just beyond my wildest dreams. And a number of people… Graham Parker didn’t send his own tape in; Elvis Costello, he wasn’t called that then, but he sent the tape in and his wife told me that was the biggest moment of his life just sitting at home and hearing this demo that he’d strummed in his bedroom, in the middle of all this music that he loved. It wasn’t just like any old radio station; it was the one that he particularly liked, playing his music. Just him and a guitar. And it’s that demo is now on a version of My Aim Is True, and it still sounds fantastic.

'So then in 1980 I moved to Capital Radio, which is London’s most commercial station and I almost consciously abandoned that audience that I’d built up in the BBC. There were various reasons, one of them was I was getting paid so little at BBC London at the time… I was launching people like Dire Straits and I was thinking this is a ridiculous amount of money and I couldn’t bear it, so I stopped. And then I went to Capital Radio and I thought, well I really don’t want to stay in the past like this, I don’t feel comfortable. I used to feel an obligation to that audience, to play what I’d originally led them to believe I was going to do. It wasn’t a person, but it was a group of people who’d given me fantastic feedback. I’d ask the most incredibly difficult questions; I’d play a song and say, ‘OK, who did this first?’ and it was astonishing how many people knew very obscure things.

‘So at Capital, playing the current, independent music of the time, and it was a lot more open and accessible than what John Peel was playing. He had a perverse streak to him and he was playing stuff that was very hard to listen to. I thought, good for him.

‘I consider myself to be a very normal, ordinary type of person who just happens to trust his judgement in what he hears. I don’t need someone else to tell me this is good; I can hear it if it’s good.

'The famous story about Dire Straits is that Richard Branson at Virgin had been told by his A&R people that I’d played them on my show. And rather than trust the fact that I’d played them and got the most amazing reaction from my audience, he took Dire Straits to John Peel, the arbiter of what’s new and hip, and said what do you think? And not surprisingly, John Peel said ‘Pointless! What’s this for?’ And so Richard Branson didn’t sign Dire Straits to Virgin Records.

‘So I was really creating a new audience, and I didn’t get the same feedback as I was accustomed to, so I felt quite lonely, and I didn’t really know whether I had an audience, and then I had the idea of talking to some of the people whose records I was playing, some of whom were on major labels. There was a feeling at the time, the early ‘80s, you had Madness and Two-Tone and UB40, it was the early days of the synthesiser groups. There was some very interesting pop music around at that time, but for two or three years. And then 1983, I started losing the feel for it. I thought, I’m 41; pop music is not for people as old as me. But on the other hand, I had this kind of addiction, I just loved being on the radio and playing records and getting reactions. But I really didn’t know what I was going to do.

'And then they fired me, out of the blue. I was in shock actually, it was like, Wow! I’ve still got more to give, I wasn’t quite sure what it was at that point.

‘Anyway, the secretaries at the station started calling me up and saying we’re getting a load of letters about you. Because people hadn’t been feeding back to me, but they were now going through the station itself and saying, we like this guy and we like what he’s doing.

‘And they forwarded the letters, and they were saying we really liked that tropical music you used to play. Just because I like to play a balance, every now and then I’d play a calypso record or King Sunny Ade – he had just started at that time – but it was only one song out of a whole show sometimes, and these people were saying that’s what they liked.

‘So I was actually only off the air for seven weeks. It felt like a lifetime, because you don’t know if you’re going to come back. The head of music called up and said, “Well, there is enough evidence to show that people like what you’re doing.” He said, "It’ll look absurd if you came back and did exactly what you were doing before; is there anything that you can do that we haven’t had a specific character to?" And I said, "Well look at these letters. They’re all saying they like this tropical music. I like the idea of starting a show… let’s call it A Foreign Affair, and we just played music… and the audience would tell me. I knew from my days at Radio London that the audience knows more than the presenters always, and they will guide you. I mean it’s always been so nice, they never say what the hell are you playing that for, it’s never like that. It’s more like, “You might like to know that it wasn’t this, it was this.”

‘It’s like being a surfboarder in a sense, you can’t invent this thing, there isn’t a blueprint for it. Womad had started in 1982 and a record shop up in London, Sterns, which had previously been the back of an electric appliance shop, selling occasional records that people would bring from Nigeria and South Africa, literally a suitcase of records, and they would sell them till they ran out. No extra supply or anything, it was just a place Africans knew they could get African records if they were quick. So some other people bought the name and set up a proper African music shop with proper distribution. A guy who’d been working at Virgin for some years started a label and a sort of informal distribution. He’d drive around London to any shop that was prepared to sell African records. And he’d sell them not just his own label, but anything they wanted.

‘So there were other people doing this, so I had two different sets of people feeding back to me. One was European and English people who’d been on holiday in Kenya or Nairobi in 1983 and had never, ever expected to hear that incredible song again. They didn’t know what it was at the time, and I just played it and their life is wonderful now, they can go and buy it. And on the other hand, all the people from those countries – Africans, Nigerians, South Africans, from Zimbabwe – couldn’t believe that Capital Radio, one of the most major commercial stations in the world (an extraordinary number of Londoners listened to it) so hearing their music on this station, you can’t imagine what this meant to them. They were proud, they were thrilled, they loved it. And then people started bringing live acts in to play in Britain, and these people showed up and would introduce themselves to me.

‘So to come back to your question, it’s never one person, it’s always a group of people, and who it is changes. And I’ve now gone back to BBC London where amazingly enough, I’ve still got an extraordinary number of those people who listened back in 1973 when I first started. They were there from Day 1 and they’re still there. But they didn’t necessarily follow me to Capital. And of course, some of the Africans. And of course, people who had never heard of me.

‘And now I’m on World Service, and of course I started completely from scratch on the World Service, an audience who’d never heard of me before, and they respond to a totally different type of program. They love things that are just sparse and slow, kind of pure in a funny way. Not pure as in traditional or folky, but just a voice, maybe a clarinet, an oud, just spare. And I said to them, if I was only to play the records that you really respond to most, each program would grind to a standstill because you just love the slow stuff. But I said I think it works when I play a couple of faster ones and then the program comes to a lovely serene moment where the slower-paced number stands out.

‘So there would be no point to it without this relationship. And of course, I have a lot of individual dialogues with a lot of listeners, and I often do a show on a theme. Like, about someone called Maria, and if I ever say in advance that’s what I’m going to do, then a lot of people always suggest things; they’ve always got their own angle you never would have thought of. And I did one on Kings, and I was thinking of people like BB King, and Albert King and King Sunny Ade, and a guy suggests a song by Ben Harper called ‘Like a king’, and the chorus is Martin Luther’s dream became Rodney’s nightmare. I’ve never listened to it. I’ve heard it but I’ve never focused on it, so that led me into playing a bit of Martin Luther King’s speech, but without that suggestion of him, I wouldn’t have though of it. And then I played a UB40 song called ‘King’, which is about Martin Luther King.

'So they give me the leads and I follow them.

'In general, every other week these days I have a guest come in with what I call "Radio Ping Pong". So it’s whoever I’m interested in, really. Damon Albarn came in, and sometimes it’ll be a guy who works in a record shop in the middle of London and nobody knows him except the people who go into that shop. But I know he really knows his onions.'

Great answer. Thanks, Charlie.

'Wordy-Gurdy' on the radio, March

2010-03-17T22:33:00.006+11:00

Jackey Coyle’s Wordy-Gurdy on Helen Jennings’ Roots of Rhythm, PBS 106.7 FM, 9.30–10am on the 3rd Wednesday of the month, Wednesday, 17 March

We eased into the show with Grant Lee Phillips’ dreamy and tender 'Little moon', the title track off last October's album. Since Grant Lee Buffalo imploded and Phillips became a father at the age of 44, he’s beome ‘more and more comfortable stripping away a lot of the artifice’. Recorded over four days, the album’s 12 tracks had been so often played that they shine with a patina polished by a core band including drummer Jay Bellerose (Plant & Krauss).

The Twoks delivered two gripping sets at Bennetts Lane in February. We played an instrumental track featuring violinist Xani Kolac with sister Meg Kolac on double bass. We caught a different live rhythm section from the album – Tom Gannon and Brett Canning before they went overseas – but with the new rhythm section – Mark Leahy on drums and Stewart Taylor on bass – Kolac feels the Twoks have ‘settled into our "sound" which oscillates between instrumental improvised music to more dance-y, rhythmic tracks’. With influences such as Muse, Sigur Ros, Camille and Bjork, what a starting point. Upcoming gigs are recommended.

Being of Irish extraction, and it being St Pat’s day, I brought Luka Bloom in to heat the room up to steamy.

Hawaiian steel/slack key player Ken Emerson contributed a ‘Quasi-tango’ followed by our own Tom Forsell & the Luau Cowboys with a rhumba named after his fave trout stream.

After an inspiring night at Spensers Live with Kerri Simpson, Wendy Rule and Monique Brumby, I started thinking about Monique’s new single, and with these three mavericks you’d expect no less than a total non–Top 40 theme, in fact a song about Alzheimer’s that hits anyone touched by this disease like a runaway tram.

I started thinking about John Prine and realised it’s 40 years since he wrote ‘Hello in there’ and ‘Sam Stone’ on his suburban Chicago mail run. I quoted from Greg Kot’s Chicago Tribune blog that quotes Bob Dylan: ‘Prine's stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree.’ (Go, Bob.)
Prine says, ‘I might’ve had the melody for “Hello in there” before I wrote it, but otherwise…the métier of the lines had an arrow pointing which way to go with the music.’

Review
20 February, Fiddlers Fest, Blackwood with expat US cajun fiddler Richard Klein who now lives in Wellington, NZ
24 February, The Twoks
27 February, Songs of the sirens, a night of magic & music – Kerri Simpson, Wendy Rule, Monique Brumby, Spensers Live

Preview
20 March, Luau Cowboys, Marquis of Lorne 5-7.30pm
21 March, Chris Smither, Brunswick Town Hall
21 April, the Twoks, The Toff in Town
4 May noon and 5pm 7 May, the Twoks, Melbourne International Jazz Festival, Fed Square Stage

Tracks
Grant Lee Phillips, ‘Little moon’, Little moon (YepRock/Shock)
The Twoks, ‘Luckier than fish’, It won’t end that way (indie)
Luka Bloom, ‘Monsoon’, Amsterdam (Shock)
Ken Emerson, ‘Tropico Pacifico’, Hawaiian tangos, hulas & blues (Hana Ola)
Tom Forsell, ‘Pilgrim rhumba’, When two worlds collide (indie)
John Prine, ‘Hello in there’, Souvenirs (Oh Boy)

Next show Wednesday, 19 April

Mid-March, midnight

2010-03-15T23:31:00.009+11:00

It’s been ages.

You know when life seizes you by the throat and tells you to just get on with it? Well, I guess it’s seized me, shaken me and I've been doing just that.

Glad to see the inquest has been reconvened for the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee. The weekend’s Australian carried a story by Tony Koch mentioning the Queensland Police Union's scandalous behaviour – although it emerged last week, it was well documented by Chloe Hooper in her book The tall man.

How shameful that there is still no verdict on this man’s death in custody, and no wonder the bereaved family refuses to accept a long-overdue apology from Chris Hurley, the policeman charged with manslaughter. Had it been earlier, Eric Doomadgee may not have taken his own life 19 months after his father's death.

Hooper spoke at the Wheeler Centre opening on the anniversary of Sorry Day. She quoted one of Aesop’s fables, the one about the competition between the sun and the wind to make a man take off his coat. She knew, when she first heard it as a child, that the competition was unfair. The wind could never win. Her words cut straight to the core of this wound in our country.

I read that book, crazily, as I was trying to get my head back in one place after returning from Warmun. It tipped my life askew, filling my nights with poignant dreams and my days with off-kilter musings. I’d been there and come back, and was further than ever from solutions. We would never fit in there. We were not missionaries. We were not misfits or mercenaries. Perhaps we were madmen – we just wanted to do something to make the competition less unequal.

Last Tuesday we were reunited with two beautiful Gija women from Warmun, Lena Nyadbi and Mabel Juli, great painters both. It was a decade since Lena had begun showing at Niagara Galleries and a celebratory catalogue accompanied Lena’s exhibition of superb ochres. The show runs until 1 April.

Film: A single man

I loved the film adaptation of A single man.

With musical treats from the likes of Etta James and Booker T & the MGs, who could demur? And the visual treats just kept on coming. The colour changes, the composition of each shot, the immaculate ‘British gentleman’ style that set Firth apart in 1960s California. The ploy of leaving the camera on Firth’s face as expressions played across it – an astute move on the part of novice director Tom Ford, aka a Gucci fashion designer.

Should Colin Firth have won Best Actor at the Oscars? It may not have been ‘his time’ yet, but his acting here is magnificent. I’d vote for Firth, even though Jeff Bridges was outstanding as the crumbling Bad Blake. And not to forget the performance of Julianne Moore – so 1960s, so glam, so dissipated.

Listen up this Wednesday, 17 March. I’m on air 9.30–10am with my ‘Wordy-Gurdy’ segment on Helen Jennings’ Roots of Rhythm, PBS 106.7FM. It’s chockfull of goodies!

Pic: beautiful Nathalia in northern Victoria as we missed the big storm in Melbourne

Films: Crazy Heart and The Road

2010-03-01T13:24:00.005+11:00

Desperation. Life on a never-ending road. These movies have as much in common as what sets them apart. With cinematography just right for the big screen, the vast US landscape takes star billing in both, but the quality of the soundtracks is just one of the divergent components.

For aging country singer Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges), the hero of Crazy Heart , life on the road is the fading musician’s existence, driving from one one-night stand to the next, pointless in every way but that of subsistence. The Man (Viggo Mortensen) and the Boy (Jodi Smit-McPhee) of The Road endure an even more desperate subsistence – waging a daily battle to keep on living while there is hope, but determined to die if a more terrible alternative is inescapable.

Bad Blake’s round of gigs begins at his lowest point with a pick-up band in a bowling alley and goes on to a neighbourhood bar gig that promises to be just as bad, but is salvaged by some fine local musicians. A union of souls happens there – it’s one of those meetings that make the spontaneous chicken-skin moments that are unique (and rarely recorded) in live music. The rapport of these musicians is the only thing that makes the love affair between the broken-down, gone-to-seed Bad and the young single-mother journo Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal) believable – that onstage magic is the turn-on that transcends rational decision-making.

As much as anything this is the story of an alcoholic and his recovery. Ironically, his lowest point comes when he has finally found a sense of purpose with Jean. But it’s never going to work out with either Jean or Bad’s neglected son and thankfully so, otherwise this film would descend disappointingly into mawk-land.

However, in The Road the supremely tender father-son relationship shines among the desperation, makes a haven in the relentless hardships. How can a father teach his son all he needs to know to survive the cataclysm? Especially when the Mother (Charlize Theron) has gone, opted for an early escape. How can he die without passing this knowledge on, and worse, how can he kill his son to save him from a more terrible death?

Jeff Bridges slips perfectly into the musical role of Bad Blake, for this fine actor has been playing music since he could hold an instrument. The stunning soundtrack comes from young singer-songwriter Ryan Bingham and the roots maestro T Bone Burnett , who cemented his persona as Mr Roots Music after O Brother where Art Thou?

The uncanny ability of Bingham to capture the rhythm of the road in the theme song ‘The Weary Kind’ is explained by the song actually being written on the road in the tour bus between gigs. Although under 30, he has an ‘old soul’, according to Burnett. (Funnily enough, Bad Blake’s redemption comes with his salvation via a younger protégé, Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell).)

In contrast, The Road soundtrack by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is disappointing in its mediocrity and insignificance. It exhibits none of the harrowing qualities of the story.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was my 2009 book of the year. Naturally, in the film I missed the beauty of the text – the sentences and word groups that are so right that they make the chicken-skin moments of literature. But I felt the plot was changed just a little too much, twisted just a little out of whack. I guess it reinforces my preferred order – film then book – and I look forward to reading Crazy Heart.

Both these movies parallel in their sense of a passing on of the baton – worthy of note for this, the baby-boomer generation, long accused of not giving up a thing to the next comers.

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, February

2010-02-17T14:24:00.008+11:00

Jackey Coyle’s Wordy-Gurdy on Helen Jennings’ Roots of Rhythm, 9:30am PBS 106.7FM, Wednesday, 17 February 2010

Happenstance and helpful friends enabled this month’s show.

Last week I jumped at the opportunity to catch Nigel Kennedy with the MSO in a show featuring the music of Bach and Ellington. Kennedy played his wild-looking electric violin for the Ellington set; highlights included ‘Caravan’, ‘Come Sunday’, ‘Prelude to a kiss’ and ‘Perdido’.The show had the intimacy and drive of the greatest roots music gigs I have experienced, and the vibrations of Kennedy’s Doc Martens booting the stage as he spurred both himself and the musicians on is an unforgettable detail of a sensational performance all round.

Kennedy has always been torn between classical and jazz, in fact performing jazz even while a scholarship student of Yehudi Menuhin. Menuhin regretted his inability to jam with the likes of Stephane Grappelli, and Kennedy made sure this didn't happen to him. Living 50/50 in London and Poland, he leads a Polish jazz band and crossed over from EMI Classics to make a Blue Note album in New York City in late 2005, focusing on jazz classics as well as two of his own compositions, with a line-up of both jazz greats and gifted younger players.

A deluxe edition including a 17-minute film on DVD is almost out of print, but try Thomas’ in the city in case they still have one. The CD-only version is still available, and Kennedy has released several albums since then on EMI.

Kennedy’s Oz connection dates back to his father performing in the touring Kennedy Troupe, and his family descended on him after the Hamer Hall gig the next night to make him extremely late for a hastily arranged 11pm jam at Abbotsford Convent.

A treat was in store with the gifted electric violinist Xani Kolac, who filled in with an impromptu solo set. One to look out for is the Twoks, a trio comprising Kolac, a VCA Masters student, as well as bassist Stewart Taylor and drummer Mark Leahy. They have just launched their debut album It won’t end that way.

Julien Wilson (sax), Jeremy Allsup (bass guitar) and Darren Farrugia (drums) filled in for what seemed like an interminable wait until Allan Zavod leapt on stage, followed by Kennedy. There’s a Duke Ellington connection here – Zavod was a student of the Melbourne Conservatorium when Ellington discovered him playing jazz piano and arranged for him to study at Berklee School of Music where he later held a post as professor of music. During 20 years in the USA he played, recorded and toured with the likes of Glen Miller Orchestra, Cab Calloway, Jean Luc-Ponty and George Benson, and furthered the legend with a 1984 world tour with Frank Zappa. The 50 minutes of jam were only halted by the accursed licensing laws and Kennedy urged the audience to fight them. Next week’s rally is our opportunity.

See Nigel play the Doctor Who theme here.

Andy Baylor won a Golden Fiddle Award in Tamworth for best fiddle album – his creative MA project double CD Possum stole the pumpkin – and looking at the thesis, I loved his journal notes and his premises about the origins of Cajun music and its similarity to Australia’s roots music culture, in that we are forming a grab bag of influences from all over the place.

From Andy’s journal:

I remember being strongly affected by the strong hypnotic rhythms, the unusual, melodious fiddle, the plaintive singing and above all the uncanny simplicity of the music.
I didn’t know where it came from, who the Cajuns were, or what their history was. I just heard the music and thought that I would like to play music like that. It was a bit like falling in love—it came out of nowhere, felt right, and I wanted to be swept up by it. (Baylor, personal narrative, 2005)

The thesis has opened up so much that could be explored further.

We played a selection chosen by Baylor: 'Gulf Coast special’, named after the Southern Gulf Coast, which stretches along Louisiana and Texa. He says:

The tune is modelled on the pentatonic Creole styles of dance music that have become the staple for many Zydeco and Cajun tunes. The prime influence I discern in this style is African music. The tune has de-tuned fiddle FCGD with rattles and Brazilian hand drum and the drone of a 1930s dobro tenor guitar tuned DGBD. The effect is, to my ears, an example of a real Australian hybrid of influences ranging from Cajun, Creole, Old-timey Appalachian to West African. It was recorded in West Melbourne in 2007.

And finally to Mistaken Identity’s CD launch last month at the stylish Paris Cat in the city. A full house sashayed revealingly up and down the stairs – my new favourite place to make a grand entrance – from the gallery salon into the matchbox-sized venue. The empathy between brothers Steve and Mal Sedergreen (piano and sax) was tangible as they took the sets through vigorous renditions of the songs from the double CD, a fitting return to performance for the brothers, with Ted Vining (drums) and Nick Haywood (bass).

Review
Mistaken Identity Live CD launch, Paris Cat, Saturday, January 23
Music inspired by Bach & Ellington, Nigel Kennedy & Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Hamer Hall, Thursday, 11 February
Super Jam, Nigel Kennedy & Allan Zavod w/ Julien Wilson (sax), Jeremy Allsup (bass guitar), Darren Farrugia (drums), Abbotsford Convent, Friday, 12 February

Preview
Andy Baylor Saturday, 20 February, Bennetts Lane with Julia Messenger
SLAM Rally 4pm Tuesday, 23 February, State Library of Victoria
The Twoks Wednesday, Feb 24, Bennetts Lane
And Baylor 8pm Wednesday, 24 February,Clifton Hill Hotel with Eagan Sisters

Tracks
‘I almost lost my mind’, Nigel Kennedy, electric violin; Lucky Peterson, Hammond; Ron Carter, bass; Jack DeJohnette drums; JD Allen, tenor sax; Blue Note Sessions (Blue Note Records/EMI)

‘Maybe in your dreams’, Nigel Kennedy, electric violin; Ron Carter, bass; Jack DeJohnette, drums; Kenny Werner, piano; Joe Lovano, tenor sax; Blue Note Sessions (Blue Note Records/EMI)

‘Gulf Coast special’, Andy Baylor, Possum stole my pumpkin (indie)

Next show 9.30am Wednesday, 17 March

Doing the work

2010-02-04T18:41:00.005+11:00

One time in the early 1990s we saw Van Morrison at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall. As he began ‘And it stoned me’, some members of the audience began to sing along. He stopped the band, turned to face the audience and said, ‘Shut the f--- up.’

‘But we love you, Van,’ a woman called.

‘Shut the f--- up,’ he replied. ‘Let us do the work.’

Well, yes, he is Mr Grumpy, and won no hearts with his repartee at a New Orleans Jazzfest gig a decade later (two words: ‘The band’).

But there is something to be said for watching a master do the work. Merely watching and learning.

So it was, a couple of Saturdays ago watching Roger Taylor at work during the final show of a fill-in series on RRR’s The Party Show during my first stint as a producer. The time was not conducive to a seizing of the next day, being midnight to 2am. And many guests were reluctant to burn the midnight oil, although most musos were up for it. And the guests of honour, the two Marios from Marios and the dearly departed Continental Café, sparkled throughout.

The show was a two-hour tribute to Prahran’s ‘Conti’, still mentioned nine years after its demise, most recently last month by rockabilly filly Rosie Flores at an instore gig at Basement Discs. And several Live at the Conti CDs have hit the shelves, the latest being Marco Goldsmith & Blue Heat’s release of late last year.

Anyway, talking about watching masters at work, the Conti was the pinnacle of gigs. The notion of combining hospitality and music into one stylish bundle was mooted and then executed with finesse by the Marios and the team they gathered around them.

I found out that being a producer involved sitting outside the studio in front of a Commander phone, looking through a window at the action, keeping the phone lights under control, ringing guests and keeping them on the line according to the schedule.

Conveniently placed were a black Texta and Blu-Tack, and I soon realized what they were there for as the phone lit up with musos and punters ringing in to share reminiscences. I became adept at lightning scrawls of names and messages in large caps, and Blu-Tacking strips of A4 sheets onto the glass with cryptic notes that needed to be totally unambiguous to save my furious charades in a vain attempt to rectify a misunderstanding.

Rog sat at the helm, talking to the Marios, completely in control, not concerned how long people had been waiting, how many lines were buzzing at me for attention, for he knew exactly what he was doing. People hung up to save mobile charges, went to bed, worried about volume once they got on air and rang on other lines to get a better line. I juggled phone lights, tried to keep names and line numbers straight on the increasingly messy messages, getting more and more hyper as the night wore on.

It was a sensational show that riveted listeners' ears awake. A fitting finale to Rog's five fillers. We ran out of time and the schedule got crowded, for everyone wanted to talk. Our scheduled guests included Kerri Simpson, Graham Barker, Geoff Achison and Marco G, but then ex-band booker Bernard Galbally rang in at 1.15 from his holiday camp site and it all ended up in a rush, 2am and I didn’t even get to talk about putting together the 'RIP Conti' piece for the Addicted to Noise website and Rhythms magazine in June of 2001, which follows, minus quotes from the 20 or so musos and music biz folks.

This is a new and improved version with just my own recollections as well as those of Rog, which didn’t make the print version.

THE CONTINENTAL
NO. 1 ON THE CHART OF OUR HEARTS

Melbourne's premier live music venue, the much-loved Conti, has closed for business but the memories linger on. Musicians and writers share their recollections.

By Jackey Coyle

The Continental Café and the upstairs Continental venue closed their doors on Sunday May 20 with a spectacular farewell show marking the end of nearly a decade as Melbourne's premier live-music venue. After the show the festivities, elegies and rituals continued until well into the daylight hours. It was a classic wake, encompassing the full gamut of emotions; a fitting end to a venue deeply rooted in the Melbourne psyche, one that became a cultural hub for artists of all stripes.

The decision to close was made after the owners of The Continental, Mario DePasquale and Mario Maccarone, were unable to negotiate a new lease with their landlords. In the 10 years that The Continental has been operating it has won a firm place in your hearts, illustrated by the many awards. These include numerous Rhythms Readers Poll Awards as Best Venue and several ‘Best Café’ awards.

Over the years The Continental presented an amazing array of international and local artists. Renee Geyer, Kate Ceberano, Vince Jones, Ross Wilson, Joe Camilleri, Stephen Cummings, Chris Wilson and Shane O'Mara were all regulars who spearheaded a who's who of Australian talent. Overseas guests included Ron Sexsmith, Keiran Kane & Kevin Welch, Melissa Etheridge, Leo Kottke, Nick Lowe, Jimmy Smith, Luka Bloom, Loudon Wainwright III, Guy Clark, Charlie Musselwhite, Keb Mo’, Harry Connick Jr, k.d. Lang, Jimmy Webb, World Party, Alex Chilton, Taj Mahal, Mike Stern, Shawn Colvin, John Hammond and Jonathan Richman! (To name but a few.)

Music writers and musicians were keen to share their memories of the venue.

JACKEY COYLE
Rhythms

The curtains, the art, the lighting. Graham Barker's clock built into the wall. The offering of a drink as soon as you set foot in the place, whether as a friend, an artist, a manager or the mooter of a wild proposition. These will be some of the many little gracious and stylish touches I'll remember, recalling the Conti in the same breath as another defunct Melbourne cultural icon, Mietta's. Birthdays, parties, politics, poetry, pétanque. Artist lunches; even Stelarc performed there. Creative energy that oozed, inspired, awed.

The mad Sunday-midnight ‘hangs’, when the next exhibition would be magicked onto the wall. My first framing show, Bob Whitaker's Beatles photos, went up that way.
The music... shows by a dream list of longtime international idols, as well as our sensational array of local talent polished up to their fullest radiance by the surroundings. Big nights like the Bob Marley tribute, the Bob Dylan Woodstock album launch. National living treasure Jim Jensen playing his Hawaiian guitar in a setting he deserves, with Alex Burns.
What memories. Thanks, guys.

ROGER TAYLOR
Presenter, High & Low, 3RRR-FM
Ex-road manager: Chain, Blackfeather, Sid Rumpo, West Creek

Believe it or not, apart from making a small contribution to Chain’s achievement of the all-time bar-take record – till James Reyne broke it a few weeks later – I went to The Continental to look at the art. I always knew that there would be good art on the walls. That made the difference. The quick pesto on those cold, rainy Tuesday afternoons tasted even better gazing at the Westcott, the McCarthy, the Barker, the Scott, the Leiss, the Whitaker and the Hickey. Then there was the time that that famous rock band, what was their name again, was having lunch at that table in the other corner. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Didn’t Howard Arkley sell some drawings at The Continental? And didn’t Kylie fancy one of the waiters? Mario always told you when Andrew Leoncelli had been in.

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, January 2010

2010-01-20T12:26:00.006+11:00

Jackey Coyle’s Wordy-Gurdy on Helen Jennings’ Roots of Rhythm, PBS 106.7 FM, 9.30–10am on the 3rd Wednesday of the month
20 JANUARY 2010

The first ‘Wordy-Gurdy’ on the first Roots of Rhythm for 2010! We had some treats to kick the year off. Our own fiddler extraordinaire Andy Baylor weighed in with a double album, Possum stole the pumpkin, completed late last year as part of his Masters under Kipps Horn at RMIT, one CD written in 2005 at the Blue Moon Lodge, Lafayette, Louisiana; one in Oz 2006–07. Andy plays his usual plethora of fiddles, guitars and mandolin and Denis Close is on percussion. Guests on some tracks include Sam Lemann, Sophie Dunn, Leigh Barker and Peter Baylor.

And another double CD landed on the desk yesterday from Steve & Mal Sedergreen’s Mistaken Identity, one recorded last year and the other a decade ago, due for launching this Saturday. Comprising jazz pianist and educator Steve (also the director of Dizzy's Jazz Club 1999–2006), brother Mal on alto, soprano and tenor saxes, drummer Ted Vining and double bassist Nick Haywood in the current line-up, the band's released several albums over the years

A treat at Basement Discs earlier this month was an instore gig from Mexicano-Americano guitar whiz Rosie Flores, the sole Melbourne gig until a tour that should happen later this year. Although as part of this flying visit from a NZ tour she did do a backyarder down the beach at Torquay. She writes on her blog: 'I enjoyed watching singer songwriter Sarah Carroll playing her ukulele and crooning some really great songs … Sarah plays with a band called the Junes. When I got up on a borrowed guitar from Tiffany Eckhardt to sing I was joined by Junes bandmates Gleny Rae on fiddle, Dougie Bull on bass and Suzannah Espie vocals along with … Chris Wilson on blazing harmonica.'

We played a gorgeous long slow blues from the Rockabilly Filly. More to come in following months.

And talking of the Junes, as promised last year, a couple of stunners from the new incarnation of Git and the Toe Sucking Cowgirls. This was an act that held us in thrall on the Queenscliff Express down at Queenscliff Music Fest in November, so much so that we couldn’t change carriages with the rest of the punters – just had to stay for more, more, more. There’s Sarah, Suzannah, Gleny Rae and Dougie as well as drummer Chris Tabone.

Tracks Steve & Mal Sedergreen’s Mistaken Identity, ‘One for Barry’, Live (Newmarket)
Andy Baylor, ‘Fatsound two-step’, Possum stole the pumpkin (indie)
The Junes, ‘Captain Morgan’, 12 Golden Greats (indie)
Rosie Flores & the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, ‘Dark enough at midnight’, Girl of the century (Bloodshot/Shock)
Andy Baylor, ‘Amade played accordion’, Possum stole the pumpkin (indie)
The Junes, ‘Work for me’, 12 Golden Greats (indie)

Gigs Charlie Parr 9pm this Thursday January 21 at the Corner also live instore at Basement Discs 12:30pm this Friday January 22
Mistaken Identity CD launch 8pm this Saturday January 23 at Paris Cat
Andy Baylor 5:30–8:30pm next Saturday January 30 Lomond

Next show 9:30am PBS 106.7FM, Wednesday, 17 February 2010

Guilty until proven innocent

2010-01-15T17:43:00.006+11:00

Moving into MMX, it feels to me like a decade’s worth of changes is already underway.

But change sneaks up on us humans, as we accept the small changes that eventually, cumulatively, can constitute a revolution. The erosion of our personal privacy seems to have happened as fast as a rug being whipped out from under our feet. But looking back to September 11 and the widespread introduction of computers, in fact it’s been slow and steady.

When, at first, terrorism brought about airport searches, they started out as traumatic, but how quickly they have become perfectly normal. Marketers have even seized the opportunities for travel accessories such as tiny cosmetics bottles. But how confusing it was for my Alzheimer’s-afflicted father while he was still able to travel, watching his wallet and the contents of his pockets disappear on the black rubber belt. This was totally alien to the world he knew in his bones and in his heart, even though he was not able to articulate it. (Of course he forgot his possessions and walked off, once he got through the screening doorway and could see a clear path ahead and what seemed like a familiar action to take as it opened up.)

How many innocent people have had personal possessions confiscated or humiliating personal or baggage searches carried out for the sake of a relatively small number of lunatics? How many productive hours have been lost with the extra time required to spend at airports prior to a flight?

Along with that, security cameras are now commonplace in public places and mobile phones, social networking sites and credit cards enable us to be tracked with ease. However, I strongly assert that being photographed without permission when attending talks is an unacceptable invasion.

Yes, true, terrorists do cause immense suffering and I won’t negate that by adding a ‘but’. And they have brought about a seismic shift in our climate. We have all become guilty until proven innocent.

The latest invasion of privacy that seems to have been accepted without a blink is the Working with Children check. It seems to be required for anything from driving a few kids to sports on Saturday to lecturing at uni. The amount of misinformation supplied as to procedures and ID requirements ranges from police giving wrong details to other community stalwarts who have not been kept in the loop as to recent changes in requirements. Now countless people are being asked to supply both originals and copies of a range of forms of ID, the specifications of which are as complicated as filling out a tax return. A driver’s licence, credit card, Medicare card and ATM card are not sufficient. Items from three different categories – from passports to bank statements and super statements and car registration – are required.

To fulfil all this necessitates considerable time, expense and multiple venues. Excuse me? I’m aware the tax office now knows pretty well (and scarily) more about my financial affairs than I do, but should the assistant at the post office have access to this information?

Now the British system of justice we assumed was our birthright is outdated.

Again, for the sake of the most contemptible of criminals, in this case paedophiles, we are all guilty until proven innocent.

There's nothing like beach holidaze …

2010-01-15T17:28:00.009+11:00

There ain't nothing quite as Aussie as a good old waterside jaunt – some sand between the toes, enough heat to build up a sweat, good friends and limpid rock pools can melt away the craziness of Christmas and slide the old year smoothly out of the consciousness.

Our getaway was at Kilcunda, on the southern coast. Mistah had a ball, skidding on the floorboards with Jude and Tim's two, Mr Brown and Felix, and we plonked around happily together.

What the Dickens?

2009-12-23T16:37:00.007+11:00

It was the best of years, it was the worst of years. Looking back on 2009, it was too tempting to resist paraphrasing Dickens. But who am I to tamper with a master? So here’s the full quote in all its magnificence.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
– Charles Dickens, A tale of two cities

I’m a sucker for a beautiful book, and I fell in love with Dickens all over again after rummaging through the stacks for a Folio Society edition of A Christmas carol. I was actually in search of words to inspire a Christmas card project but I fell into the stories and I never did finish that card design; we ended up with readymades.

It’s been a Dickens of a year. And a Cormac McCarthy year and a Joyce Carol Oates year and a Peter Goldsworthy year and a Glen David Gold year and an Alexander Waugh year and an MJ Hyland leading into Albert Camus year …

Anyway, strange to discover it in London, but NZ writer Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip began my Dickens revival. Jones's theme is the power of storytelling to heal, to transcend a reality that is too brutal to bear, to build bridges between black and white, across centuries and continents. The plot centres around a young girl, Matilda, who survives the bloodshed of Bougainville’s civil war in the 1990s. Dickens’ Great expectations is the only textbook in the little school maintained by the village’s self-appointed teacher, Mr Watts, who is also the only white person in the community. He opens Matilda's eyes to a larger world than that portrayed by her God-fearing mother.

The poetic quality of Mister Pip guided me into a year of poetry too, courtesy Mr Stephen Fry and his Ode less travelled.

As I savour Dickens’ Scrooge and Marley, then examine yet again the watercolour endpieces, it is last Christmas and we are in London among the Regent Street lights, our breath fogging in the early darkness, and then in the bustle of Borough Market, the vendors dressed to the nines with their poultry and game and baked goods rivalling the lush rounded shapes of the winter fruit and veg and our heads full of rich aromas and our ears filled with carols and the hubbub of that great city. My beloved ones around me and the pubs of Greenwich waiting for us on the way home. It makes me wish for a magic carpet.

This year, here in this other great city, there are parties and our friends and other beloved ones around us and new traditions to meld now, to make sense of this southern hemisphere life, where it’s just passed the summer solstice and the long, lazy days beckon to recompense the frantic lead-up time.

And here’s cheers to you, dear reader, wherever you are. I wish you peace and happiness for the coming days, and clarity and laughter and inspiration in 2010. Thanks for reading.

The strength of water

2009-12-17T18:54:00.005+11:00

The Strength of Water
Running time 83 minutes

Here’s a film where both the setting and music play starring roles. The wild, brooding Hokianga in New Zealand’s far north is home to the isolated Maori community featured in this New Zealand–Germany coproduction. It’s the debut feature film for NZ director-writer team Armagan Ballantyne and playwright Briar Grace-Smith, and stars first-time child actors Hato Paparoa and Melanie Mayall-Nahi as 10-year-old twins Kimi and Melody.

When a stranger, Tai (newcomer Isaac Barber), comes to the small mist-shrouded and mountain-shadowed hamlet, he precipitates an accident that forces the twins apart and thus Kimi must learn to live an independent life.

Briar-Smith explores the mystery of twins – how they can operate in two halves as a complete whole – by placing Melody as the more confident leader, and Kimi as the chubby follower. The loss of Melody precipitates grief in the community that affects people in diverse ways. Parents Gibby (Jim Moriarty, The Waimate Conspiracy, the Returning) and Joy (Nancy Brunning, What Becomes of the Broken Hearted) grieve like ghosts while brother Gene (newcomer Shayne Biddell) takes the violent route and lonesome teenage Tirea (Pare Paseka) finds a kindred spirit in Tai.

Universal themes resonate through the story – I felt the pain of Tai as the outsider who causes the accident and becomes the outcast. I wept at the traditional Maori tangi (funeral), held in a real marae (meeting house) and shows raw emotion so tangible that it seems to leap from the screen. I wondered how Kimi will learn to cope. Yet it was hard to feel sympathy for the unlikeable and sullen child, who occupies the screen for most of the film.

The risk of using mostly first-time actors was intended to pay off in a freshness of approach, and perhaps this was a bonus. Perhaps it’s the script that lets down the dialogue, which may have been salvaged by more experienced actors. Mostly it comes across as surly, clumsy and banal, and indeed one course of action to save it would have been to take a leaf out of Samson and Delilah’s book and simply ditch the dialogue where it had no purpose to drive the narrative forward. Often it limped.

The film’s most important function is not the plot, for it’s not substantial enough to drive a feature-length film, but the cultural knowledge that’s generously imparted. Cultural challenges were nowhere more pronounced in the making of the film than in the funeral scene. Death is the most sacred phase of the human cycle for the Maori, and to be allowed to use a real marae for a fictional tangi (funeral) entailed a series of hui (meetings) with locals. For them, the very bedrock of their belief system needed to be rethought to juxtapose fiction onto their community. Then more challenges arose, for example, considering which photographs could be used on the dead people’s wall of the marae, and how to cope with a fictional cemetery springing up overnight.

The cinematography in that majestic environment could not fail to impress and its haunting quality underlines its role as the driver of the plot, setting the mood in its storms, rain and mists. However, occasional jarring notes sound by simple things such as horizons being off horizontal at moments that should be serene.

A scene where Melody sings as she twirls poi (a ball of woven flax) hauls the strong soundtrack into the spotlight. Warren Maxwell and Peter Golub have plundered NZ music from the last half-century, with tracks from 1950s star Bill Wolfgramm with Daphne Walker (‘When my wahine does the poi’) to hip-hop artist Flowz (‘Anger man’).

NZ-born singer and guitarist Warren Maxwell is the leader of psychedelic blues quartet Little Bushman. Formerly the lead singer with NZ band Trinity Roots, he is also saxophonist in Fat Freddy’s Drop and involved with theatre sound design, as well as scoring for short films. New York City–born Peter Golub composes for film, theatre, ballet and concert hall, and since 1998 he has been the Director of the Sundance Film Music Program.

Tonga-born lap steel guitarist Bill Wolfgramm helped bring Hawaiian music to the forefront in New Zealand’s dance halls in the 1950s. Flowz (ex-Footsouljahs) is currently developing a solo career. Also featured is Hirini Melbourne (1950–2003), a Maori language revivalist who left dozens of songs that are now sung in New Zealand classrooms. His later-life exploration of traditional Maori instruments sits perfectly with the ethos of this film – listen out for his ‘Ti hore mai’.

Worth seeing? Yes. If only for the combination of the cultural insights with the country. And the music is a bonus.

The Strength of Water is showing at Chauvel Cinema Paddington, NSW from Thursday, 17 to Wednesday, 23 December.

Pic: Melody (Melanie Mayall-Nahi) and Tai (Isaac Barber)

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio December

2009-12-16T14:51:00.007+11:00

Jackey Coyle’s Wordy-Gurdy on Helen Jennings’ Roots of Rhythm, PBS 106.7 FM, 9.30–10am Wednesday 16 December 2009

The best of ‘Wordy-Gurdy’ for the year, with a jam-packed show that trespassed way over time (and there was not a Christmas song to be found).

Review: Queenscliff Music Festival battled seaside weather and uneven programming to give an array of delights that included the Blues Train – dubbed the Queenscliff Festival Express for the weekend – and we travelled on separate days, Helen with Mal Webb Saturday and us rocking on with the Junes on Sunday. Seychelles-born, Perth-based Grace Barbe had the place dancing and Tim Finn took the pop crowd out on Sunday. The Rolling Stones tribute garnered raves from all quarters.

Tracks: Hoola, ‘La Rosita’ and ‘Aloha oe’, Hoola (indie); Kendra Shank, ‘All of you’, Mosaic (Challenge); Ry Cooder & Manuel Galban, ‘Caballo vieio’, Mambo Sinuendo (Nonesuch/Perro Verde); Lil Johnson, ‘Get ’em from the peanut man (the new hot nuts)’, Raunchy Business: Hot nuts & lollipops (Columbia/Legacy); Suzannah Espie & the Last Word, ‘Let it slide’, The first & last hotel (indie); Red Stick Ramblers, ‘Les oiseaux vont chanter’, Made in the shade (Sugar Hill); Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, ‘Please remember me’, A stranger here (Anti/Shock); Willie Nelson & Asleep at the Wheel, ‘South’, Willie & the Wheel (Bismeaux Records)

Preview: Andy Baylor CD launch, December 20, Northcote Social Club; Hardrive, New Year’s Eve, Lerdies restaurant & bar, Blackwood, December 31 – accomm info.

Greetings of the season! It's been great to be back on the airwaves sharing the music with you. If you'd like to see the playlist for the whole year, or the previous years right back to 2005, just go to the about page for a pdf.

Next show 9:30am PBS 106.7FM, Wednesday, 20 January 2010

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, November

2009-11-18T17:20:00.007+11:00

Jackey Coyle’s Wordy-Gurdy on Helen Jennings’ Roots of Rhythm, PBS 106.7 FM, 9.30–10am Wednesday, 18 November

Preview Queenscliff Music Fest is coming up the weekend after next. Friday-night highlights at this cornucopia of sounds and styles are Broome’s Pigram Brothers, our own Marcia Hines and Marco Goldsmith’s Blue Heat.

Saturday, I’ll be looking out for Djan Djan, Rory Ellis and Charles Jenkins & the Zhivagos and that night can’t resist Organ Boy (Barry Organ), Hammond. Special events are the Rolling Stones tribute and the Telstra Road to Tamworth.

On Sunday I’ll be looking for country supergroup the Junes and Tim Finn. Really looking forward to Grace Barbe from the Seychelles – a tiny island nation 1000km east of Kenya. The music, like the culture, is a gumbo of Africa, Europe and Asia so it’s a rhythmic, tropical fusion of creole, reggae, funk and afro beat.

Review Wangaratta Jazz Fest: For its 20th year, the Wangaratta Festival of Jazz & Blues greeted visitors with a colourful image makeover.

Hot, hot, hot – Wangaratta turned up the heat up, and the program sizzled to match the weather.

The brand-new multimillion-dollar venue PAC with its two performance spaces had an unexpected bonus usefulness, which was as a cooling shortcut between venues. Great acoustics and very comfortable. However, the small size is disappointing: the main venue seems to have been grown out of already. Certainly not for lack of planning, more lack of funding apparently.

Jazz, blues or both? It was a bit further to switch between venues than before the blues marquee was relocated, but with some judicious planning you could do it!

Actually caught Charles Tolliver, twice – NYC-based trumpeter since 1960s, recorded and toured with such greats as Art Blakey, McCoy Tyner, Sonny Rollins, Hank Mobley. Caught him first with the Jazzgroove Mothership Orchestra, second with Charles Tolliver Quartet (Mike Nock, piano, Malaysia-born, Oz-educated, NYC-based Linda Oh, bass, Tommy Crane, drums).

Ari Hoenig Quartet – innovative and inimitable NYC drummer Ari Hoenig, Israeli guitarist Gilead Hekselman, our own Jamie Oehlers on sax and Sam Anning, bass. Stunning and innovative, with a guitarist who plays like a pianist and 'one of the most maniacally obsessive, spasmodic and musical drummers in jazz’ (Jazz Times).

The fest had its biggest international blues line-up yet, to go with the two-year-old purpose-built shelter above the new, bigger green space across the river. The old space looks tiny now.

UK-based James Hunter – Van Morrison’s guitarist for a while, but Van said he was too good a singer to just be a guitarist and actually guested on his first album. A highly professional, slick, danceable act with vocals you’ve heard across the spectrum of soul – think Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke. This is the kind of stuff that crammed the dance floor.

On Saturday Bridie King had a superensemble with the Boogie Kings as well as the Harmony Queens, intro’d and outro’d by a new MC, none other than ABC/RRR announcer Roger Taylor.

Pianist Laia Genc & trio Liaison Tonique – Germany – entranced with luminous rhythmic and melodic voyages in the cathedral.

Singer-songwriter-guitarist Glen Terry is due for a tour down here. He looks great in his bright handmade Indian cotton shirts and sounds even better. Although it was only last year he released his first CD, he’s a seasoned performer who’s toured the world since the ’80s. He’s still buzzing from a US tour where he played at Buddy Guy’s Legends in Chicago.

Texas guitar gun Hamilton Loomis made his 2nd Wang visit, and US native Deborah Coleman rocked the night out. From the USA, Deborah plays guitar like a bloke and sings like a woman. At the jazz end, we caught the reggae-tinged Vampires and award-winning vocalist Kristin Berardi with her Sextet.

But to kick the day off, it took the Vanguards – with a postmodern take on blues from all the years of gigging by members Dale Lindrea, Dean Hilson, Dai Jones, Mark Grunden to spice it up and beat it into a glorious concoction, often tongue in cheek, always great listening. Sacrilegiously for diehard blues buffs, there were even doses of rap!

When I caught Fallingwater Trio in the cathedral I was astounded to see Dale Lindrea transformed on bass guitar in this hallowed space with such a sublime sound that indeed evokes falling water, with Phil Bywater, saxophonist, composer and voice of an angel, Elliott Folvig, guitar.

Aforementioned diehards adored Hat Fitz & Cara Robinson, as did everyone else. There would have been no complaints if they’d gigged all day.

Enjoyed Allan Browne’s Australian Jazz Band, in spite of techie probs, as well as Andrew Robson’s Thomas Tallis Quartet with a new take on Tallis’ hymns in, you guessed it, the cathedral.

Brian Abrahams’ District Six – London-based, South Africa–born Abrahams arranges soaring horns that evoke the vastness of the country, much in common with this country in the sense of one’s innate geography– formed by the geography of your country of birth

Blue Heat rocked out the blues marquee in style for a re-formation after six years out.

US-born, Paris cafe-nurtured Kendra Shank took the fest to a close: time flew as we experienced this poetic, sensuous singer who stretches time then caresses it.

Monday found us with the irresistible and dazzling Li’l Fi and her band at the verdant Bailey’s of Glenrowan.

CDs The Pigram Brothers, ‘Moonlight’

Charles Jenkins & the Zhivagos, ‘Trees of Brisbane’

James Hunter, ‘Don’t do me no favours’, The Hard Way, Hear Music)

The Vanguards, ‘Girls in Slacks’, Girls in Slacks (Indie)

Fallingwater Trio, ‘Tears (must there always be one more war?)’, Stay (Jazzhead)

Next month’s show: The finest of 2009! Catch us 9.30–10am Wednesday, 16 December

Pr1me numbers, aloha aperitivi & chick flicks

2009-11-10T22:50:00.022+11:00

I had a birthday Monday, and we decided to celebrate. Seeing as I was turning the age of one of my favourite types of numbers, a prime number, and seeing as we were the same prime-number age for the last time for a few years, Rog and I decided to party. We wanted to catch up and reconnect with friends – many of whom we hadn’t seen since Rog took off for the wilds of South Australia in 2003, and some even longer.

The moment I walked in, several months ago, I knew the venue. Because some places just make you feel good. So it is with the alternate reality of Handsome Steve’s House of Refreshment, upstairs in the French medieval architecture of the glorious refurbed Abbotsford Convent. It’s not refurbed too much, and retains an enchanting sense of age, a beguiling scruffiness, a sense of lives lived over its nigh-on-150-year history. The suffering endured by the inhabitants it was built for – unfortunate women and children in the care of the nuns of the Convent of the Good Shepherd – adds a sense of gravitas that’s not lessened by too much tizzing up.

Alex Burns and Jen Hawley from the Hawaiian band Adventures in Paradise entertained with a repertoire of island music and early jazz, and Steve mixed up lethal channelling-spritz New York Dolls with Elvis on the teev in Blue Hawaii and aloha shirts in the air.

What a night. Hot as hades, steamy as the aloha outfits of some guests, glam as the mid-century Italiano aperitivo of others. And me? Well, simply could not resist going exotic Eastern to mix it up a bit more, in a black-gold bespoke cheongsam. There was chic, there was kitsch, there was laughter and moonlight and music.

And so to numbers, of which nine is supernumber, the end and the beginning and the number of doom, for ninth symphonies spelt death for Beethoven, Bruckner and Mahler. The magical square of squares that makes Sudoku. The trashy screech of prices that try to look like they cost less than they do. Like $9.99.

Garrison Keillor's wonderful Writer's Almanac came in this morning with other-side-of-the-world-timeline lateness, kind of satisfying to reflect we are so far ahead when in the depths of feeling very far away from so many places I'd love to be. Anyway, it came in with the revelation that 'It was on this day in 1967 that the first issue of Rolling Stone was published.'

On my birthday! And Jann Wenner printed 40,000 copies, and 34,000 were returned unsold.

I love the fact the demolition of the Berlin Wall began on that day, 22 years later.

And Katharine Hepburn, Hedy Lamarr, Carl Sagan had November 9 to celebrate.

Now it gets even better: the first use of chloroform to make childbirth easier. The outlawing of flogging of Brit soldiers. JFK elected.

And some good breaking news: another writing shortlist to celebrate, this time for a short story in an international field of 2500 for the UK mag Aesthetica.

But on a sombre note, we’ll always remember this 9 November. We’re still reeling from the brutal killings of Nick Waterlow and his daughter Chloe. To express our sorrow would take more words than this page can hold.

Thanks to Jinny Coyle and Brendan Hehir for photos.

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, October

2009-10-21T16:43:00.004+11:00

Jackey Coyle’s Wordy-Gurdy on Helen Jennings’ Roots of Rhythm, PBS 106.7 FM, 9.30–10am, Wednesday 21 October

Our minds were adrift with the festival spirit today, seeing as we head off to Wangaratta Jazz Fest Friday week. I was enjoying James Hunter’s clip on the Wang fest website, and that got me thinking of all the other fests through the years – my favourites in New Orleans, Woodford, Byron Bay and Cropredy for starters – and the music I’ve happened upon.

Festivals are perfect for browsing – in previous years at Wangaratta I’ve come across classic favourites like Tord Gustavsson’s Trio by doing just that. And I’ve found the best way to start out with a review of an unfamiliar band or a book is to simply plunge in, and get the only pure experience that will be available without the left brain and preconceptions kicking in to muddy the waters, and before the researching has a chance to shape any opinion.

We started out with a treat unearthed in the middle of a CD – I reckon LPs were great in that the middle tracks got fairer recognition – ‘Over her shoulder’ featuring the horns of Joe’s son Levon Henry – Joe Henry, Blood from stars (Anti).

James Hunter followed up with ‘Strange but true’, from this year’s CD/DVD set The hard way.

Keeping it strange, Anders Osborne’s ‘Life is strange’, Ash Wednesday blues, recalled a pre-Katrina Jazzfest.

Carmen Lundy followed up with ‘Old devil moon', Old devil moon, a late-1990s masterpiece on JVC with a knockout horn-, key- and drum-laden NYC band.

James Andrews recalled a gig with Allen Toussaint and Dr John and that dirty Nawlins sound in ‘Paper Moon’, Satchmo of the Ghetto.

Well that was enough strangeness and moons for October and Halloween, and we finished off with one for the big October date that is Helen’s birthday – John Mooney, ‘Broken Mold’, Against the wall.

Next show Wednesday, 18 November

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, September

2009-09-16T22:47:00.008+10:00

Jackey Coyle’s Wordy-Gurdy on Helen Jennings’ Roots of Rhythm, PBS 106.7 FM, 9.30–10am, Wednesday 16 September

So much to see, so much to do.

Reviews – Last month’s album launch by Rocky & the Two-Bob Millionaires went off, with a memorable lead vocal when Forever Young’s Trevor Young stepped out from behind a drum kit for ‘Throw it away’ and a late arrival by Victoria’s Chief Magistrate Ian Gray to front on ‘Justice’ – the late excuse being he was pulled over by police en route. Some listeners loved checking out the FAD Bar gig in the city: we caught the Two Bobs at Richmond Union Bowling Club on Friday – luckily we arrived after the lights got turned down from operating-theatre bright. Find more Two Bobs gigs here.

Acts to watch from Darebin Music Feast – Tom Woodward, Taylor Project, Bossbucho. And a recommended venue – Bar Nancy.

Sin City – On a quick trip to our own northern version we caught up with premier steel guitarist Graham Griffith and singing-uke-guitar-playing Jenny Griffith in their outfit the Honeymooners, with Peter Moloney and Morna. Graham and Jenny lead Hoola Hapa Haole Hawaiian band, a Sydney must-see, but that’s not all for these jazz-indie-western swing aficionados – they appear in many different combinations. Thanks to Graham for today’s selection of music, both known and just discovered.

CDs – ‘How d’ya do?’, ‘Sleepwalk’ and ‘My little grass shack in Kealakekua, Hawaii’ by Hoola hapa Haole Hawaiian Band, from a demo disc (indie). Full-length CD is available here.
‘Tico tico’ and ‘The sheik of Araby’ which features the vocals of Dr John by the Frank & Joe Show, 331/3, Hyena Records, being Les Paul main man, guitar gun Frank Vignola who subbed for Les Paul for three weeks then actually joined his Trio. Catch him live for ‘Tico tico’ here.
‘If you ain’t lovin (you ain’t livin’) featuring the vocals of Chris O’Connell by Tommy Morrell & the Timewarp Tophands, Jugglin' Cats, WR Records, available here. Yes, that’s Chris of Asleep at the Wheel fame, with unforgettable Texan non-pedal-steel player Tom Morrell.

Coming up – The Devil Rides a Rocking Horse::Mojo Juju, The Brothers Grim & The Blue Murders, Singing Sadie, Frankie Valentine and Can Can Dancers, 17 Sept at 8pm, Wesley Anne, 250 High St, Northcote
Fingerbone Bill – Featuring the talents of Dean Schulz on banjo, guitar and vocals; Nick O’Mara on mandolin, guitar and vocals; John Ebzery on double bass, mandolin and vocals; and Peter Graham on harmonica 18 Sept at 9.30pm, Bar Nancy, 61 High St, Northcote
Suitcase Royale, 18 Sept at 5.30pm, Wesley Anne
250 High St, Northcote
Big street party – Sunday Sep 20 including free all-day bands at Northcote Social Club, Wesley-Anne and Bar Nancy
More here.

Websites –
http:// www.hoola.net.au
http://www.westernswing.net/
http://www.frankvignola.com/
www.myspace.com/barnancysundaysongs
www.myspace.com/bossbucho
http://www.darebin.vic.gov.au/Page/Page.asp?Page_Id=878

Next show Wednesday 21 October

Sydney & the South Coast

2009-09-10T14:43:00.004+10:00

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, August

2009-08-19T22:54:00.003+10:00

Jackey Coyle’s Wordy-Gurdy on Helen Jennings’ Roots of Rhythm, PBS 106.7 FM, 9.30–10am Wednesday 19 August 2009

It was certainly a preview-review show today.

Seeing as Joe Henry released his 11th album, Blood from stars, yesterdee, we started out with the first two tracks. With so much production work behind him in the past decade, there’s an interesting happenstance whereby his production work is morphing into his own music, cross-fertilising and setting off sparks like what happened when US mainland bluesmen got a listen to the Hawaiian steel guitarists almost a century ago. Two recent releases, Allen Toussaint’s The Bright Mississippi and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s A Stranger Here, explore classic blues songs. Push came to shove and it was only a matter of time before the blues found their way onto Henry’s own recordings, and indeed Blood From Stars is a departure from his style with a rawer, edgier sound.

‘I was playing with a writing form,’ he says, ‘a blues structure, in the same way that you might sit down and try to write a sonnet or a haiku. I was intrigued by how structured and how simple those ideas of, say, a pair of repeating lines answered by a refrain can be. I’ve been reading a lot of poets lately, and lot of diverse poetry very consciously references a blues tonality, whether it’s Langston Hughes or Allen Ginsberg or e.e. cummings. Poets are very aware of the power of that structure.’

We started out with ‘Prelude: Light No Lamp When The Sun Comes Down’ and went straight into ‘The man I keep hid’, Joe Henry, Blood from stars (Anti). Seeing as the album produced for Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was a major inspiration, we went into Tampa Red’s ‘New stranger blues’ from Jack’s album A stranger here (Anti).

Next we featured artists from the Wangaratta Jazz Festival program. In its 20th year, the fest has a new image and will have a new hub this year, at the multimillion-dollar venue with two performance spaces.

James Hunter, ‘Jacqueline’, The hard way
Deborah Coleman, ‘Meanest Women’, from Pinetop Perkins’ album Ladies man
Marco Goldsmith & Blue Heat, 'Shuffle up', Irresistable Behaviour

We spoke with founding artistic director, Adrian Jackson, who outlined the program.
Wangaratta Jazz Festival, www.wangarattajazz.com, Friday 30 October – Monday 2 November

Extra! Rocky Dabscheck came into the studio to talk about the CD launch of the CD Rocky & the Two-Bob Millionaires 3–6pm this Sunday at Grand Central Hotel, Richmond (corner Coppin and Swan).

We played two tracks off the new album and Rocky explained the band line-up and some of the mind-boggling playing history racked up by the members of the band:
Rocky Dabscheck, guitar and vocals. Rocky has played alongside Janis Ian, Eric Burden And the Animals, John Martyn, AC/DC, Tangerine Dream
Nick Carrafa, drums and vocals
Brenden Mason, guitar and vocals – from well known bands Madder Lake and Black Feather; has played alongside the Rolling Stones, Queen
Max McIntosh, bass and vocals. Max has played with Brian Cadd, Russell Morris
Steve Williams, saxophone, mouth harp and vocals; saxophone player for John Farnham; has played alongside Tom Jones , Olivia Newton-John, Ray Charles, Kate Ceberano, Ross Wilson
Sigie Gabrie, saxophone, mouth harp, synth guitar, slide guitar percussion and vocals
Julie Buxton, vocals

‘New trick’, Rocky & the Two-Bob Millionaires, Rocky & the Two-Bob Millionaires
‘A walk across the rooftops’, Blue Nile, A walk across the rooftops, Linn Records
‘Settle it down’, Rocky & the Two-Bob Millionaires, Rocky & the Two-Bob Millionaires

Rocky & the Two-Bob Millionaires are playing here:

CD launch: 3–6pm this Sunday, 23 August 23 at Grand Central Hotel, Richmond
with Forever Young
Also playing:
Friday, 28 August, Panton Hill Hotel, with Deja Voodoo
Thursday 3 September, FAD bar, Coors Lane, City

We ended the show with a quote:
‘If Rocky & the Two Bob Millionaires were playing I would never have left the building’ – Elvis Presley

Next show 9.30–10am, Wednesday 17 September

Music to whose ears?

2009-08-13T22:59:00.004+10:00

Used to be a time when we needed to recover from the weekend. Now we recover from our neighbours’ weekend! Yep, new ones have replaced our lovely old Irish bloke, Frank, and decided a ‘small party’ was in order.

This involved a beat box that increased in volume and bass reverberations throughout what turned into a very long night. An invasion of new attendees took the party out to the street at 2am – within the hour they had set off the car alarm of our catty-corner neighbour. (I guess that wasn’t as bad for our neighbour as the ones who ran across the top of that same car a few weeks ago, prompting us to always park under trees from then on.) Our gate was actually opened in order to come in and urinate in the entry to our house (the lane across the road obviously got too far away after a while). However, my heart went out to our other neighbours, returned from interstate that day for a family illness, who were woken in fright by partygoers running across their tin roof in the early hours and called the police.

We finally begged for mercy just before 6am.

So we’ve hosed down the entry to our house and the rains have taken away much of the other stench but, in spite of Monday’s recycling truck removing three bin loads of empties, the backyard has just as many to go. And that’s the biggest Jim Beam bottle (photo) that we’ve ever seen!

So from now on we’re taking no prisoners – we’ll vigorously uphold every noise and nuisance bylaw there is.

Meanwhile, the on-air bullying of a 14-year-old girl to reveal her history of a rape to a Sydney radio audience has resulted in higher ratings for the offending show, and its imminent return to air. I wonder how her mother could air such a public grilling with the knowledge of what had befallen her daughter.

But life ain’t so bad. I’m 3000 words into The Tall House – yes, the novel at last! It’s taking its own shape and surprising me daily.

Lonely Planet has sent me to Italy (in my head that is, but it’s back at No 1 on my travel list – Turin, for starters).

Melbourne looked Technicolor today in the bright winter sunshine. Fed Square shone bronze and silver and graphite, against gleaming skyscrapers and a blue sky iced with dramatic cumulonimbus. The Yarra actually sparkled and the buskers plyed a wonderful aural tapestry – first a Chinese single-stringed lute, then a little further, a sitar, and further still, a penny whistle.

Tune in next Wednesday for 'Wordy-Gurdy' on Helen Jennings' Roots of Rhythm – 9:30am, PBS 106.7FM

Gold in them thar hills

2009-07-29T22:43:00.008+10:00

The Gold Coast is a place I’ve always passed through, en route to somewhere either north or south. A bit like the inner-city suburb where I live.

The weekend before last I went to the Gold Coast, this time with a purpose, seeing as I had business concerning the Gold Coast Writers’ Association short story prize. And with the opportunity for face-to-face feedback with the judge, who could resist?

Burleigh Heads, where the GCWA holds its meetings, is a northern suburb of Coolangatta, some suburban clicks and a couple of verdant patches on the way to a lovely beach southended by the rocky bluff of a national park and sweeping round to a smaller head at the north. Always in sight, like a magic faraway land, are the shining towers of Surfers Paradise around the coastal curve to the north.

So that’s where I hung out before decamping south to the Lismore hinterland to chill with my sister Rebecca and her family. Now that’s a much more well-trodden area for me, since spending almost every Easter at Bluesfest from over a decade ago in nearby Byron Bay, first hanging out and later covering the fest for Rhythms magazine. The place is still inspiring and healing to the soul of a cold-ridden southerner, for it’s been a long and chilly winter here.

The Gold Coast was somewhere we habitually shunned, ever since hearing the absurd quotes of Joh Bjelke Petersen and seeing press showing the beaming, glitzed-up meter maids and shuddering at the thought of boiled peanuts. It was all too bright and not quite, well, black enough.

Four years ago, during a stint freelancing for NMP Group’s ill-fated Aura: the magazine of southeast Queensland – one story they actually did recompense me for – I interviewed Chris Nyst, the high-flying Gold Coast lawyer who’s also a surfer, a boxer, a painter, a screenwriter, an author.

At that time his current projects included writing a miniseries screenplay for his first book Cop This! (1999) and a third crime thriller, Crook as Rockwood, as well as a screenplay called Crooked Business to follow-up 2004’s award-winning comedy feature Gettin’ Square.

We talked about boomtowns, starting off with his hometown of Blackall in the heart of Queensland – the birthplace of the ALP, the navy blue singlet, and Qantas – when it was thriving.

'My father was working out there building picture theatres,’ he said. ‘In those days o’course there was a fair bit of money in the west and it was the days of the high wool prices and so forth, so that was where everything was happening.’

And so to the Gold Coast. ‘Yeah, there was a B&W movie starred Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable called Boom Town,’ Nyst reminisced. ‘It was a gold rush town and they spent the whole time walking round these muddy streets, all these kind of real gold diggers. I kinda figure that as the Gold Coast – you know, you’ve got all these guys walking round in mud up to their knees but there’s gold in the hills. Was it Willy Lomond? Walked into the jungle and walked out a rich man? That’s the Gold Coast mentality. I mean, it’s exciting.

‘The Gold Coast … is what it is, y’know,' Nyst said,'it’s crass and it’s gaudy – it’s got its downsides but it can be a great place.'

And so to reality: the folk I met know and love their patch and its history, avoid the shadows of the high rises where Nyst's characters lurk, and have a refreshing anything-is-possible mindset that I'd forgotten existed. I can't wait to go back and see them again. (Maybe I'll pass next time on the Kenny and Dolly act witnessed during the convivial afters at the bowling club … that is the ugliest damn drag-queen Dolly I ever did lay eyes on.)

Thanks, GCWA for a shot in the arm and a lightening of the heart. Thanks to judge Wendy Waters for thinking 'The man with the pencil-thin moustache' was worth highly commending. And here's to making it to Surfers next time.

'Wordy-Gurdy' on the radio, 22 July 2009

2009-07-22T10:58:00.005+10:00

Jackey Coyle’s Wordy-Gurdy on Helen Jennings’ Roots of Rhythm, PBS 106.7 FM, 9.30–10am Wednesday, 22 July 2009

We warmed up the wintry chill with a bit of spice: some double entendres, naughtinesses and impure thoughts across the last century of roots music.

We began with a classic, well-known for good reason, and zigzagged back to the 1920s and up the years to today.

‘Back door man’, Howlin’ Wolf, The Howlin’ Wolf Collection (Spectrum/Universal)

‘Lollypop mama’, Clarence Samuels, Chess Blues Vol 1 1947–1952 (MCA/Chess)

From Raunchy Business: Hot nuts & lollipops, Columbia/Legacy:
‘Shave ’em dry’, Lucille Bogan
‘Wipe it off’, Lonnie Johnson
‘Butcher shop blues’, Bernice Edwards

‘Fan it’, Willie Nelson & Asleep at the Wheel, Willie & the Wheel (Bismeaux Records)

Bob Wills & his Texas Playboys, from Take me back to Tulsa, (Proper):
‘What’s the matter with the mill’
‘Who walks in when I walk out’

‘Saturday night fish fry’, Louis Jordan, The Best of Louis Jordan (MCA Records)

Next show 9.30–10 am, 19 August, PBS 106.7FM

Magic in the air

2009-07-16T13:09:00.004+10:00

I’ve discovered a new favourite term: short list. There's something magical about it. Especially when it comes out of the blue – or rather, out of that black hole where submissions disappear – and it is my short story up for a writing prize. The money is irrelevant; the recognition is what counts – that someone is actually interested in reading a fantasy I've cooked up.

At an exhibition at the State Library of Victoria, The Independent Type, is the 1983 first-submission letter from a 15-year-old Sonya Hartnett, as well as the reply from the MD of publisher Rigby, MD Frank W Thompson:

… Writing is a bit like playing sport – everyone can play most games but only a few play games so well that we will pay to watch them play, and even then they have to practise continually …

How good is that?

I loved the Peter Carey exhibit, made up of his laptop and research materials from the writing of True History of the Kelly Gang. On display is one manuscript page with a quirky charm – it is lovely enough to frame – elegantly typeset and adorned with the arcane and mystical hieroglyphics of the hard-copy editing process using a fountain pen with green ink, by none other than Gary Fisketjon, from the esteemed New York editing house of Knopf. This intimate view into the process gives a precious glimpse of the Fisketjon style, which shaped the words of the likes of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy and Haruki Murakami.

Anyway, there is some stiff competition up there on the Gold Coast with its well-established writers’ association. So whatever the result, there’s an opportunity to hone my craft with a new tool – the judge’s feedback. The theme is Magic – how apt.

Next radio show is Wednesday 22 July and we’re warming up winter with a bit of spice: some double entendres, naughtinesses and impure thoughts across the last century of roots music. Tune in at 9.30 am on Helen Jennings’ Roots of Rhythm, PBSFM, 106.7FM in Melbourne or on the web.

Longer days & shorter nights

2009-07-06T22:47:00.006+10:00

These days just keep getting longer.

Now we’re over the solstice, it’s really becoming winter. Time for food, snuggling up, reading, dinners with friends. Our house reeks of rich and heady aromas like baking bread; tonight it’s orange and cumin, this morning it was sourdough, last Friday it was cranberry, spices and vine fruits. Herb-infused casseroles and soups simmer, slow and rich; pies bake to be paired with mash in a ritual of prandial pleasure.

On a recent Saturday night we were faced with a culinary challenge: cook for a couple, one of whom is a sensational cook, the other with a series of health conditions necessitating a long list of no-nos: garlic, all onions including leeks, shallots, spring onions, tomatoes – well, that knocks out the entire Mediterranean cookbook – no broccoli, yeast, raisins, alcohol, asparagus, cabbage, fennel, wheat, legumes, no mushrooms, no avocado, no apples, no pears, no apricots, no cauliflower. Not much lemon, butter, salt, sugar.

Well, that was a throwdown of the gauntlet, if ever I saw one. But doable. We ended up with corn cakes and salmon roulades, followed by sweet potato-lemongrass-coriander soup. Next came spiced chicken with lemon-flavoured rice. Now for three ices: chocolate sherbet, rosewater sorbet and honey-vanilla ice cream with flaked coconut and almonds plus strawberries (for those who ate ’em). A few cheeses and rice crackers and we were replete.

I’ve been working out the chemistry to make a combination of ices that’s not too cold, not too rich but exotic and lighter than my beloved stodge puds. With the right combo of fats, sugar, milk solids and water – plus pairing cooked with uncooked mixtures – they can make a palette of colours, textures and flavours that looks pretty and cleanses the palate.

It’s time to get the knives sharpened. When I first came to Richmond in 1980, you didn’t have to leave the borders for anything. Knives sharpened, silk screens made, glass cut and anything else you needed. A place opposite the old Ball’s down on Church Street sharpened knives, just up from the row of south-meandering pubs that only contained beer and dusty bottles of sherry for consumption.

My sister Rebecca and I were rather fond of G&Ts at that stage. However, our request at the first we tried was met with a ‘Whatcha fink this is? A woman’s pub or somefink?’ We had to go along Swan Street to the Wine Shop for anything in the way of wine, a place where shelves reached to the ceiling and were crammed together so that whoever was in there had to leave to allow entry to the next customers. Our favourite was always the selection of the week, often with a recommendation of ‘great drinking now’ as suggested by the benevolent Doug.

Anyway, those days are long gone. We now have to take our knives out of Richmond! On a particular day of the month!
Ball’s is gone, Dimmeys too. At least my favourite Empire of Wreckage is still down there, arrayed behind Swan Street. Its windows and doors and bits and pieces stretch into the distance and I still can’t help but gaze on it with a quickening of the heart, a can’t-wait-to-get-in-there-and-fossick kind of a breathlessness. I hope that place never goes.

Trade secrets: the good, the bad and the ugly

2009-06-24T18:51:00.008+10:00

Over the years, living in a Victorian house – stripped of many original features in the 1960s and since arrayed in oh-so-decorous beiges and whites with layers of masonite, vinyl tiles and wall paper – things break, things get tired, things need fixing up and brightening up and things need making good.

Even if you have the best set of tools in the business, climb a ladder with the greatest of ease and your hand-eye coordination is second to none, sometimes you simply have to get a man in. Yep, it still is a blokes’ world, and even though hardware shops have realised that treating women as if they have a brain is good for business, tradesmen have not necessarily moved with the times.

Over the years, you realise that tradies are either a girl’s best friend or the source of untold angst. And sometimes you just gotta laugh.

It’s a bit like a game of snakes and ladders. First of all, will they show up for the quote? Good, now you’ve made it up a short ladder. Now will they show up for the job? And they have but whoops, they’ve wrecked the rest of the house with dust and heavy equipment. Big snake, down you go. (Working at home as a freelance writer and editor has its special challenges at these times.) Ooh, here’s someone on time to start the job with his drop sheets and polite chitchat – big ladder. Oh-oh! there’s an unforeseen hitch, the mobile phone’s ringing, is that a snake, and he hasn’t brought a part and he’s off to the other side of town to another job and you have to do a tag team effort just to keep him there, desperately, just to have water/heating/a roof that night.

Now the job’s done (and just like the doctor who always says ‘it won’t hurt’, you’ve had the one of ‘there won’t be any mess’), and you haven’t entered the room to find a dust fog, will they clean the mess up? Will they dispose of empty drink and food containers rather than leave them on the front veranda? A big snake lurking, ready for action.

Here’s some snakes from through the years.

Snake 1: roofer explains carefully that tinted corrugated sheets must be laid with labels facing up, otherwise the tinting won’t stop the sun’s rays. He then lays sheets with labels all but one facing down. It takes a day or so until he realises this means he can’t simply turn the sheets around as the holes he’s drilled are now in valleys not on hills, as before. Oops.

Snake 2: plumber shows me patiently that gutters need their level down on the drainpipe end. He then attaches the gutter the opposite way.

Snake 3: carpenter replaces part of side fence. I return to find him reversing the position of fenceposts on the new part of the fence, leaving no room for access down the sideway.

Snake 4: genius cabinetmaker eventually takes five years to complete a job. My text messages become condensed into just one word: Please.

Snake 5: plumber comes to replace hot-water system. He puts in an instantaneous model and when we can’t get any hot water for a shower, he tells us the problem will be fixed if we replace a. shower head for voluminous water flow b. all tap fittings as the shower head no longer matches c. bathroom tiles – as he leaves dark smelly boot prints (mud, we hope!) through the house.

Snake 6: electrician arrives nine hours late and looking crazed to complete new bathroom for overseas guests arriving the next day. He locks himself in and noisily gets to work, dropping tools and chipping the new handbasin. I find out later his girlfriend had an abortion that day.

Snake 7: floor sanders shout interminably in Aramaic, whether in the house, or outside in the van, for the full five hours of the job. They dump heavy equipment on expensive rugs and entry-hall Baltic pine floorboards and turn off power during our computer work. In a moment that evokes Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi, we are told we cannot have satin finish like the rest of the house – it must be gloss. They won’t issue a receipt but offer a mug instead.

Well, after that lot of snakes, here’s some ladders.

Ladder 1: FG James damp proofing – wonderful, professional outfit who left our walls and skirtings better than they found ’em. Can you nominate finishing carpenters for sainthood?

Ladder 2: Pele Fireplace Installations – stylish, visionary, and persistent with getting flues up those kinky Victorian chimneys.

Jim’s Mowing – George Kanellakis and his dad have been restoring order to our little patch of wilderness for years.

Ladder 3: Mac’s Place, Flinders Street – helpful, understanding of freelance repair budgets. When my lappy died in the Kimberley, there was no question of shipping it back here for life support.

Ladder 4: Hames Reid Plumbing – Kevin and his crew keep pipes clear with a crew that's usually spot on. George is No 1!

Pic: yet more wonderful relics of the 1960s dual-family accommodations in our little house

'Wordy Gurdy' on the radio, 17 June 2009

2009-06-17T17:27:00.008+10:00

Jackey Coyle’s 'Wordy-Gurdy' on Helen Jennings’ Roots of Rhythm, PBS 106.7 FM, 9.30–10am Wednesday 17 June 2009

Today was gonna be a bit ragtimey and it moved around in place and time, using the theme extremely loosely.

Willie Nelson & Asleep at the Wheel, ‘I ain’t gonna give nobody none of this jellyroll, Willie & the Wheel (Bismeaux Records)

For our feature CD, Willie Nelson and Asleep at the Wheel teamed up for a collaboration released in February.

According to the Willie & the Wheel website, the album was 30 years in the making. It’s a collection of classic western swing songs handpicked by the late Jerry Wexler, better known as ‘Mr R&B’. He was a fan of the original western swing bands like Bob Wills, Milton Brown, Cliff Bruner – introduced to him while he was studying journalism in Kansas City.

The album takes genre hopper Willie Nelson back to his musical roots. As opposed to some of his other style collaborations such as reggae, which didn’t quite gel, western swing is a perfect choice for him – his vocal stylings have always originated in jazz. He grew up on western swing – he was born about the same time it began – and it has always figured heavily into his approach to music.

‘Jerry Wexler originally came up with this concept back when Willie was on the Atlantic label,’ says AATW headman Ray Benson. ‘But before the record could be made Willie left Atlantic for CBS records and so the idea was shelved.’

This is a good story. In 2003 Jerry Wexler, who was retired and living in Florida, called his old friend Ray Benson. ‘’Ray!’’ he said, ‘’I’m getting rid of my LPs! They collect dust and it bothers me. I have recorded them all and I am sending you all my western swing albums!’ A few weeks later a box arrived with 20 or so LPs from Jerry. They were collections of the music originally on 78 rpm records reissued on 33-1/3 rpm LPs. Ray noticed that a number of the song titles had two initials next to them: ‘WN.’ Ray didn't think much about it but when he thanked Jerry he asked what they were – ‘WN’ stood for Willie Nelson.

Fast forward to 2007, when Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Ray Price and Asleep at the Wheel set out on the wildly successful Last of the Breed tour showcasing classic western swing and Texas country music. Not long after, Ray got the call from Willie and his manager. According to Ray, they asked, ‘Jerry Wexler thinks now’s the time to do the western swing CD. You've got the LPs don’t you?’ Ray continues, ‘It took me a second to realize what they were talking about and once I put two and two together I answered “Yes of course!” I went to the shelf and pulled out the LPs. Sure enough there were the penned-in "WNs" by certain songs and so I went to work.’
From nearly 40 selections Jerry and Ray painstakingly narrowed the list down to 12. Jerry insisted that some of the tracks should include horns as well as a return to the traditional fiddles and lap steel guitar associated with western swing. ‘To my delight and relief,’ says Ray, ‘he loved them.'

Alex Burns & Nick Charles, ‘Yank Plays Mandolin’, Cordially Yours (Newmarket)

An original from a match made in heaven, featuring the vocals and mandolin of Nick and backing vocals by Alex, Kelly Auty and Tanya Lee.

Sol Hoopii, ‘Hawaii Nei’, Master of the Hawaiian Guitar Vol II (Rounder)
A traditional Hawaiian song from the collection of Bob Brozman, recorded in 1929 and one of only four recorded with his sax trio.

Willie Nelson & Asleep at the Wheel, ‘I’m sittin’ on top of the world’, Willie & the Wheel
Joe Henry, ‘I will write my book’, Civilians (Anti)

According to the liner notes: Henry is a Southerner by birth, and Midwestern by transplant. He lives ‘on the fringe of Los Angeles, right where it begins its slide into the San Gabriel Valley, and in a house built in 1904 for a First Lady of these United States of I'm Sorry…'

He likens his work to ‘shoveling out a fireplace: If I do it well, the next fire will have more air to breathe. And the fire next time is always the thing.’ Recorded & mixed by Ryan Freeland at The Garfield House, South Pasadena, CA, 2007. Musicians: JH – acoustic guitar, handclaps, knee slaps and 'corduroy'; Bill Frisell – electric and acoustic guitar; Greg Leisz – acoustic guitar, mandolin, Weissenborn and lap steel; Patrick Warren – piano, Chamberlin, pump organ and more; David Piltch – upright and electric bass; Jay Bellerose – drums and percussion; Loudon Wainwright the 3rd – backing vocals; Van Dyke Parks – piano

Willie Nelson & Asleep at the Wheel, ‘Hesitation blues’, Willie & the Wheel

Last song was a dilemma with 12 knockouts to choose from so we went with Helen's choice.

Next show: July 22

Winter in a cool climate

2009-06-04T17:27:00.004+10:00

Monday morning the fog came in as we watched. Every other day it’s cleared; the damp dissipates and the sky is suddenly a piercing blue. Rog and I stood upstairs in the ochre-yellow, north-facing room and watched the rooftops disappear. We used to be able to see all the way up to Fitzroy from there – my philosophical dentist John Gilheany once mused on the fact that Brunswick Street was bookended by churches – but the city’s closing in now and today’s vista is made up of rooftops, balconies, angles and palms. Then there’s the ubiquitous TV antennae and further away, the ever-present cranes punctuating the horizon.
Routines are there to be changed, so any morning holds exciting choices. Stay home or go out? It’s usually the latter in this vibrant metropolis, so a couch-potato sojourn is a treat.
As Monday nights are special movie night, sometimes I meet my sister Jinny at Trotters in Carlton for a glass of fizz and a feed. Trotters is one of those Melbourne cafés with good Italian-based food, fast service, attentive, warm staff – what’s not to like there? Some concentrated browsing at Readings, an ice cream and a movie and there you go, we’ve pushed the week off gently and it’s rolling. Rog is starting to get hooked now, and we slotted Gomorra in for this week.
Last week Samson and Delilah knocked our socks off – strong and sad were words I thought of. It took an Aboriginal filmmaker to say it, and I guess it’s how change has to happen to bring happier times in this Age of Aquarius – through the Aboriginal people themselves, not through us and our doomed solutions. Every theme resonated way too deeply with what we saw in our time in the Kimberley. The women who cop all the disasters yet somehow, miraculously, come out stronger; the men who take a crack at being leaders and fall short; the brutality to one another that swells the desolation; the art scene that feeds off the isolation of artists; the irony of hunter-gatherers who have lost their connection with country.
During the week, Snow Falling on Cedars resonated more gently but just as deeply. Set in 1954 on a fictional island off Washington State, it follows the murder trial of a Japanese-American man in the wake of the death of a fellow fisherman. In the film, the effect of Japanese exile camps during the Second World War on the island’s residents is as important a theme as the interracial love story. The gradual exposing of the underbelly of racism following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led me to think about what might have been, here. So much suffering for our people in the Pacific War. I will never forget talking to a 90-year-old POW incarcerated in Changi who wept, just at the mention of his time there. My uncle never could speak of his time in New Guinea. And that was meant to be the war that ended all wars.
Full of gore and violence, Gomorra was not a film to enjoy. I guess I’d call it a sickening exposé of the stranglehold of the Camorra gangsters over the citizens of Naples.
It segued perfectly into last night’s panel discussion of true crime writing at Victorian Writers’ Centre. Our fascination for turning over the darkest acts of humans, one to another – could it be a quest to understand where the good ends and evil starts? Or simply to solve the puzzles?
Anyway, things aren’t all grim. I discovered Making Modern Melbourne, by my thesis supervisor and all-round mastermind Jenny Lee, and caught her talk to the Coburg Historical Society a few weeks ago. I found her take on our history looking from the western and northern suburbs – as opposed to the usual eastern slant – enthralling. I’m enjoying Lisa Lang’s E.W. Cole: Chasing the Rainbow now, and recalling Cole’s Funny Picture Book. What an extraordinary, visionary, eccentric man – my ideal dinner companion. This is one of the titles in small and perfectly formed A6 format, all printed on recycled paper by Arcade Publications. Lots of illustrations, immaculate research and immensely readable – a quirky take on Melbourne history.

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, 20 May 2009

2009-05-29T18:52:00.007+10:00

Special Radio Festival show – Pianists’ pianists: who do the ivory-ticklers kowtow to? Selections from the cream of Melbourne’s keyboardists on Jackey Coyle’s 'Wordy-Gurdy' on Helen Jennings’ Roots of Rhythm, PBS 106.7 FM, 9.15–11am Wednesday 20 May.
We asked musicians, Who inspired you to take up the piano, and/or inspires you still? Would you be able to nominate your favourite/s? If there are particular tracks that still tickle your ivories, we will do our best to find them to play.
It ended up being a packed show. Some trivia that didn’t fit in included the World's Largest Organ! as well as a list of Presidential Pianos, courtesy Sullivan’s Music Trivia.
From Oscar Wilde we could have had that memorable quote: Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best. – from a notice in a dancing saloon in America’s West
My favourite quote comes from Austrian-born pianist Artur Schnabel:
The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah! that is where the art resides!
For ANDY COWAN we had Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett’s ‘Memories of tomorrow’ from Köln Concert; Muddy Waters with Otis Spann from Fathers & Sons; John Coltrane with McCoy Tyner, and Dr John.
TIM NEAL selected Jimmy Smith, ‘I Got my Mojo Working’, I Got my Mojo Working and Oscar Peterson, ‘Night Train’, Jazz on a Winter’s Night.
We played tracks from my collection for JAMES BLACK (Professor Longhair; Charles Brown, Otis Spann, Dr John and Jimmy Smith); MICK O’CONNOR (Donny Hathaway, ‘Jealous Guy’, Live); ANDREW OGBURN (Professor Longhair, Dr John and Huey ’Piano’ Smith).
From Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue my choice would have been ‘Blue in Green’; then we did get to play Little Richard, and Tom Waits’ ‘Kentucky Avenue’ from Blue Valentine.
My choices: If I’d had half a chance, these’d be part of the playlist:
Lefty Frizzell, ‘If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time’, Life’s Like Poetry (Bear Family)
The barrelhouse piano of Wichita Falls’ Madge Sutee – part of the pickup band assembled for Lefty Frizzell’s very first Columbia recording sessions – helped form the distinctive sound that surrounded Lefty’s unique vocal style, which would influence some of the greatest country singers who followed as well as inspire a host of cover versions of Lefty's composition and put Lefty well on the road to stardom.
Tord Gustavsen Trio, The Ground (ECM)
Any track from this ethereal jazz – some called it folk music when the trio visited Wangaratta Jazz Fest in 2005 – would serve to spirit us away. Still one of my desert-island discs.

Wordy-Gurdy goes pianistic next week

2009-05-13T12:04:00.003+10:00

Next Wednesday marks the start of the annual PBS Radio Festival.
So have we got a show for you! We'll sit in with Helen Jennings for a special extended two hours themed around
PIANISTS’ PIANISTS: WHO DO THE IVORY-TICKLERS KOWTOW TO? FEATURING SELECTIONS FROM THE CREAM OF MELBOURNE’S KEYBOARDISTS AND TRIVIA FROM THE ANNALS OF THE ‘GOANNA’.
We are asking the players, Who inspired you to take up the piano, and/or inspires you still? Are there particular tracks that still tickle your ivories?
And we’ll do our best to find them to play, as well as digging up anecdotes, trivia and strange facts.
Wordy-Gurdy goes pianistic 9–11 am, for a special extended show on Roots of Rhythm Wednesday 20 May on PBS 106.7FM.

The festiv-al season

2009-05-07T23:06:00.002+10:00

Autumn – my favourite time in Melbourne. Festivals galore, luminous days, bright leaves turning to crackling ground cover to scuff through. How lucky was I to be in Kyoto last November for its celebrated autumn foliage – coming from the dry heat and dust of the Kimberley, the rich, lush and gracious gardens were a tangible reminder of my hometown.
Talk about festival city: last week we had the Williamstown Literary Fest and the Melbourne International Jazz Fest. There was no time to long to be in Nawlins for Jazzfest; we had Charlie Haden, Bill Frisell and Joshua Redman right here: the first two playing with Ethan Iverson at the Melbourne Town Hall; the latter with his quartet at the new Melbourne Recital Centre.
Earlier in the week in Hamer Hall, Katie Noonan performed her Blackbird Project: the songs of Lennon & McCartney, which went to show what a singer she is, angel voice and all, and how much McCartney needs Lennon, ie four McCartney songs in a row just cry out for the tang of Lennon to balance the saccharine. Miss Katie’s main squeeze, Zac Hurren, starred on sax, whetting our appetite for his trio’s opening of the Redman gig two nights later.
Yet FGHR disappointed as Katie’s opener – six of our finest delivering blah compositions that showed the wisdom of a master such as Redman, who ain’t too proud to open a set with someone else’s, in this case a magical interpretation of (yep, had me puzzled for awhile too) Rodgers & Hammerstein’s ‘Surrey with a fringe on top’. (I remember my mum singing it in her fine soprano voice, busying herself around our childhood needs, sometime long ago.)
Hurren’s trio was a dazzling complement to the elegance of Joshua Redman. The Ornette-channeled energy filled the hall to bursting before interval, when exiting onto the first-floor lobby the lights of Melbourne laid themselves bare through the asymmetrical hex-glass shapes that made up the north-facing wall of this brand-new apparition risen from the longtime car park we drove by so many times it became invisible in the way that ugly things do. Such surprises happen often as we rediscover this town, see what’s new and what’s changed and who’s where.
To watch the Joshua Redman trio was to see the rhythm, as soulful as the music we were hearing. The reed-thin Redman’s exuberant kicks as he blows up a sweet storm evoke life on the backstreets and Nawlins funerals and Jazzfest a decade ago. Although nothing matched the sheer spare perfection of MoodSwing’s ‘Sweet Sorrow’ or ‘Dialogue’, the perfectly matched trio delivered a set that floated us right out into the crisp night.
The Melbourne Town Hall let us down in terms of the barnlike acoustics after the excellence of the Recital Centre. Even worse was the opening act, when the grand old organ, recently restored, was wrenched to life by Paul Grabowsky for a performance named after Glen Waverley’s Shirley St, where he grew up. He apologised to those from the suburb beforehand, and rightly so. The composition was cold as the hall periphery, lengthy too, sending many of the audience around us into a postdinner slumber. The vibe was hard to bring back for the magnificent Haden-Frisell-Iverson combo, who battled against the sound to fill the space with their decades-honed mastery.
So here we are, just four days on from celebrating 29 years together, my Roger and me. The Footy Show is on and Sam Newman just got tarred and feathered and I’ve turned up a Christian McBride bass solo and Brad Mehldau’s come in on piano and Joshua Redman’s there now to go out on ‘Mischief’.
I’m sad for someone I love who’s too far away to hold close, thinking how fragile a decade the 20s is. How painful it is and how much you have to learn and to work out for yourself and how much there still is to go when you get through. What a miracle that is, coming through to the other side – I know I barely did. Here’s to coming through.
And here’s to life with its sweet rhythms and dud gigs and surprises, always surprises.

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, 15 April 2009

2009-04-15T13:25:00.008+10:00

Jackey Coyle’s Wordy-Gurdy on Helen Jennings’ Roots of Rhythm, PBS 106.7 FM, 9.30–10am Wednesday 15 April 2009
In view of the fact that New Orleans Jazzfest begins end of this month, we featured the best track off an album by San Francisco Bay Area native Eric Lindell, recorded in Louisiana. Lindell moved in 1999 to New Orleans and made a name on the local scene; by 2005 Alligator Records had signed him.
We reviewed a new music fest and previewed the Melbourne International and the Stonnington jazz fests, with a stunning track by Charlie Haden featuring Chet Baker and Italian pianist Enrico Pieranunzi recorded in Italy in 1987 and released following Baker’s death.
We closed with more of that Nawlins sound.
CDs: Eric Lindell, ‘Lullaby for Mercy Ann’, Track 7, Gulf Coast Highway (Alligator)
Vince Jones, ‘We let them do it’, Moving through taboos (Universal)
Charlie Haden with Chet Baker, Enrico Pieranunzi & Billy Higgins, ‘My Funny Valentine’, Silence (Soulnote)
Marcia Ball, Irma Thomas & Tracy Nelson, ‘Sing It!’, City of dreams: a collection of New Orleans music (Rounder)
Review: The inaugural Chill City music fest, held on Good Friday in the Alexandra Gardens, has all the big-picture stuff right: lighting, setting, ambience. The legendary Chipmonck brought the laid-back style of his Woodstock gig to his MCing, and star act of the day was Paul Kelly. US newcomer Mamie Minch garnered some attention too. Notes for the future: you could die of thirst before you got to the head of the queue, and that was just to pay for your drink! More attention needed to book the very best of acts too.
Previews: Stonnington Jazz, coming up in May, focuses for its fourth outing on Australian composers and has added small venues such as cafes to the Malvern Town Hall and Chapel off Chapel. Go to www.stonnington.vic.gov.au/jazz for info and program or Chapel off Chapel for tix: www.chapeloffchapel.com.au or 03-8290 7000
Meanwhile, end of this month bassist Charlie Haden visits as resident muso and Joshua Redman signs in for one gig at the Melbourne International Jazz Fest. Go to www.melbournejazz.com.
Next Show
Wed 20 May – Special Radio Festival show – Pianists’ pianists: who do the ivory-ticklers kowtow to? Selections from the cream of Melbourne’s keyboardists.

Starting Over

2009-04-05T21:39:00.004+10:00

Aries marks the beginning of the new year, Gita yoga tells us. Which I always thought was strange. How do the northern hemisphere rituals that mark rebirth and regrowth – such as Spring and Easter – translate to here?
But more and more, it’s feeling like new beginnings. Daylight saving ended today and we’re into the long, cool nights of warming food, moving into a more inner phase after the long, hot extroverted days of Summer. Our house needs to be made warm and cosy; gutters made clear and structures made sound. It’s cool enough to begin running again and the leaves are starting to turn in beautiful Autumn Melbourne.
We’ve had rain and our parks and gardens are green again. It’s a lush, bright green covering the ground and after rain the scent of flowers and eucalypts is intoxicating.
Yesterday we drove an hour north to Kinglake for the first footy match of the season. To be held on the very oval that offered refuge from the insanity of the hellfires of 7 February.
On the way there the road curved through black expanses as far as we could see, hills and valleys, tree trunks, occasional bits of building materials, all black. The smell of soot and smoke. I felt numb; unable to feel the grief I felt at the fire sites of South Australia four years ago. This was alien landscape now. My head said it’s natural for the country to burn; my heart ached for the loss of life, the homes, the lives that’d have to be rebuilt.
Once my eyes adjusted to the surreal blackness, they began to pick out signs of new growth in the midst of the aftermath. Tree ferns unfurling their perfect spirals. Shoots shooting, bright green. Now more and more appeared, carpets of green against the vertical black trunks striping the sky.
We got to Kinglake just in time for Peter Garrett to lead the national anthem with the local band Paydirt. Two thousand people were there in the crisp mountain cool. It was a celebration, it was a grieving. The bright flags of our country fluttered against the black, but all around the green was showing through.
And Kinglake killed ’em.

Moving Pictures

2009-03-25T12:35:00.009+11:00

The other night I saw The Reader again. Since my first viewing, two months had passed. By now I’d read the book by German law professor–judge Bernhard Schlink, so this time the plot held no surprises. Yet the power of the film had not diminished; I left the cinema in the same state – shocked, unable to speak – as that first time, on the other side of the world. My companions were prepared a little, but not enough to insulate them from feeling similar shock.
I remember visiting Auschwitz in 1976 searching for clues, trying to imagine the unimaginable, to reconcile the reality of the cold, scrubbed rows and echoing chambers with the horror stories I’d read and heard throughout my bookwormish growing up. The smell was musty and faintly deathly in the crisp, frosty air. I examined the faces of the German bus driver and attendants, searching for reasons for how they all could have let it happen. But now, what's changed? Are Israelis echoing that nightmare now on the Gaza Strip, avenging the locking into camps of their own ancestors?
The Reader resonates for any of us who heard of the Holocaust without being there. The other night I felt, all over again, the rawness of Michael’s pain and the conflicting emotions that spun his head around.
He was so young – another current showing illustrates that fragile early manhood. The film Easy Virtue shares the young man/older woman ending in tears theme, yet in a setting so dissimilar as to be almost a primer on different nationalities. Noel Coward's hilarious one-liners, brought to celluloid by Australian director Stephan Elliott, left a feeling of anticlimax after laughing so much, I was disappointed at the obviousness of the Hollywoodish ending. The film touches on WWI horrors in a way that underlines a national Oz characteristic – trivialising the important and making the trivial important.
The character Jessica, way more articulate than Hanna Schmitz, describes her relationship with the younger man as wanting the 'innocence of youth'. Once her terrible secret is revealed, sure – understandable that she would need to replenish the well, recharge the batterings of life with the purity and energy of youth.
Way more common, ad nauseam in fact, is the pattern of older men taking up with young women – like Mickey Rourke’s character in The Wrestler. After a life of feeding off fame, he realises his need for redemption only when that's dried up – in this case with ageing and illness.
All three characters eventually reach out for more honest relationships. Perhaps what is most shattering about The Reader is that sometimes – for someone such as Hanna – there is nowhere else to go. It is too late.

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, 18 March 2009

2009-03-22T21:19:00.005+11:00

Jackey Coyle’s Wordy-Gurdy on Helen Jennings’ Roots of Rhythm, PBS 106.7 FM, 9.30–10am Wednesday 18 March 2009
Still buzzing from the gigs previewed last month, we played a Peter Rowan song that encapsulates his narrative chutzpah – the storytelling that lands us in the America that struggled itself into prosperity in the first part of the 20th century.
Remarking on the diversity of songs shared by Rowan and the Red Stick Ramblers (graphically summed up in the five-hour jam they spoke of, at a music fest five years ago), we looked at the nigh-on-140-year-old song ‘In the Pines’, performed by them all at the end of the show on 13 March. It's been covered and modified by artists from Leadbelly to Dolly Parton to Nirvana.
The definitive 1952 Monroe version, complete with high lonesome vocals and wind-mimic whistling, led into an idiosyncratic version put down by the Crumb Family at a Hamburg, Germany gig in 2003. The Doug Sahm arrangement was, strangely enough, part of an album to bring the Quintet back into the limelight in a post-‘She’s about a Mover’ lull – ironic in their incarnation as British, complete with Beatles suits and haircuts, to include such an American classic.
For more info than you can poke a stick at, see Wikipedia.
CDs:
Peter Rowan, ‘Dustbowl Children’, Quartet (Rounder)
Bill Monroe, ‘In the Pines’, The Best of Bill Monroe (MCA)
The Sir Douglas Quintet, ‘It was in the Pines’, The Best of the Sir Douglas Quintet (Beat Rocket)
R Crumb, ‘In the Pines’, The R Crumb Handbook (MQP, London, 2005)
Susannah Espie, ‘Already Gone’, The First & Last Hotel (Independent)
Gigs: Review
13 March Peter Rowan and Red Stick Ramblers, Brunswick Town Hall
15 March Redstick Ramblers and Ten Cent Shooters, East Brunswick Club
Gigs: Preview
Wed 18 March, The Songs of Mick Cameron, Don’t Tell Tom
Fri 20 March, The Davidson Bros & Peter Rowan, East Brunswick Club
Fri 10 April Chill City, noon–10pm, Alexandra Gardens, Melbourne
Next Show
Wed 15 April

I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain…

2009-03-12T12:24:00.003+11:00

Melbourne is wet. The air’s laden with moisture and outside we hear car tyres sloshing and water dripping from gutters laden with the leaves that fell prematurely in the 40+-degree days of February. And there’s the patter of rain on the tin roof.
It seemed like all of Victoria was burning last month. All our country was disappearing, all the places where our memories are fastened – in the gold-rush buildings and the wildlife sanctuaries, in the ranges and valleys, the little cafes and rest stops, on the winding roads.
I remember years ago riding my motorcycle along those roads, gasping in eucalypt- and fern-laden air like a drowning woman as I sped from the crises of the city to chill out in the Dandenong Ranges. It’s hard to imagine it burning.
My siblings all remember family holidays in lovely Marysville; when we revisited it later it was even lovelier. Hard to believe it’s gone now.
In Melbourne the smoke and ash travelled into the inner city. We couldn’t breathe; we choked up and got sick with it. Our hearts and minds were choked too – drenched in a sickly feeling of dread. As the death toll rose, the uncertainty rose too – what would happen next? Who was safe?
We tried to keep track of those we loved, not wanting to clog the phone by calling and feeling impotent in our inability to make it right for them. Every time they evacuated we stopped breathing until we knew they were OK.
Late morning on the day before one horrendous north-wind day, Rog and I stood on the Glenlyon bridge where we were married. The little creek where the dogs had frolicked beneath us was dry, had been so for a long time. The ground was dusty and brown; the trees hung limp. As we pumped mineral water, drank then passed it round, the wind started from the north. A siren sounded on the road nearby and I didn’t want to know it, but it was a fire truck.
The plume of smoke was not far, and when we drove through Daylesford no one seemed fazed. That was all to change.
Back at our guest-stay in Creswick we tracked the fire’s progress and heard the ABC reports and learned of people leaving Daylesford; held our breath again for our loved ones as they evacuated for a third time, he staying to fight the fire, she taking child and dog and whatever they could think of to salvage should the worst happen, but torn and not wanting to put a mozz on as if they expected to lose the 140-year-old miner’s cottage filled with treasures and years of toil to make it into a family home. They love that country.
Last week we drove to the Yarra Valley, through the smoky stench and blackened crops to the TarraWarra Estate, set like a jewel in its still-lush country, with its sublimely designed art gallery framing serene vistas in its huge windows. Small signs of green were showing already showing through along the way.
By now the grass of our Melbourne parks is green again. We need the respite of those parks as something that remains constant, for after February Victoria will never be the same again.

Wordy-Gurdy on the radio, 18 February 2009

2009-02-18T22:20:00.010+11:00

Jackey Coyle’s Wordy-Gurdy on Helen Jennings’ Roots of Rhythm, PBS 106.7 FM, 9.30–10am Wednesday 18 February 2009
Today’s show previewed two VIGs (Very Important Gigs) at Brunswick Music Festival, which kicks off on Feb 28 with a Music for the People afternoon gig, then really hots up with the famous Sydney Road Street Party the following day. (PBS is sponsoring the Roots Stage there.)
13 March Peter Rowan and Red Stick Ramblers, Brunswick Town Hall
15 March Red Stick Ramblers and Ten Cent Shooters, East Brunswick Club
These gigs straddle the entire straits of roots music – from the USA cult bluegrass-country-folk, let’s just call him Americana as he’s played with everyone from Bill Monroe to Peter Tosh, master Peter Rowan; and the Red Stick Ramblers from you guessed it, Baton Rouge LA, setting the circuit on fire with their gumbo of southern and not-so-southern musics. From WA we have the Ten Cent Shooters with their contagious old-timey blues.
The Town Hall gig’s a sit-down affair and the pub gig is a dance-your-socks-off affair, so we started out with a dangerously infectious back-to-back of Ten Cent Shooters do Big Joe Williams into Red Stick Ramblers do Clifton Chenier, mellowed out with a Rowan-Monroe cowrite, then broke up a chat with Festival Director John McAuslan with Ten Cent Shooters. We took it way over time with the mindblowing 9:45 ‘Smeckled Suite’, named after the famed Hawaiian player Roy Smeck’s 1938 Recording King guitar of composer Chaz Justus – just to reinforce why booking the sit-down as well as the dance gig is a must.
Tracks: Ten Cent Shooters, ‘Wild about It’, ‘Saturday Night Rub’, from Wild about It, Independent
Red Stick Ramblers, ‘Hot Tamale Baby’, ‘The Smeckled Suite’, from Made in the Shade, Sugar Hill
Peter Rowan & Tony Rice, ‘The Walls of Time’, from Quartet, Rounder
Websites
www.peter-rowan.com
www.redstickramblers.com
www.brunswickmusicfestival.com.au
Next show: March 18, Brunswick Music & Stonnington Jazz fests

Libby Matthies, 1951–2008

2009-02-11T23:25:00.008+11:00

Death lies on her like an untimely frost
– Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet

Her voice – mischievous and a bit posh. Her scent – patchouli and rose. Her style – modish, sometimes surprising, always stylish. Her stories – larger than life. Her loves – dogs, chic, houses, text, music, central Victoria. She loved hugely – children, lovers, grandchildren, friends, family. These things I remember.
Hot pink club chairs. A cool brown cashmere scarf she knew would suit me. A wardrobe of black clothes from when she decided to wear only red. The dolls of Janice Hunter. A card by Katharina Rapp. Bric-a-brac and bright knits. These things I have. Only a couple of photos, for we were always doing things, making things, going places, walking dogs, talking, talking, always talking.
We met at a party, somewhere in the mid-1990s, through a friend. We quickly found a host of other commonalities – our alma mater, marriage patterns, creative urges, Richmond houses, sense of humour.
Friends and family had a last afternoon in her apartment, three months on. A faint trace of her scent lingered in the airy, elegant space. The garden’s grown. The earthy colours and soft, rounded shapes of the doll collection evoked her sharply. The space was the old space, but empty, like clothes when someone has stepped out of them. Not in the sense that she had just gone out, but devoid of a soul.
She trod lightly, but what an imprint she left. Goodbye, Libby. You are missed.

Cornwall Capers

2009-02-04T23:21:00.012+11:00

From the locations of Daphne Du Maurier novels to Bodmin Moor to the Lost Gardens of Heligan – New Year's in Cornwall was a treat. Bolstered by a steady diet of Cornish pasties, ale and hearty fare, and guided by fish cookery guru Felicity Sylvester, we explored the diverse history and culture of this tiny corner of England. Based in a tiny, high village called Minions on the edge of Bodmin Moor, we arted out at Tate St Ives, chilled out on the moor, seaworthied out on the Tamar and down by St Michael's Mount and pigged out at our local, the Cheese Wring pub. We clambered down to the Rebecca beach and up to the Cheese Wring; marvelled at the human traces throughout millennia layered on the moor... and that's just for starters.
Thanks to Alice Coyle for some photos and Ian Miller for the ride, and, always, Roger.

Wordy-Gurdy on Roots of Rhythm, PBSFM, 21 January 2009

2009-01-21T17:07:00.011+11:00

Jackey Coyle’s Wordy-Gurdy on Helen Jennings’ Roots of Rhythm, PBS 106.7 FM, 9.30–10am Wednesday 21 January 2009
The first Wordy-Gurdy on Roots of Rhythm for 2009 focused on discoveries unearthed in London recently. And two of the hottest new albums happen to be from USA artists.
London happenings
Musos & art: Eric Clapton opened paintings show by Oz's own Philippe Mora
Also featured in What am I like exhibition & catalogue, Dulwich Picture Gallery; as well, Brian Eno; limited edition prints available, www.houseofillustration.org.uk
Bob Dylan, The Drawn Blank Series at Halcyon Gallery, New Bond St, www.halcyongallery.com
Musos & ads: Iggy Pop, Swiftcover car insurance, huge billboard featured on every second underground & overground station
Johnny Rotten, Country Life Butter on TV (catch these on youtube.com)
Musos playing in black London cabs, www.blackcabsessions.com
Tracks: Ray La Montagne, ‘Henry nearly killed me it’s a shame’, Gossip in the grain (14th Floor)
Seasick Steve, ‘Just like a king’ with Nick Cave, ‘Chiggers’, ‘Walkin man’, Started Out with nothin and I still got most of it left (Warner)
Joe Henry, ‘Parker’s Mood’, Civilians (Anti); ‘Cold Enough to Cross’, Scar (Mammoth) 3:16
Gigs: Joe Henry Corner Hotel, Richmond, this Friday
Seasick Steve, Bluesfest, Easter
Magazines: The Word October 2008, January 2009
Time Out London, January 8–14
Ta to Paul, HMV, Terminal 4, Heathrow Airport, London
LISTEN LIVE (requires Real Player)
Next show is 9:30–10am, Wednesday 17 February, PBSFM 106.7FM Melbourne Australia.

London Calling

2008-12-28T07:42:00.006+11:00

The days start slowly here, with dawn at around 7.30am and nightfall at 3.15pm, although that's getting later now we are past the winter solstice.
We are staying in Hither Green, a pretty residential area one train stop past Lewisham and close to Blackheath. Past there is the swollen curve of the Thames where gracious Greenwich spreads, the Millennium Dome to your right, London City a toytown as far as you can see, shivering at 0 degrees longitude in the -5C wind chill out front of the Royal Observatory.
In the throes of the economic crisis, London's Boxing Day sales are bigger than ever. Discounts of up to 70% have drawn a tsunami of shoppers to West End shops, and I had to see it for myself, get crushed in rush-hour crowds on the tube and in the streets. Surprisingly, just off the main drags were serene streets and arcades still adorned in their Christmas decorations.
Christmas Day is rich here, with big food among friends and family and a cold, short day with great TV to end the social activities. Who could beat a three-bird roast with a rainbow of vegetables followed eventually by a brisk walk to view the famed house of the Newstead Lights series of Christmas specials of Doctor Who going into two EastEnders sandwiching Wallace & Gromit, followed by The Royle Family?
We leave with my sis Alice and her partner Ian for Cornwall tomorrow, staying in a cottage in Minions on Bodmin Moor for our New Year's celebrations. Hope yours, too, are with loved souls and lead into a bright 2009.

Packing

2008-12-19T20:39:00.006+11:00

As the sound of Christmas parties echoes around our little world, I feel all warm and smiggly. (Specially after the goodbye Lindauer Fraise with my sister Jinny in a little city hole-in-the-wall.) The presents are all wrapped, the get-togethers are all done and now there’s tomorrow-flight packing to be finished.
I haven’t got a clue what to pack for a UK winter. After 18 months of taking off regularly with a tiny red suitcase that seemed to just pack itself, I realise we haven’t had a winter for two years. Rog is in the same bemused state. ‘Pack for colder than you can ever imagine,’ Helen Read says.
But first, I just want to reflect. Over the last two days, people we met through Warmun Art have called or emailed – I like that. Having to pick up sticks quickly meant no time for proper goodbyes – I miss that. Some people – both Gija and gardiya – who crossed our path there, I remember them in a sort of way I can only describe as tender. Doing work with others who truly love what they do creates a current of energy you can almost see. It doesn’t need to be spoken – it forms a special connection. That connection will never be broken, even if you never meet again. If there are songlines across Australia, I think there must be heartlines across the world.
There are many things that need to be said to complete that Warmun cycle and I hope they will form themselves into a shape cogent enough to write down next year.
Meanwhile, I wish you the merriest of merries, the happiest of happys, and the brightest of starry nights. Thanks for reading.

Radiant Surprises

2008-12-09T17:48:00.007+11:00

This old cactus is a Schlumbergera, I believe. It heralds my birthday each year with the flower world's equivalent of fireworks.
My prickly friend has survived at least five house moves since I inherited it from my sister Alice in ’78 with the rest of her cactus collection. She left for her big OS stint not long after I returned, but whereas I stayed two years, she just stayed. And the cacti have grown weathered and scarred. Snails and scale have left dents and tiny pits. I remember at one stage boiling up packets of duty-free Drum tobacco into a stinking brew to annihilate the scale. Once there was family discord as I devised yet another tactic in the war against snails - Rog loves them and was secretly encouraging them.
I found this image in some recent shots – just as the last of the blooms opens, its tiny face like a premature baby; a miniature version of the robust early flowers. Melbourne is a bit like this old friend, its radiant surprises appearing among its cold spells and bad traffic. I’d forgotten how magnificent the State Library is, and one of last week’s treats was exploring the old Museum spaces like Queen’s Hall that are in the throes of being restored. And we have great radio again – weekend mornings hold little pleasures like listening to Tim’s Vital Bits on RRR. Then there’s the markets, and finding current newspapers readily available. Even the unseasonal bouts of rain bring back the temporarily forgotten pleasure of snuggling up, lost in a book. Daphne du Maurier is on the reading list for our New Year in Cornwall with Alice and her Ian. Al's friend Felicity, a local, has advised The House on the Strand and Rule Britannia. I feel like we are there already.
Helen Read is in town with her end-of-year showing of Aboriginal art at the Barn in Kew. Helping out with setup last week evoked memories of making displays in my own shop years ago – there was the similar challenge of rationalising a diverse collection. Helen’s glorious melange of treasures is collected over decades flying small aircraft into settlements – either nursing or, later, bringing visitors to tap into the reality of making art in remote Australia. Helen cares about the basic lack of housing and health care, and Aboriginal people can see this – she is welcome in parts not always accessible to visitors.
Spilling out of the Barn are paintings made with ochres and acrylics on canvas, paper, board and bark, Mimi figures, baskets, totems, ceremonial artefacts, little painted creatures carved from bush woods, books, etchings and screenprints drawn from 14 community art centres across northern and central Australia. It’s worth a wander – phone 0418 137 719 before 23 December. Or browse www.didgeri.com.au, www.palya-art.com.au.

Wordy-Gurdy on Roots of Rhythm, PBS-FM

2008-11-26T22:33:00.007+11:00

Roger Taylor joined me on Helen Jennings' Roots of Rhythm from 9.30 to 10am today in a preview of the return of Wordy-Gurdy to the show after my 18-month hiatus.
We riffed on Andy Baylor’s new CD Blues is Poetry. After hearing the album, Rog and I ratted through our collection and chose four tracks that linked in one way or another. We looked for stuff that was evoked for us by the gorgeous, fat, dirty, shuddering guitar Andy plays on the album. We tried to go for songs that shared the wonderful spaces between the notes.
Andy Baylor, ‘Caress Me Baby’, from Blues is Poetry
Jimmy Reed, ‘You’n that Sack’, from The Vee Jay Years Disc 3
Junior Kimbrough, ‘I Cried Last Night’, from Oxford American Southern Music CD 2006
John Lee Hooker, ‘Serve Me Right to Suffer’, from The Boogie Man
Kerri Simpson, ‘I Ain Your Fool’, from Maybe by Midnight
Andy Baylor, ‘Blues is Poetry’, from Blues is Poetry
Blues is Poetry launched last night at the Spiegeltent.
In a seies of song intros Andy mused on his career. He mentioned his time in Louisiana learning Cajun music, the bands he’s played in with various players at the gig, and outlined the genesis of the album, when he was undergoing chemo and began recording in an exercise as much about the healing, nurturing power of the blues as anything. ‘I’m still here!’ he said at one stage, and the fantasmagorical room seemed to echo our collective relief at his recovery.
The players: from the album, Pete Beulke, bass; Denis Close, percussion; Ian Kitney, drums. Guests, Ric Dempster on steel and harmonica; Sam Lemann, guitar; Aurora Kirk, vocals.
Best shoes: Andy’s two-toners
Best tie: Ric’s half-mast number
Wordy-Gurdy returns to Roots of Rhythm on January 21 2009 and will continue on the third Wednesday of the month at 9.30am.

Japanning 5: Osaka

2008-11-26T22:24:00.006+11:00

Japanning 4: Tokyo and Kyoto

2008-11-26T22:01:00.008+11:00

Japanning 3: Aichi

2008-11-26T21:54:00.005+11:00

Japanning 2: Tokyo

2008-11-24T12:17:00.007+11:00

Japanning 1

2008-11-19T16:17:00.007+11:00

Last week I returned from ten days in Japan conducting ochre-painting workshops for children. Artist Marika Patrick and I left Warmun on October 29 for the legs that took us first to Kununurra, then Darwin, Cairns and Tokyo.
Masako Takahashi of Wonder Art Productions orchestrated four events in an imaginative series from Tokyo to Handa City in Aichi Province, back to Tokyo and then to Kyoto for two nights and Osaka for the final gig. Filmmaker Michael Aso acted as interpreter for three gigs. He had visited Warmun earlier this year with Masako and her assistant Yui, and he met us in Kununurra fresh from a night toad-busting – the dreaded cane toads are now just an hour’s drive from Kununurra. Devastating for the native species; we were glad 3500 were rounded up.
At Tokyo’s Setagawa Art Museum, we introduced thirty or so children and jat least as many parents and assistants to Warmun, the Kimberley and the Bungle Bungles before we all ventured into the museum gardens, just colouring up for autumn, and the kids gathered various browns of dirt for painting. They mixed those colours for the background, and used the yellow, green, brown and pink of Warmun for the primary images. I was doubtful about the process, but the results were fascinating. To see kids crowd around to touch the bright ochres showed how little as city kids they got their hands dirty, and the interaction of parents and helpers illustrated a deep fascination with nature.
Those pictures are now on display at the Museum, along with others from later in the trip.
At Handa City via the amazing shinkansen, we worked with another 30 kids at the Nimi Nankichi Museum, an underground complex built to celebrate the loved children’s story and nursery-rhyme author who lived a short and productive life. The soils here, being pottery country, ranged from greys to pinks to even yellow-browns and many paintings featured Gon-Fox, the hero of Nankichi’s most famous story.
Back in Tokyo, Marika became a performance artist at JT Hall, painting a 3.5m canvas to the accompaniment of Japanese didj player Eliji Suzuki, his radiant wife Yu Suzuki and band. It was surreal for Marika and me to hear this Arnhem Land–style music and there was even a song composed called ‘Bungle Bungles’.
One night in Osaka and the final gig – two half-day workshops at Kids Plaza, four floors of kidstuff, sort of like a museum–fun parlour where parents can either leave children while shopping or kids go to spend the day. It was the first painting class they’d conducted there and the reaction was just as positive as others throughout the trip. Another didj player with a totally different style and a glimpse into the hearty culture of this earthy region.
A birthday cake for Scorpios Marika and me and we left on the all-night flight.
What a country and what people. What a project to end my Warmun tenure. Now, safely back in beloved Melbourne close to family and friends, we reflect on the vision of Masako, the hard work and attention to detail of all concerned, the laughs and the experience of a lifetime. It was satisfying to use our skills to help bring Warmun onto the international stage.
More photos to follow.

If it’s not one thing…

2008-09-29T10:00:00.006+10:00

We had a friendly takeover this week… three volunteer teachers from Melbourne came up, armed with boxes and boxes: sewing machines, big, bright balls and skeins of wools, felt puppet makings, lino cutting tools, calico bags to print on, feathers, googly eyes, donated clothes and vibrantly patterned fabrics. Triple J we called them: Jude Wigley, Jane Byrne and (Vir)Ginia Harding and they’d raided willing hostages in Melbourne for donations: thank you Zart, Alphington PS, Portsea SLSC, Pat Lowy and jane Gribble. Warmun Art chipped in for some costs and accom, but amazingly, these generous women had brought themselves up here. They peppered the community with shots of laughter, fresh thinking and energy, inspiring the most troublesome kids to crochet and fingerknit and make hand puppets in the last week of school before holidays.
Gija day happened on Tuesday -– our annual feast of all things Gija. It began with a playing of the didjeridu and mantha (smoking) and progressed through games and activities (including Triple J’s linoprint and knit/crochet workshops) and ended with the Gija joonba dreamt by Rover Thomas all those years ago.
Meanwhile, we’re licensing images to Purnululu National Park for merchandise, curating shows for this year going into next, catching up on three weeks’ worth of emails and copyright, designing invitations, organising the Jack Britten estate for exhibition and planning, planning, always planning.
Thanks to Jude Wigley for some of these photos