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INTRODUCTION

the Live Music Capital of the World

News bulletins led with this headline when the Melbourne live music census was released early in 2018: more live music venues per capita than any other city in the world, that’s what the census highlighted. Over five years between 2012 and 2017 there was a twenty percent increase in the number of gigs in the city and an increase in audiences to over 112,000 people every Saturday night. That’s an AFL Grand Final’s worth of people combing the city and looking for that ‘hydrogen jukebox world,’1 as Allen Ginsberg once called it; all those people looking for the speed and sound of music made in Melbourne.

So what specifically is it about Melbourne that, according to the Melbourne Live Music Census in 2017, allows it to support around 553 live music venues as compared to, according to a Sydney Morning Herald article2 453 in New York, 385 in Tokyo and 245 in London despite its population being a fraction of those major world cities? I mean, let’s be honest, Melbourne’s weather can be brutal at times, every road awash then, minutes later, sun so hot it drills holes in footpaths. You’ve all heard that cliché about four seasons in one day. But despite flaky weather, the footy, the movies, Netflix, YouTube, Melburnians are committed to going out in great numbers in rain, heat, hail, sleet to listen to live music and find those bands and singers they’ve heard on records or downloads or discovered on 3PBS or 3RRR or read about in the street press. Is this a new thing, a passing fad? No! Melbourne has been a live music capital for generations, arguably almost a century, and the story of how it became an internationally recognised live music capital is amazing.

It is remarkable that a little city, thousands and thousands of kilometres away from the musical motherland has been able to establish a culture that has been magnified by music where — according to the Music Victoria census — around 3500 musicians and tens of thousands of patrons on any given weekend night engage in a kind of magical exchange, which for generations, has sustained the crystal ju ju that is the music we love. All this in the face of hostile planning law, the dead hand of rotting corporatism, booze, sexism, drugs, the nihilism of changing fashion and technology. What has been the process that has allowed our musicians to create a sound so vital it gives you chills, a sound often overpowering, a sound so recognisably Melbourne? That’s what I hope to answer in the pages of this book.

The story of live music in Melbourne is very much linked to the story of jazz. Jazz was played in the grand dance palaces, community spaces and town halls of the southern capital from the ’20s up to the ’50s. It was then that purveyors of roots music — which is defined as incorporating blues, country, folk, rhythm and blues, and rock influences — joined their jazz colleagues in the halls, clubs and coffee lounges, and later, bars and pubs of Melbourne. It’s a big story. It’s a story that has a political and social subplot, a story tied to the history and culture of Melbourne. Every story has heroes and ours has thousands of them — the musicians of Melbourne. Those men and women who were born in Melbourne or made the city their home, whose skill has allowed them to play across genres and styles, and who will, for a hundred bucks a gig, lump their basses, tenors, trumpets, trombones, keyboards, guitars, drum kits and amps through ice-chopping Melbourne winter days and nights to play like the confident masters they are. They go to root of things: a jazzy waltz, a full-on country jamboree. They never let the singer stand naked. With everyone sitting in with everyone else there is an inevitable cross-fertilisation: licks are incorporated, phrases are borrowed and a sound emerges, a Melbourne sound that is at once rakish and debonair.

Some might say the Melbourne sound goes to the very soul of the form that’s being played. That’s because Melbourne musicians are enthusiasts and not academics, which means they play from the heart and not the head. Some may find this approach a little eccentric at times, ragged even, but it’s a sound that’s unique. It’s a sound I’ve heard up close from the barroom floor and from the ringside table of the stage, and I have seen first-hand how these Melbourne masters blow the fog away.

One thing this book isn’t is a list. It is not a comprehensive, exhaustive examination of every jazz band or all the roots artists that have played and made a name for themselves both in Melbourne and beyond. What it will examine — and hopefully explain — is the altered consciousness, the reality or the ‘invisible republic’ (to paraphrase the music historian Greil Marcus in his book Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes)3 of the Melbourne jazz and roots scenes.