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Chapter 3

Modernism, Communism, Hot Jazz & Graeme Bell

Jazz is a tree. It has many branches that reach out in many directions, it goes out into the far east and picks up an exotic blossoms … everywhere it goes east, west, north, south, it produces many different coloured flowers and picks up many influences … but as you go down into the earth, you’ll find blue-blooded-black roots deep in the soil of black Africa which is the foundation of everything, because it is [the African beat], the most listened to beat in the world …1 (Duke Ellington)

Dixieland jazz originated in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century and was played mostly by its African and Creole American originators: Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Kid Ory. Dixie bands typically featured piano, saxophone, trumpet, bass and drums and some may have also included trombone, tuba, clarinet, banjo, guitar and washboard. This wild mercury music caused a sensation in African-American communities across the United States, with its shards of attacking horn, its disorientating rhythm, and its stab first and ask questions later attitude. However, perhaps unsurprisingly, the first commercial recording of jazz music was not made by its intense and passionate originators but by five white crackers cashing in on this new sound: the Original Jazz Band. In 1917 this inauspicious bunch climbed the stairs of the Victor Talking Machine Company on 38th Street in New York City and recorded a stinking pile of 12 bar crap known as the ‘Livery Stable Blues’. Highlights of this musical mess included a clarinet making the sound of a rooster, a cornet whinnying like a horse and a trombone mooing like a cow; Pat Boone and Vanilla Ice would be proud.

By the ’30s it wouldn’t be this piece of cultural appropriation that would be played by Melbourne musicians, but one of more traditional jazz, played by a couple of serious students of the genre with unorthodox chemistry — the Bell Brothers. Although not the first to play Dixieland jazz in Melbourne, they would be its principal exponents.

Graeme Bell was a classically trained piano player and his brother Roger blew horn. The two Scotch College boys fell in with some jazz dudes from their school, like ‘Lazy’ Ade Monsbourgh, and started playing clubs, coffee houses, pubs and specialist jazz venues like The Embers as well as jazz appreciation societies. It was the Bells that got things swinging.

In the ’40s, jazz appealed to the young almost as much as it horrified the establishment. During the war, many local musicians came into contact with Americans who updated them on developments in the scene. Melbourne became the centre of a local enthusiasm for ‘hot’, or traditional ’20s New Orleans style jazz,2 with its emphasis on improvisation and authenticity and which paralleled new directions in the visual arts and literature. In 1941 for example, Graeme Bell’s3 Jazz Gang formed a Victorian Jazz Lover’s Society and staged regular gigs at The Stage Door on Flinders Street. The Gang co-produced a program of boogie-woogie piano, blues and traditional jazz, with supports from such people as a young pianist Don Banks and blues singer Vivian Roberts along with guitarists Joe Washington and Spade Davis. Bell writes that, ‘To date, this was probably the most adventurous staging of jazz music in Melbourne.’

But the Victorian Jazz Lovers Society shows were important for another reason: they were co-produced by Harry Stein, sometime drummer but fulltime leader of the Communist Party-aligned Eureka Youth League. Harry would have a significant role to play in both the evolution of jazz music in Melbourne and in bringing Graeme Bell and his take on the traditional jazz form to the attention of the wider world.

Picture this: it’s among the darkest days of World War II. German U-Boats have blasted the British fleet to bits in the Atlantic and the Nazi Army has marched into Greece. Auschwitz has expanded to increase the production rate of bodies and up to 34000 Jews are slaughtered in ditches by anti-tank guns over a two-day period during Operation Odessa, while almost simultaneously, Liverpool is reduced to rubble by the Luftwaffe. Meantime, Rommel roars across the African desert, Moscow is under siege and Japanese Zeros sink most of the US fleet anchored at Pearl Harbour. With the world on the brink, Graeme Bell and his Jazz Gang formed a partnership with the Communist Party of Australia to bring their two-beat hokum to the jazzbos of Melbourne.

Bell’s band poured out their polyphonic blues improvisations every Saturday night at The Stage Door. Roger Bell’s cornet played the melody on songs like ‘Shimmy Like Your Sister Kate’, while Ade Monsbourgh on clarinet or valve trombone and Pixie Roberts on clarinet improvised around Roger’s wailing voice. Jack Varney on banjo or guitar chorded away as Lou Silbereisen on bass or tuba kept the oom-pah rhythm driving through the song, propelled by the great Russ Murphy on drums, as soldiers about to fight in the burning sands of Africa or the rugged mountains of Greece danced with their sweethearts like there was no tomorrow. In a boiling whirl of organic sound, they lost themselves for a few stolen moments in multi-dimensional, unembellished madness, a madness hotter than a Vickers machine gun.

Aside from Harry Stein and his comrades at the Eureka Youth League, the Bell boys were also hanging out with Melbourne’s modernist, artistic avant-garde, led by John and Sunday Reed at their Heide farm in Heidelberg. It was at Heide that the aristocratic Reeds and their painting protégés (such as Sidney Nolan, John Sinclair, Joy Hester, Daniel Vassilief, Adrian Lawler and Albert Tucker) read and dissected modernist authors like Dostoyevsky, Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. The assembled patrons with their artists, writers and musicians in tow, pored over art books that reproduced the European modernism of Braque, Matisse, Cézanne, Gauguin and Picasso. At the same time the modernist painters were also creating their own Antipodean artistic revolution: think Nolan’s Ned Kelly series and Tucker’s Images of Modern Evil exhibition, not to mention John Perceval’s Survival, to name a few. They drank wine, ate Sunday’s roasts and listened to recitations of works by Rimbaud and Eliot by modernist writers like Max Harris and Michael Keon. All the while, Nolan, Tucker, Counihan and others painted and fought and fucked and created an always unique, often disturbing artistic Australian voice. It was a voice that was underpinned by Bell’s jam sessions, a voice that still resonates today.

My uncle Alf Roberts and aunt Jean lived on a dairy farm next door to the Reeds in the ’30s; in fact it was Alf who sold them eleven acres for 1314 pounds in 1934 allowing John and Sunday access to the Yarra River. I’m not sure if my farmer uncle’s family were fully prepared for their neighbours’ exuberant bohemianism, the visual and sexual experimentation of John, Sunday, Sidney Nolan and their various modernist acolytes. Nor would they have fully grasped the shock and spark of the blazing art and literature exploding under the roof of the Victorian farmhouse next door just off Bulleen Road. My cousin John however fully understood the lascivious behaviour he observed his neighbours engaging in all those years ago:

There were wild parties, jazz bands, with drinks running freely … and in summer there were always nude men and women swimming in the river or luxuriating under the shade a red gum. I was a teenager and wanted to see more of what went on under those trees.’ But Uncle Alf knew what was going on in the shade of those arching red gums, ‘He nailed hessian bags to the fence separating our farm from the Reeds, hoping to block out the view. But us kids just went swimming in the river and all was revealed!

Graeme and Roger Bell were in the eye of the intellectual storm surrounding Heide. The Bell boys’ band played at swing parties hosted by John Sinclair in a converted garage owned by the Reeds and over the road from their Victorian farmhouse. As well as the Reeds, communist intellectuals and fellow travellers, modernist artists, writers and their satellites explored the universe and the inner substance of things, got off on cheap booze and each other while the Bell band supplied the musical backdrop. To quote Lesley Harding and Kendrah Morgan ‘Roger Bell’s soaring trumpet was heard across the empty farmlands …’4 up and down the Yarra Valley.

The Bells also played ‘hot jazz’ at the Reed-supported Contemporary Art Society’s exhibitions, where the living art of Nolan, Tucker, Noel Counihan, Adrian Lawler and Joy Hester was first displayed, much to the horror of Melbourne’s conservative right wing art establishment. Bell, in his autobiography Australian Jazzman quotes Melbourne’s Truth, describing, in modernist terms, the scene at the October 1941 CAS exhibition, held at the Hotel Australia on Collins Street and featuring the Bells’ band, Graeme Bell’s Jazz Gang:

‘Long-haired intellectuals, swing friends, hot mommas and truckin’ jazz boys rubbed shoulders on friendly terms. While swingers hollered ‘Go to town!’ and jitterbugged in the aisles, the intelligentsia learnedly discussed differences between the rhythms of hot jazz and the pigment of Picasso.’

The close association between jazz musicians and artists was seen as decadent by Melbourne’s conservative art establishment. J.S. McDonald, then-Director of the National Gallery is quoted by Bell describing Melbourne’s Modernist Art movement as the:

‘Product of a generation revelling in jazz, jitterbugging and the elevation of the dress model to stardom … [they are]committed to ungainly attitudes … the exalting of the discordant and ugly!’

Bell himself described his association with the Contemporary Arts Society as ‘a most important event’ that not only led to further gigs, but also cemented close political and personal relationships for a new generation of artists and musicians. As Bell wrote:

‘We jazz musicians and the contemporary artists discovered that we were in the same camp. To be modern or anti-conservative during the prevailing climate was to be anti-fascists and therefore left wing. If anything was anti-conservative in the early ’40s it was jazz. It was a matter of record that the conservative forces in the arts were linked to right-wing politics … leading writers like Max Harris saw jazz as part of the total art phenomenon …’

The connection between these artists and left-wing politics (via Graeme Bells’ association with Harry Stein and the Eureka Youth League) was cemented when the two men co-produced shows at The Stage Door in Flinders Street under the heading ‘Young Jazz Lovers’. The partnership between modernist artists, writers, jazz musicians and progressive politics was unique within Australia. As Bell wrote: ‘Other [Australian] cities, however, particularly Sydney, had nowhere near the rebellious vitality in art, jazz or literature that there was in Melbourne.’

The artistic rebelliousness of the ’40s could be at least partially explained by the psychology of ‘the outsider’. Melbourne’s young, bohemian subculture ran in counterpoint to the suburban cultural establishment. This establishment was led, at the time, by the likes of media giant and father of Rupert, Sir Keith Murdoch, J.S. McDonald and Murdoch’s artistic acolyte, the soon to be National Gallery of Victoria Director, Sir Daryl Lindsay. At this time these cultural troglodytes were busy digging a hole to nowhere in their conservative suburban graveyards, while trying desperately to dismiss the politically progressive, polyrhythmic dynamism of Nolan, the Reeds, James Gleeson, Max Harris, Michael Keon and jazz musicians like Graeme Bell and his Gang. Lindsay refused to buy any modernist paintings for the NGV, and Murdoch dismissed the whole movement as debauched.5

The real action was not at Lindsay’s Toorak mansion, or Murdoch’s bucolic spread on the Mornington Peninsular, but out in Heidelberg at the Reed’s joint, where guests found release letting the Bells’ music dump them like a wild wave. That barn sure rocked; not only was it the scene of wild modernist mayhem, but also the venue where Graeme Bell and his newly acquired young wife, Margo Byass, held their wedding party. Bell writes:

‘The rort …was held in John Reed’s barn … all the artists, writers and jazz musicians of note were there … for the all-night jam session … it was a mad and restless night.’

Another modernist clique descended on the Bell’s new South Yarra apartment, where artists, musicians, racing drivers, sportsmen, writers and African-American servicemen would participate in Saturday afternoon drinking and jazz jam sessions. It was all about trying to escape the general gloom of the war years …

As the war progressed Graeme Bell’s Jazz Gang continued to wail away in subterranean university college jam sessions, and four nights a week at their residency at the Swing Inn coffee house on Flinders Street, above the Young and Jackson’s Hotel. At weekends the gang played the Pacific Hotel in Lorne as well as other regular jazz gigs all around town. The band at this time featured Graeme on keys, Roger on trumpet and Ade Monsbourgh on trombone. It was a line-up that, although still somewhat fluid given the demands of the war effort, remained largely intact until the end of hostilities.

Jazz, parties, dances, art shows; ’40s Melbourne would have been, compared to the rest of world, a surrealist daydream largely untouched by the horrors of the past six years. When the war ended in September 1945, Europe and much of Asia lay in ruins. Great cities such as Warsaw, Kiev, Tokyo and Berlin were piles of rubble and ash. In the Soviet Union, 17000 towns and 70000 villages had been wiped off the face of the earth, and by the end of 1945 the largest population movement in European history was underway.

It’s estimated that between eleven and twenty million people had been displaced by the war, leaving some 850,000 people starving in displaced persons camps across Europe by conflict’s end.

Britain, too, was bankrupt, leaving bombed-out cities such as Manchester, Liverpool and London with little money to rebuild. Things were made even more uncertain when Prime Minister Churchill proclaimed that ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent…’ which ushered the entire Western World into a Cold War with their former ally, the Soviet Union.

Even though Australia had lost over 27000 servicemen and women in the struggle with the Axis powers, in comparison to Europe we had emerged relatively unscathed. Some would say we prospered from it; the war had accelerated the development of Australia’s manufacturing industry which led to a significant fall in unemployment. Australia also emerged from its isolation from the rest of the world when then-Prime Minister Ben Chifley announced a mass migration program at the war’s end. Between 1946 and 1960 the program pushed an annual increase in Australia’s population of 2.7percent per year and contributed to the development of a cosmopolitan society and a more outward-looking nation.6 With a rising population and an emerging manufacturing industry, we were well-placed to prosper from the post-war boom.

Culturally, the surge in economic prosperity mixed with a collective feeling of relief, following the privations of both the war and the Great Depression in the previous decade meant that people were looking to relax and celebrate. The people wanted a goodtime, they deserved it, and the Melbourne jazz scene was primed and ready to deliver. Throughout the war and especially in the lead up to peace, there had been an explosion of jazz gigs across town, many attracting both American and Australian servicemen and women stationed in the southern capital. And the Bell boys were in the thick of it.

From the early ’40s Graeme Bell and his Jazz Gang played regularly at the Palais Royale, the Trocadero (previously the Green Mill), and the Exhibition Buildings, as well as at many of the town hall dances staged throughout Melbourne, according to Bell’s autobiography. In addition, the band played a regular Sunday session at Admiralty House on Exhibition Street, plus the odd special event — like a dance for three thousand people held in a huge factory in Morwell. There were also the lucrative, wild private parties where booze flowed and Albert Tucker’s ‘Victory Girls’ ran hot. Graeme also played piano with various bands at places like the Geelong Palais and the Heidelberg Town Hall. Then there were gigs at the Power House on Albert Park Lake, Manchester Café opposite the Melbourne Town Hall and, later, the Green Knoll Café, which soon morphed into the Horst Liepolt’s Café and Jazz Centre 44, located on the corner of Acland Street and the Esplanade right opposite Luna Park (more on this venue later). Maybe it was in the war years during which foundations were laid for Melbourne to become the nation’s live music capital.

Like a lot of contemporary Melbourne musicians, Graeme and Roger were also filling their diaries with guest spots in other people’s bands, sitting in when key personnel were shipped off for military duties. Graeme worked with Russell Jones’ band every Saturday night at The Power House, and even spent a few months playing with Claude Carnell’s band in Mackay, Queensland, performing for US soldiers as part of an American Red Cross show band. Graeme’s absence left the way open for Roger to join clarinettist Pixie McFarlane and regularly sit in with Benny Featherstone’s Dixielanders. This gig led to a residency at The Rainbow Room, with Don Banks, Lyn Callen and Laurie Howells. When Featherstone joined the Merchant Navy, Roger and his band, the newly-named Roger Bell’s Dixieland Jazz Band, took up their Saturday spot at the Heidelberg Town Hall. Roger’s six-piece band played alternate sets with Hal Lloyd’s Strict Tempo Dance Orchestra, a radical move at the time. It the brainchild of promoter Bill Glennon, and the idea took off like a rocket; suddenly there was a circuit of Glennon-sponsored events around town. This led to regular gigs for Roger and the band.

In the war years, Melbourne’s music scene was fluid, with side musicians running from gig to gig subbing in for unavailable players. With half of Melbourne’s jazz musicians enlisted in the armed forces, people like Graeme Bell who was exempt from war service due to medical grounds (he suffered from an inflamed vertebra) and Roger (who was working as an engineer in a protected industry and therefore also exempt) were in high demand. They adapted different styles of music for a variety of audiences; a jazz club, a swing band, a wedding, a private event (what we would call a corporate event today). There was also an occasional recording session.

Graeme and Roger could both read music charts, an advantage over their self-taught colleagues. As well as being outstanding musicians, they were also blokes who were easy to work with, an important prerequisite for a sideman and almost as important as musical ability. Most importantly, the more they were out there gigging, the more they were on band-leaders’ radar, and more gigs came their way. This is a practice that continues in Melbourne to this very day.

Right up to the ’70s the format of alternating a contemporary band with a full orchestra persisted at the Heidelberg Town Hall. By then the venue was a little daggy and Melbourne was alive with groovy discotheques that had sprung up all over the city: Berties, Sebastians, The Thumpin’ Tum — Q Club was even hip in comparison. But, for me anyway, the Heidelberg had two great attractions. The first was the Heidelberg Town Hall Big Band. What a thrill it was to hear that twenty-piece orchestra, with its full brass and reed section, keys, guitar, bass, percussion and drums in full roar. The second was The Charlie Gauld Trio (oh, and the gorgeously sophisticated office girls that seductively shimmied around the town hall all night long, but I was 15, they were unattainable, we move on).

My friends and I, along with a couple thousand others, would make our way to the Town Hall on Upper Heidelberg Road on a Wednesday or Saturday night. We would go to see Jill Glenn, Colin Cook, and Olivia Newton-John; I remember seeing her sing solo and with her old Go Show/Bandstand partner Pat Carroll. These artists, among others, would sing the hits of the day, backed by that mighty twenty-plus-piece band. When Jill Glenn did her ‘Little Egypt’ routine or swung her hips and did the hoochie-koo while singing ‘Big Spender’ from Sweet Charity, man I nearly popped my cork. Colin Cook also did a pretty good Joe Cocker impersonation when he performed the Mad Dogs and Englishmen version of ‘The Letter’ with the band. After an hour or so, the singers and band would take a break, everyone shuffling outside to smoke a gasper or talk bullshit or try to chat up one of the office girls or whatever.

After a half-hour or so, we were back inside and ready for — in my case — the main event. For me, the real highlight of the night was when the Charlie Gauld Trio took the stage to play the progressive rock hits of the time. Charlie was arguably one of the greatest guitar players in the country and a legend of the local music scene, having come out of Melbourne’s ’50s go-to house band the Thunderbirds, which had also included Harold Frith on drums and Peter Robinson on bass, who went on to co-form with Laurie Arthur the Strangers. The Thunderbirds had backed Betty McQuaid on her hit recording of the John D Loudermilk song ‘Midnight Bus’ as well as Johnny Chester on his version of the Johnny Kidd and the Pirates hit ‘Shakin’ All Over’. Listen to Johnny’s version of the song on YouTube; that’s Charlie Gauld wangin’ that surf guitar, and what a cold blast of icy reverb that sound is!

Charlie could play anything; funk, flamboyance or invention. The first time I heard Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’ and ‘Foxy Lady’, as well as Cream’s ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ they were being played by Charlie at The Heidelberg. He stood expressionless and resolute behind his aviator sunglasses and extracted, it seemed to me, the same fire and fluidity from his Burns guitar that Hendrix and Clapton had managed to pull out of their Stratocasters. It was psychedelic, it was funk, it was blues, it was rock — Charlie Gauld played them all.

Many years later, Jeff Burstin and myself were playing a little acoustic gig on a Sunday afternoon at the Palace Hotel on Burke Road in Camberwell. Suddenly, a little old man wearing enormous sunglasses shuffled into the room, pulling with him a shopping trolley full of old newspapers. He sat down at a table and ordered a beer, pulling out a handful of yellowed newsprint and flicking through them, stopping occasionally to drink from his glass. He intermittently looked up and smiled at us, or swivelled around the room as though looking for someone. He’d drain his beer, read his newspaper, order another pot and repeat. I’d recognised who he was at once.

‘I reckon that’s Charlie Gauld there,’ I said to Jeff between songs. ‘I’d know him anywhere.’

When we took a break I approached Charlie and asked if he was who I thought he was. Of course I was right. I told him what an inspiration he was to me, that he was, in my young teenage eyes, the greatest guitar player I had ever seen. I told him he was a legend, I said it was an honour to meet him, and then I saw, through his dark glasses, his eyes moisten, so I shut the fuck up.

‘Thanks …’ was all he whispered. I bought him a beer and asked if he would like to sit in with Jeff and me.

‘Please play my guitar, it would be such a thrill if you did …’ I gushed.

‘No, no, I don’t play anymore, sorry. I was hoping Wayne [Duncan, our then bass player and an old friend of Charlie’s] would be here today?’

‘No sorry Charlie, it’s just the little duo today.’

‘Oh right! I was hoping to see Wayne, maybe next time … you were great by the way, I just wanted to see Wayne.’

With that he repacked his trolley, drank his beer and shuffled out the pub’s front door. Charlie Gauld died soon after and with him went a little piece of Melbourne’s rock’n’roll soul.

The Eureka Youth League, Communism and all that Jazz

Throughout the ’40s and ’50s, and into the ’60s decade of rebellion, the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) developed significant relationships with cultural and artistic movements. The youth wing of the CPA, The Eureka Youth League (EYL), played a particularly important role in the attempt to forge an alliance between musicians and communism. First through jazz, and then through two folk music revivals, the EYL sought to use music to recruit members and to foster its ideological and political struggles. In the end, the EYL’s and CPA’s relationship with both jazz and folk was tenuous. Yet along the way, the music itself flourished. This, then, is a story of tensions between and paradoxes surrounding the Party and musicians sympathetic to it. Yet it is also a story about how the cultural life of Australia was greatly enriched by the EYL’s attempt to use music as a political tool …7

Back in 1942, newlywed Graeme Bell was hangin’ with the Reed push, playing hot jazz and pissing-on at the Fawkner Hotel in Toorak Road, or spending time at his flat in South Yarra. Drinkin’ at the flat was de rigueur with the hip bohemian crowd and everyone who was anyone was there — jazz musicians, music critics, Michael Keon. It was at the Bells’ Adams Street flat that Sid Nolan turned out monochromes of nudes painted on blotting paper with the aide of a dipped finger in a jar of red pigment. Groovy baby.

But then the planets aligned, and Graeme and Roger Bell’s life would change forever when Harry Stein of the Eureka Youth League, the youth arm of the Communist Party of Australia invited the Bells to play at Stein’s Eureka Hot Jazz Society at 104 Queensberry Street North Melbourne. What was going on here? Why would a card-carrying communist support and promote a bunch of avant-garde jazz heads like Bell and their modernist artist mates?

Maybe Stein and fellow members were true Bolsheviks, in the pre-Stalinist sense. Like Harry’s Eureka Youth League, the pre-Stalinist Russian Bolsheviks encouraged a national cultural pluralism, a kind of democratisation of art where progressive artistic movements would become a dynamic force in society, hopefully resulting in modernity becoming accessible to everyone. In the immediate aftermath of the 1917 revolution, Lenin’s Commissar of Education Anatoly Lunacharsky turned over the Russian art schools to modernist artists such as Marc Chagall, whose staff included Malevich and El Lissitzky. According to Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New:

‘Lunacharky, who was determined to see the birth of “an art of 5 kopecks” — cheap available and modern — created the Higher State Art Training Centre in Moscow … which turned into the Bauhaus of Russia, the most advanced art college anywhere in the world, and the ideological centre of Russian Collectivism … where the modernity of rivets, celluloid, aeroplane wings replaced primitivism and mysticism.’8

Maybe Harry Stein viewed things similarly to his Bolshevik comrades. Maybe he too wanted to establish Melbourne’s very own democratically available modernist jazz centre right there in Queensberry Street, a place where everyone, not just the denisens of the Trocadero or Palais de Danse, could access this dynamic music. He certainly wanted to establish a space where jazz musicians could play, swap ideas and be supported by both a sympathetic promoter and a receptive audience. If this fitted into a broader communist vision for Stein at the EYL Hall in North Melbourne then perhaps it was successful.

The war was clearly approaching its end. Together with the Soviet Union, the Allies had invaded Germany and were pushing the Nazi Army back to Berlin. Hitler suicided, the Germans unconditionally surrendered in May and now there were just the Japanese to deal with in the Pacific. For Melburnians it was time to emerge from the depression, fear and monotony of war and embrace the warm miracle of peace. That’s what happened, though not overnight, at the EYL Hall in 1945.

Down the road apiece was Camp Pell, an American Army Camp set up in Royal Park. It was there that thousands of cashed-up, unbound, jazz-loving US soldiers were in search of a good time. Ironically they would find it at Commie Central, EYL Hall. Jazzbos and their girls dug the band, danced the Lindy Hop and disappeared together into the anonymity of the blackout. It was, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, a still point in a turning world. It was a time of anticipation. There was a sense of existing in a kind of dream, where — to quote Eliot again — the past and future had gathered. There was nothing to do but dance and wait.

Then the bomb annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, turning men, women and children into shadowy outlines on walls. Japan surrendered in September and war was over, for now. Camp Pell was dismantled but the EYL jazz scene lived on — in fact, it thrived. Pretty soon the Queensberry Street hall became a musical magnet for every jazz cat in Melbourne, especially when Graeme Bell’s Jazz Gang rented the space from Harry and the EYL to run a regular hot town cabaret every Saturday night. The cold, cavernous Victorian Hall was transformed into an atmosphere of a Parisian café-chantant by visual artists like Tony Underhill who painted neoclassical figures on huge pieces of paper and hung them on the walls. Artist/set designer Warwick Armstrong also painted a semi-abstract design of Salome dancing before Herod for the stage backdrop. Graeme Bell himself designed a modernist depiction of a clarinet player for the band’s music stands. A piano was rolled out of Graeme’s mother’s house and into the club, front of house staff were recruited from the ranks of girlfriends and wives, and suddenly, to immediate success, the Uptown Club was born.9

Bell had experience hosting dances, and had learnt a thing or two about building a crowd. As he wrote,

‘When you’ve got something to market and a ready-made outlet doesn’t present itself, you create your own.’10

Years before, Bell had hired places like Leonard Cabaret at the St. Kilda Baths for a regular Sunday night dance. The whole enterprise was a kind of cottage industry; he printed tickets himself and made each patron a club member. This had the bonus of creating a mailing list of jazz enthusiasts that could be added to as he expanded his entrepreneurial empire. For the opening of the Uptown Club, Bell broke out the franking machine and hit the post office, and designed posters and notices.

When the Uptown Club finally opened it was a full house from day one. Couples danced to blues shouters, boogie-woogie piano, and of course the red-hot sounds of Graeme Bell and his Jazz Gang. It was a venue straight out of a Scott Fitzgerald novel, a place where ladies could rouge their knees and roll their stockings down.

‘Put your lovin arms around me, like the circle round the sun,

I want you to love me momma like my easy rider done …’11

Soon 104 Queensberry Street North Melbourne was the place to be for every respectable jazz-cat in town. This was true no matter how young they were, like John Sangster, the teenage, cornet-playing schoolboy from Vermont. In his autobiography, Seeing the Rafters, Sangster describes how every Sunday he would kiss his Presbyterian Church Choir singer father goodbye and catch the train to North Melbourne to see Graeme Bell’s jazz band go gangbusters. Sangster was drawn to Roger Bell’s cornet technique, writing that he ‘played it clear and strong.’ He was also inspired by Lazy Ade Monsbourgh: ‘He was a revelation, I marvelled as he played his rich valve trombone like he was straight out of Bourbon Street in New Orleans.’

Occasionally, tuba, banjo and washboard replaced drums and bass in the band. When this occurred, a new smooth, light rhythm could be heard purring behind Graeme’s front-line players on songs like Bell’s ‘Blue Tongue Blues’. Upon hearing this, Sangster was hooked, and he went on to become a powerhouse in Australian jazz, touring with Bell and his band from 1950 to 1955 and playing various instruments including drums, cornet and vibraphone.

Sangster went on to play with Don Burrows and even joined the progressive rock group Tully in 1970. He toured with the rock musical Hair and wrote scores for television, documentaries, films and radio. In 1973, Sangster released a series of popular Lord of the Rings-inspired albums that started with the Hobbit Suite.

By 1946 the Uptown Club was in full roar. Every Saturday night it was packed with, a young crowd of university students, artists, musicians, dancers, plain jazz enthusiasts, and even the Chilean Consul’s daughter, Alma Hubner, one of the Bell’s band most ardent supporters. As Bell wrote:

‘Admission was 3s3d and we played from 8.15 to 11.45pm. At the time it was an offence to drink alcohol where people were dancing or within 100 meters of premises where there was dancing. You couldn’t even go out to your car parked around the corner the corner to take a swig without being booked.’12

As alcohol was not allowed, soft drinks were sold in the foyer, along with cups of coffee and tea — although there was grog smuggled in via medicine bottles and the odd Dexedrine tablet to speed things up a bit. Graeme Bell and the Uptown Club weren’t going to challenge the Le Lido on the Champs-Elysees for sophistication, nor was it, for fear of being closed down by authorities, able to challenge Melbourne’s overarching cultural conventions.

The First Australian Jazz Convention

In December 1946, Bell, Ade Monsbourgh and Harry Stein helped unite Australia’s jazz fraternity by organising the first Australian Jazz Convention, held in the EYL’s Hall in Queensberry Street.

As Jeff Sparrow observed,13 Australia’s musical isolation at this time was so intense that jazz-heads habitually accosted American sailors on the docks to ask them if they had any records. This isolation was, at least in part, the result of two events: the Australian Government’s banning of imported recordings in ’40, and the paucity of overseas musicians visiting our white-Australian shores. After the Sonny Clay episode, it was not until 1954 that another band led by a black musician was permitted to tour.

Australia was a Federation in name only in the ’40s; more accurately, perhaps, we were a loose collection of self-contained states and territories, separated physically and culturally by distance and inferior communications. Jazz enthusiasts lived in islands of polyrhythmic isolation in our capital cities or worse (in terms of access to jazz), remote rural locations. Jazz lovers and musicians alike were in desperate need of an opportunity to meet, discuss current musical trends and ideas, and simply just play and have a good time. The Australian Jazz Convention provided that opportunity.

As Bell wrote, for five days in 1946, jazz musicians and music lovers from all over Australia descended on the EYL Hall for a series of lectures, concerts, jam sessions, workshops, record programs and discussions. Graeme Bell gave a talk on the music of Louis Armstrong, Dink Johnson, and Jelly Roll Morton. Bill Miller presented material under the heading ‘Origins of Jazz’, featuring field recordings of Alan Lomax and including blues, ‘Negro’ lullabies and chain gang work songs. Concerts sold out, jam sessions went long into the night, ideas were swapped, and a lot of hot Australian jazz was played. Bell later recalled, ‘We were all walking on air. Here were these musicians from Sydney Hobart and Adelaide — few of us had previously met — who had been searching out this music that we had. Their aims were the same and they talked the same language. The rapport was almost unbelievable.’14

The lecture papers given at the conference were later published in the John Reed/Max Harris literary and artistic avant-garde journal Angry Penguins, which again reflected the association hot jazz had with the modernist movement at the time.

The convention did however highlight certain characteristics associated with the Melbourne ‘traditional’ or ‘hot’ jazz scene that were not shared by other mainland cities. There was, for example a notable absence of Sydney bands from the first jazz convention. This was largely because Sydney didn’t support a lot of traditional jazz music, it being a Melbourne-based phenomenon at the time. In his book Black Roots White Flowers, Andrew Bisset speculated that Sydney bands were more mainstream. He writes:

‘In Sydney there were more commercial ballrooms and more money for entertainment, especially during the war. If a musician reached a professional standard on his instrument then he had a good chance of making a living by it in Sydney, provided he played the music that was popular. Because of this, Dixieland was despised as something you rose above. But in Melbourne, [where]… many good musicians remained amateur, they were free to pursue their own interests, [consequently] Dixieland musicians researched their subject thoroughly, they knew more tunes than their Sydney counterparts, they sharpened their talents, their bands stayed together longer because there was nowhere to go, so they developed their own style and eventually created their own jobs.’15

It’s a tribute to the vision of early pioneers of the Australian Jazz Convention that it continues to this very day. The Convention, in its 73rd year at the time of writing, is now permanently held in Ballarat annually and is the longest continuously running jazz convention in the world.

Then it was 1946; Bell was playing hot jazz at the Uptown Club, and the Eureka Youth League was booming. At Heide, Sid Nolan was spreading his tins of Ripolin and bottles of oil on the scrubbed long table in the dining room; on the walls were charcoal drawings of bearded heads.

Brisbane poet Barrett Reid said of that moment:

‘I saw real paintings, free authentic, for the first time. I had arrived [at Heide] just as the Kellys were nearing completion; the large hardwood panels, the cardboard studies, the many drawings and water-colours, captured and controlled my eyes.’16

What Reid saw that day was an example of modernism engaging with popular imagination, through the vehicle of the Ned Kelly story. Nolan’s genius was to take the motif of Kelly, the black square letterbox, and, as Harding and Morgan wrote in Modern Love, mix local folklore with a lyrical bush setting in which Kelly appears as a kind of Australian Everyman. With the help of Nolan’s work, over time, the outlaw came to personify what many Australians thought about themselves: a race of anti-authoritarian men (no sheilas here mate, and no shirt lifters!), rebellious and alone, riding a stallion heroically through the great green grey of the Australian bush towards a blue horizon, beyond which lay immortality. Through Nolan’s Kelly series modernism came into the mainstream.

A similar phenomenon in the hot jazz scene would take place in February of the following year when, according to Bell’s autobiography, Harry Stein phoned him to ask if he and the band wanted to go to Prague.

Stein went on to explain that the World Youth and Students Convention, a leftist youth festival, would be held in the Czechoslovakian capital between July and August of ’47, and youth organisations from all over the world had been invited to send delegates. Sporting bodies, gymnasts, dance troupes, choirs, and so on were going, why not a jazz band? The Eureka Youth League would sponsor the event and Harry Stein would accompany the band as tour manager. Fares would be raised in a collaboration between the EYL, the trade union movement and the band.

It’s interesting to note that modernist artist and CAS mainstay, Noel Counihan was also sponsored by the left to travel to Czechoslovakia in the ’40s as part of an Australian delegation to the first World Peace Conference held in Paris. Counihan worked in Prague, Hungry, Poland and finally England for over three years, also establishing an international reputation.

Bell’s association with the Contemporary Art Society and the modernist art movement in general had helped mould the band’s philosophical outlook and gave it cachet with a progressive, sophisticated audience in the first half of the decade. But it would be Bell’s association with the Eureka Youth League and the left wing political movement in the second half of the decade that would, as Bell himself wrote, ‘Launch us as almost a household name and [give] us international exposure.’17

The media had got hold of Bell’s imminent European tour. The Bell band would be the first Australian jazz group to tour overseas, a rarity for anyone from the performing arts, or really from any walk of life at this time. This gave the band huge publicity; it meant photos in the papers and radio and newsreel coverage. This generated a buzz which, in turn, led to massively increased audiences at places like the Uptown Club, as well as a five-night-per-week residency at the Manchester Café.

The tour may have also indirectly led to another huge leap in the career of the band: their first recording contract with Columbia Records, a subsidiary of EMI. In those times a recording contract opened many doors; airtime on city and country radio was guaranteed because of the small number of records released in Australia straight after the war. As Bell wrote, ‘Coupled with the overseas tour, this [recording contract] was a double that was hard to beat. It was like pressing two magic buttons simultaneously … and in the right place …’18

To say Graeme Bell and his Dixieland Jazz Band (as it was now known) was a hit in Prague would be an understatement. Crowds of six thousand people or more at their concerts were normal. Bell observed that ‘The audience reaction … was something none of us will ever forget … they threw their hats in the air, whistled and cheered as we went into our programme …’19

The band’s performances were filmed for newsreels and the footage was shown in movie theatres all over the world. Articles about the band appeared in Czech, French, English and Russian newspapers, with one paper declaring, ‘Usually we think of Australia only as the land of the kangaroo, emu or good sheep wool … none of us would have thought that Australia produced true, pure jazz …’20

Following the Prague convention the band stayed on to play a month-long, nine-show-per-week residency at the prestigious Fenix Club in Prague. This led to an invitation to cut six sides in the Rokoska Studios for the Czech label Supraphon; the tracks from these sessions were exported all over the world in later years. Bell was always proud of the results; he wrote that ‘Forty years later these records stand the test of time for balance and clarity and yet I think only two microphones were used, one for the front line and the other for the rhythm section …’21

The tour continued in Bohemia and Moravia, with a brief return to Prague for a one-night stand at the historic Smetana Hall. Featured on the bill was famed Czech poet Egon Kisch, well known in Australia for the dictation test imposed on him by the Australian government when he tried to visit before the war. Kisch had been asked to write out a passage in Gaelic, which of course he couldn’t manage; he was subsequently deported back to Czechoslovakia.

From Czechoslovakia it was on to Paris, where the band was a huge success. During this stint the band played an enthusiastically-received gig at the Hot Club of France and conducted a recording session for the French Pacific label; the tracks would be subsequently released on a Swaggie album some years later. Then there was a series of frenetic gigs and residencies all over London and Great Britain, including at the prestigious Leicester Square Jazz Club. As a result of this nearly six-month European tour, and later European visits, Graeme Bell and his Dixieland Jazz Band were credited by the American music journal Downbeat magazine as starting the European traditional or trad jazz revival, and being … ‘unquestionably the greatest jazz band outside America.’22

Trouble in Paradise

However, all was not well with the modernist movement at home. The Bells’ overseas absence had coincided with Australia descending into a cultural miasma of fear, conservatism and bigotry; the source of this crisis, in part, could be placed at the feet of the Cold War.

Australia had just emerged from World War II after experiencing the horrors of the Great Depression. Its people were exhausted, and looking to live out their life in a quiet, safe suburb. The desire for security replaced curiosity; pursuit of a career (for the male of the household), accumulation of assets, raising of children, and the keeping of an English-style garden were the matters of importance for most Australian families. There was, however, trouble in paradise.

The Atomic Age had arrived, bringing with it not only the promise of cheap power, fuelling a new industrial revolution, but also the possibility of annihilation. The Soviets had the bomb, so did America: it was a fight that could potentially kill us all.

Conservative state and federal governments and the right-wing press spread panic, fear and Cold War hysteria. The Minister for External Affairs Richard Casey fuelled anti-communist Cold War paranoia by bringing to the nation’s attention a ‘Nest of traitors in the public service.’23 Reds were everywhere, apparently: in trade unions, the teaching profession and universities. Nowhere was safe.

Additionally, as wool price plummeted and inflation rose, the economy slid into a recession. A horror deflationary federal budget followed, leading to a surge in unemployment, with wages stagnating and black smoke rising over the Bonegilla migrant camp near Albury as inmates rioted.

It’s all the fault of those wogs, we collectively screamed, and the Government agreed. Menzies responded to the economic crisis by severely cutting Australia’s migration program from Britain and Europe, much to the relief of many Australians, including members of Her Majesty’s Opposition. In the nation’s capital, the Honorable Queensland Labor Senator Archie Benn compared immigrants to cane toads, complaining they never should have been introduced in the first place.

This economic and political uncertainty resulted in many Australians turning on the Government. For a while it seemed the Menzies regime would come to an end — but they still had a trick, in the form of a communist threat, up their sleeve. Then on the eve of the 1954 election, they were handed a gift from the security-intelligence gods in the form of the Petrov Affair.

Vladimir Petrov was a minor Soviet diplomat who had been courted by ASIO for many years; they managed to convince Petrov to defect in the caretaker period before the election (fancy that?). When Petrov’s wife was being flown back to Moscow by Soviet officials it stopped in Darwin for refuelling giving an opportunity for our brave boys in blue to swoop; she was spectacularly escorted off her plane in the full view of the waiting Australian media (I wonder how they found out about it? Separation of powers; No?) by a couple of burly Federal Police officers and reunited with her husband in Sydney. The nation cheered and in the days leading up to the election, citizens devoured related stories of Soviet espionage on our shores — and then, wouldn’t you believe it, the Menzies Government was returned, with a thumping majority!

Anti-communist hysteria also led to a split within the Labor movement. It was led by arch-Catholic Bob Santamaria, the leader of a grouping of conservative, ALP affiliated trade unions known as the Grouper faction. Santamaria justified splitting from the ALP on the grounds that communists had infiltrated many of the trade unions associated with the party, and consequently wielded too much power. The split resulted in the formation of the ultra-conservative Catholic-dominated Democratic Labour Party that subsequently formed a close political alliance with Menzies’ Liberals, an alliance that kept the ALP out of government both federally and in Victoria for well over two decades.

These were indeed desperate times, and Melbourne’s progressive artistic scene was not unaffected. Albert Tucker was just one of the many artists to flee Australia at this time, stating:

‘The realisation that art has its own forms, structures and principles; and for me a far greater validity than politics … the artist his own specialised form of energy which will assert its self regardless of any opposition.’24

Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd followed Tucker’s lead. The aim of these artists was not to walk a collective path to modernism, but rather undertake their own solitary artistic journey, one that moved them away from our shores and resulted in their becoming what Albert Tucker described as ‘refugees from Australian culture’.25 John Reed reported that the postwar years had seen ‘some organic change … in the community, a lessening of sensitive awareness, or perhaps a mere dissipation of energies into numerous channels, irrelevant to creative talent.’26

This ‘dissipation of energies’ led directly to the collapse of what had been one of Reed’s greatest achievements: the dynamic Contemporary Art Society.

This new social and artistic conservatism was felt most keenly in Melbourne; as Richard Haese wrote, ‘the Melbourne scene had been the liveliest, and the change of cultural climate was felt most intensely there.’27 And with Melbourne’s cultural landscape fast resembling a pile of indurated clay, what was the impact felt within the jazz scene?

It firstly had the effect of breaking the nexus between the modernist art movement and jazz: they no longer could be described as a cohesive whole. With the collapse of CAS, and with many of its key practitioners living in exile overseas, there was no-one left on the visual arts scene to fight the good (left-wing, artistic) fight. This probably had a real impact on Bell, and on the jazz scene in general.

Let’s go back a little to the time when the Graeme Bell Australian Jazz Band — they had been renamed again — returned home from their triumphant European tour in August 1948. By then, the band’s international career had been launched and the Bell boys were household names throughout the country. Bell explained, ‘By the time we reached Melbourne, the publicity was quite overwhelming and we wondered what we had started. All capital dailies were running stories with photos … we were also filmed by Cinesound Newsreel …’28

Even the conservative Australian Broadcasting Commission wanted a piece of the action and dangled a lucrative contract in front of the band. But there was a catch; in order to sign the ABC contract the band had to satisfy ‘Aunty’. Bell had to agree that ‘I [Bell] was not going to place a bomb in the middle of Collins Street or paint a hammer and sickle over the door of St Paul’s Cathedral or do anything a communist was supposed to do …’29

Bell managed to do this by agreeing that he and the band would sever all connection with communist fronts like Eureka Youth League, including the Australian tour organised by the EYL to ‘pay back’ their sponsorship of the band to Prague.

The band was broke on their return from Europe and as Bell explained in his autobiography; being on the road is expensive, and despite six months of packed houses there was little to show for it. The ABC contract would not only wipe out any outstanding debts, it would secure the band’s immediate future. It was no contest; the EYL lost their poster boys for recruitment to the cause.

The decision meant that things got decidedly hostile between the band and their former comrades. Audrey Blake from the EYL shot both barrels in an article published in the EYL’s Youth Voice:

‘When Graeme Bell’s Band left Australia all were members of the Eureka Youth League. We gladly accept their resignation. People with such lack of principle have no place in our ranks … Without the League, the Bell Band’s European tour would have been impossible. The Bell Band, who are now interested only in money, have placed themselves beyond the pale of all progressive elements in the Australian labour and democratic movement …’30

This proved to be a turning point in the relationship between left wing politics and the Melbourne jazz scene. Up to this point, people like Harry Stein believed that jazz music should be championed by the Communist Party, and that, in turn, it would play a significant role in recruiting musicians and young people to the left. But by the end of the ’40s, fascism had been defeated, the Cold War was in full swing, a new social conservatism was on the rise and there was no longer the same commitment by artists to left wing causes. A new era of artistic individualism had arrived.

Visual artists such as Tucker and Nolan, and Graeme Bell and his band were artists first, not politicians or political organisers. They had sympathies for left wing causes, but were no longer part of a united, modernist ‘art movement’. The EYL and the Communist Party of Australia had undoubtedly helped facilitate the emergence of a vibrant live music scene for hot jazz in Melbourne. But ultimately musicians are, as ‘autonomous agents,’31 a cultural reality seen as treacherous by an increasingly Stalinist-dominated Communist Party of Australia.

The flirtation between jazz and the EYL, and its unhappy outcome, reinforced the view of puritanical CPA hardliners like Paul Mortier: that jazz was not a progressive force in society but rather a decadent pollutant that would turn sons and daughters of good Marxist families away from the working-class cause. Mortimer is quoted by Ashbolt and Mitchell:

‘To the extent that we fail, their minds will continue to be gripped musically by the inanities of Tin Pan Alley, or the eroticism of Bessie Smith …’32 Mortimer was instead advocating young people turn to folk music which, during the ’50s became the natural home for radical youth. But that’s another story; it will be explored shortly.

Mortier had much in common with Methodists at this time; both socially conservative and both infused with a joyless commitment to the one true cause. But he had much more in common with Stalin and his war against Russian culture, where modernist filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein and artists like Chagall were forced to flee Soviet shores in pursuit of artistic freedom overseas. If artists didn’t emigrate, they fell under the Soviet boot for fear of the death camps. Musicians like Shostakovich conformed to Stalin’s sterile socialist realism because failure to do so would risk his being tried as an enemy of the people during the purges. The Stalinist era eliminated an entire generation of the Russian internationalist avant-garde, replacing it with conformist mediocrity pumping out propaganda.

Meanwhile, Bell and his band had reached a pinnacle of their creative power. Their ABC concerts were a huge success both critically and financially, with the Melbourne Herald’s music critic John Sinclair stating that the Bell band played ‘vital jazz in its purest form …’33 The band played town halls up and down the east coast and recorded thirteen radio programs for broadcast on ABC stations right around the country. Graeme Bell remembered the tour fondly:

‘After the scruffy accommodation and travelling conditions we [endured] in England, the ABC’s first class and very efficient arrangements were not hard to take … grand pianos tuned on the day of the concert, taxis to and from hotels, press receptions, supper after the shows … [we were well] looked after …’34

After the ABC tour ended the band was back on the road, this time with ex-Duke Ellington trumpet player Rex Stewart. Together they played sixty country towns in all, from Port Augusta in South Australia to Sale in Victoria and up to Yass in New South Wales. The tour was the most comprehensive of its type ever undertaken in Australia, giving many country people their first chance of seeing a live jazz show.

Following the Rex Stewart tour, the newly named ‘Graeme Bell and His Australian Jazz Band’ travelled back overseas, beginning with England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. This tour included a Royal Command performance for Princess Elizabeth in 1951, and a tour of war-ravaged Germany with the Delta blues singer Big Bill Broonzy. There the band was met with reception that Bell described as ‘over-whelming’; jazz had had been banned during the Nazi regime and was now a living symbol of freedom for the German people.

A touring jazz band, for German girls, also presented a chance to exercise these freedoms; as Bell explained in 2006, ‘German girls would hide in the band bus behind the seats, and when the band would take off, in the middle of the snow, on these long journeys, they’d reveal themselves, some of them would wear wedding rings so that they could get into the hotels with the members of the band and pose as their wives, and they’d purposely speak bad German.’35

The tour included fifty-eight concerts in two months in the European snow through January and February and although very well organised, the cracks were beginning to show. By the end of the European run, the band ran out of steam.

The end of an era

By the early ’50s, Graeme Bell and his Australian Jazz Band had fallen apart. According to Bell after the European tour things began to get a little strained domestically, wives and families were fed up waiting for their men to come home. After five years of constant touring, the band had lost its joie de vivre and most of its members wanted out. ‘Lou and Pixie were all for going on, but the rest of us wanted to quit for a while, so we cancelled the whole thing …’36

It was, perhaps, a case of too much of a good thing: too much touring, too much music, too much booze and too much partaking of the pleasures of the road. Bell’s jazz career subsequently took a backseat; instead, he played piano as an arranger-for-hire in other people’s bands while concentrating most of his energy on his emerging business interests.

Bell had co-founded the Swaggie record label in 1949, alongside his brother Roger, Ade Monsbourgh, Pixie Roberts, Lou Silbereisen and Mel Langdon. Swaggie was the first Australian-owned record company dedicated to recording Australian jazz music. The label was a cooperative and continued as such until it was sold by the partners to Nevill L. Sherburn some four years later.

Bell also hosted The Platter Parade, a radio program which broadcast once a week on 3UZ. He tried his hand at jazz promotion as well, touring a number of American jazz musicians around Australia. Ever the businessman, Bell made a point of recording with the touring international artists on his Swaggie record label, including English trumpet legend Humphrey Lyttleton, providing a bank of material for later release.

Bell continued to play live, but what he presented was, in his own words, ‘a musical smorgasbord … with programs cluttered with novelty and hokum … playing ragtime and boogie pieces [which] appealed to the general public.’37 Bell got through all this by hitting the bottle, apparently the booze blurred out the reality of playing music for the money and not for the art.

Then in 1954 Bell received an offer to tour Korea with the dynamic young singer, Yolande Wolffe (Bavan). The offer was too good to refuse, and so Bell put a band together. It included John Sangster (his old fan from the Uptown Club) on trumpet, Jack Baines on clarinet, John Costello on trombone and Jack Banston on drums. The tour lasted three months and even took a swing through Japan.

However, Bell was moving further and further away from the hot jazz that had made his name. He played dinner music in Tokyo for the English military, and cabaret in Kyoto. Back in Australia he played piano in the orchestra pit for an ice-skating show at the Theatre Royal in Adelaide, then moved to Brisbane to take up a six nights-a-week residency playing jazz standards at the Bennelong with John Sangster. This was a wild period for Bell, he drank too much, played bad music, was broke and became depressed.

Then, luckily, an offer came from food and wine expert Len Evans. He wanted to put together a traditional jazz band to play the prestigious Oasis Room at the Chevron Hotel in Sydney; other band members included Bob Barnard on trumpet, Norm Wyatt on trombone and Laurie Gooding on clarinet. The Chevron Hotel in Kings Cross was Sydney’s poshest and swingingest night-spot of the era, and Bell, upon joining the band, was now back playing what he was famous for: energetic, direct, uncomplicated hot jazz, an approach forged in the dance halls and clubs of Melbourne.