All that jazz- a sentimental journey

 

The ‘Trumpet Volunteer’ in about 1958. The black and white photograph does not do justice to my vivid yellow socks.

During the mid to late-1950s I was a member of a unique and enterprising little musical group, known unpretentiously as The Havelock Street Jazz Band. There were four of us: Richard "Ðicky" Bird, Barry "Leb" Levinson, Richard "Kelly" Kelsall and me.

In 1956 we were Year 10 students at Hale School, then located on Havelock Street in West Perth. We were old friends, all of us having been primary students together at Nedlands State School before moving to Hale for our high school years. Dicky and Leb had been neighbours and good mates all their lives, while Kelly and I had joined forces already in various under-age sporting teams, especially football. Later we rowed (he was Number 2, and I was Number 3) in the First VIII in the Head of the River. Rowing, I have discovered, establishes a life-long bond between fellow-oarsmen. And so does music.

The Havelock Street Jazz Band was formed and led by Dicky Bird. Already at the age of 16 he was an accomplished musician, playing the clarinet, saxophone and flute, and being able to read and write music with insolent ease. Leb was our pianist (and was pretty good), while I played the trumpet (poorly at first, but I got better). Initially we didn't have a drummer, there being no suitably equipped student at Hale School at the time, but the backing rhythm was ably supplied by Kelly Kelsall on a bush bass (more of this in a minute). However, a jazz band really needs a drummer, and a couple of years later an excellent young drummer called Rick Evans joined us. He was not a Hale School student, but a nice bloke and a mate of Kelly Kelsall.

Let me explain why I use the term "unique" in describing The Havelock Street Jazz Band.  As far as I can tell, and I am happy to be corrected, this was the first schoolboy jazz band in WA, certainly the first in Perth to so style itself. This was well before the era of the school symphony orchestra, and of the "garage band" movement that emerged after the advent of rock'n'roll and electric guitars. There was a bagpipe and drums band at Scotch College (of which I would have dearly loved to be a member) and there were, of course, many schoolboy and schoolgirl musicians who performed at Speech Nights or school concerts at the better class of school. One of these was the prodigy Geoffrey Michaels who lived just down the hill from me on Beatrice Road. Geoffrey was in the musical stratosphere compared to the rest of us, becoming an internationally-famous violin virtuoso, living in New York and performing at Carnegie Hall. We were not in this league, needless to say, but our claim to fame was that we were a genuine schoolboy "jazz band".  Moreover, we actually played at dances and other functions, although we were not, as far as I remember, ever paid to do so. Now I think back on it, our amateur status and the fact that we played for nothing was probably a more important attraction to the organisers than our music.

The other thing I should mention about Dicky and Leb is that they both had small collections of gramophone records, and this is how I was introduced to jazz. Previously my musical experience had revolved around the classical music beloved of my parents or played by my sisters on the piano in the lounge room at home, plus I enjoyed country and bluegrass music which I listened to on the radio. It was at Dicky's place after school however, that I first heard Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis and others, and it was under this influence that I decided I wanted to learn the trumpet and play jazz, and it was to these wonderful musicians that we looked for inspiration.

The elegant brick and stone buildings that formed part of the pre-1960 Hale School campus on Havelock St, West Perth

I will never forget the time we came together for our first tentative jam session. Music played no part whatsoever in Hale School culture in those days, so there was no such thing as a music studio or a rehearsal room on the Havelock Street campus. The school had one ancient upright piano (badly out of tune) in the assembly hall, on which the equally ancient German master Herr Lutz used to belt out an accompaniment to the singing of hymns at morning assemblies. No way could we display our embryo musicianship in this public place. To give an idea of the status of music at Hale School at that time, suffice it to relate that there was only one boy in the entire school who was learning the piano and who sometimes practised on Herr Lutz’s upright in the hall. He was regarded (by the coarser element) as “effeminate”.

The problem of where to rehearse was resolved when Leb discovered that there was a piano in the Junior School, across the road from the main school, and that it was located in a room where we might be able to play with some privacy. I was delegated to confer with Mike Beech, the School Captain and seek his advice. “Go and see Spud. I’ll put in a word for you” Mike advised.

School Captain in 1956, Mike Beech

Thus it was that the next day I shyly approached and knocked on the door of the office of the Headmaster, Vernon "Spud" Murphy, a man to whom I had never spoken before or been spoken to by. I had been in his sanctum once before, however, and that was to get the cane, six cuts across the backside. The cuts were delivered not by Spud, but by the wild-eyed Welsh geography master “Taffy” Wall who (for some reason) used Spud’s office that day to mete out punishment to several boys, there having been something of a rumpus in the 4A form room when the scheduled teacher did not arrive. Taffy’s cane had a serious reputation – it was said (by those of my fellow-students who had been caned by Taffy and who also knew the Bible) that it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder. My crime that day, I might mention, was "playing the fool in class". Me? Ridiculous. To this day I believe it was a harsh and unfair judgement and a cruel punishment. My backside twitches as I write this, sixty-something years later, remembering how Taffy’s cane lived up to its reputation.

But when I knocked and entered Spud’s sanctum to seek permission to use the Junior School as our music studio, the Lord and Master himself was in his rightful place behind his desk.

"What sort of music do you intend to play, mm, mm?" asked Spud, looking down his nose at me, unsmiling. Spud had a mannerism of ending every sentence with "mm, mm". Kelly Kelsall could mimic this with wicked perfection.

"Progressive jazz, Sir" I replied, using the term popular at that time in the smoke-filled jazz cellars of Harlem and San Francisco.

"Progressive!" sniffed Spud, "Sounds more like retrogressive to me, mm, mm?".

I was not sure what he meant, but when I told the story to my father that evening, he roared with laughter. It was the first intimation I ever had that Spud was capable of a witticism.

Vernon “Spud” Murphy, in his hey-day as Headmaster of the Havelock Street Hale School. He always came across (to me) as mild-mannered but distracted, as if he would rather be doing something else instead of headmastering a boy’s school.

Despite his animosity to “progressive jazz”, Spud gave his permission, and thereafter we used to troop across to the Junior School at lunchtime about twice a week and start in on the business of playing jazz music and of developing a repertoire (if that is the right word) of music that we might publicly perform.

Dancing days (a relevant digression)

In those days, the main social event in the lives of young Perth people was a weekly dance, usually held in a suburban church or municipal hall, or the local tennis or football club. Young men and women, all dressed nicely, could attend these dances unchaperoned and admission was very cheap. It was not just fun, but it was the way you met people of the opposite sex. Nobody went as part of a couple, and any boy could ask any girl for the next dance (and occasionally there was a "lady's choice"). This being before the era of the disc jockey and his electronic gear, music was always provided by a live band. It was also the era before the almighty amplifier, so that the music tended to be more a discreet accompaniment to the dancing, not the blaring, throbbing, eardrum-shattering stuff of today.

Dance band standards varied enormously. They ranged from the top bands at places like the Embassy Ballroom or the Subiaco Civic Centre (where the musicians were experienced professionals) at one end of the scale, down to The Havelock Street Jazz Band playing for nothing at the Nedlands Tennis Club, at the other.

Luckily for us, most of the young people at a Saturday night dance were undiscriminating when it came to the quality of the music. They had come to socialise, to dance and enjoy themselves, and the band was there to facilitate all this, not to provide a concert. Nobody stood around simply listening to the music, unless they were themselves musicians. I was one of the latter, a fairly rare species (Dicky Bird was another). Sometimes instead of dancing I would just stand to one side of the dais and listen. My favourites were The Riversiders, a Dixieland band who played at the Claremont Football Club and the Kings Park Tennis Club, and Rocky Thomas, the trumpet player with Horrie King's band at the Subi Civic Centre. They could play.

But by then I had also learned to dance, which in turn helped me to understand and play dance music. And by “dancing” I do not mean the modern style of jigging up and down on the spot and waving the arms about (was this once called ‘The Watusi’?).  I mean proper dancing, as graced the ballrooms and dance halls of English-speaking countries all over the world in those days.

An interlude: Dancing Classes

One of the most painful memories of my schooldays occurred back in the 1950s, when I was aged about 14 or 15. Our entire class at Hale School was sent off on Saturday mornings to attend ballroom dancing classes at St Mary's Anglican Girls School. Hale School was located on Havelock Street in West Perth in those days, and St Mary’s was just around the corner in Colin Street.

The requirement to learn to dance was a good one, I realise now in retrospect. In those days dancing was a primary and wholly acceptable form of recreation and for social contact between young people of the opposite sex. Adults also danced. They went to balls and danced at weddings and other functions. There was a small number of “standard” dance steps that everybody who wanted to be part of the social life of the day (especially in the country) had to know, and at some point, you had to learn how to do them.

But the classes were an uncomfortable experience for immature and self-conscious schoolboys. We turned up, brushed and gleaming, perhaps in our first pair of long trousers, to be confronted by a hall full of giggling schoolgirls. These were mostly from St Mary’s but a busload of boarders from one of the other girl’s schools, St Hilda’s perhaps, would also attend.

The classes were run by the Linley Wilson School of Dancing, Perth’s foremost ballet and ballroom dancing academy in those days. The academy’s Dancing Mistress who taught us was a bouncing young woman with a stern and commanding voice, more used to dealing with ballerinas than nervous schoolboys, but nevertheless in full control. An elderly unsmiling lady in a woollen cardigan provided the music on an old upright piano. This always sounded a bit to me like the honkytonk played in the saloon in a 1950s cowboy film.

We were typical boys of our age and of the time – some lanky after a growth spurt which left the ankles exposed below the trouser bottoms, some still little boys in shorts; some with squeaky and some with breaking voices, nearly all with pimples, spiky crew-cut hair and (when dancing) a look of glassy concentration. Strangely, the same boys who, out on the football field or the tennis court, were smoothly coordinated athletes, became stiff and gauche on the dance floor, stumbling over their own feet.

In my mind’s eye, I can also see the girls. Some are in dresses and some in school uniforms. Mostly they seem to be at least a foot taller than the boys, and all are far more self-assured and confident.

For some reason the girls all appeared to have abnormally large feet – no matter where I put mine, some girl’s feet were always underneath. This led me to try to dance while watching my feet, not a recipe for smooth coordination with the dancing partner. Curiously I also found I now had two left feet, where once I had one of each. Or it could have been two right feet. I found in the stress of it all I no longer had any idea how to tell one from the other.

Under the shouted instructions from the Dancing Mistress “Right together, left! Left, together right! Aaaand right together left and left together right!” we would hold our partners with a death-grip, but at arm’s length, and lurch into the waltz, the quickstep, the foxtrot, the Waltz Oxford, the Pride of Erin, the polka or the Barn Dance, our palms sweaty and our brows furrowed. As a spectacle, at least in the early classes, it was a shambles. Thank God the video camera had not been invented.

We were also taught ballroom etiquette. Between bouts, as it were, the girls would sit demurely on chairs lining one side of the hall while opposite the boys shuffled and muttered and elbowed each-other, as 15-year-old boys will do when nervous or stressed. At the ringing command from the Dancing Mistress “Boys! Take your partner for a Pride of Erin” we would walk across no-man’s land, face one of the waiting girls, bring the heels together with a faint click, bow slightly from the waist, and croak “Please may I have the pleasure of this dance?”

To this question, the answer was invariably yes, accompanied by a blinding smile. I suppose Pamela Whale-Tonnage may have been among them, but to my eyes all the girls at the St Mary’s dancing class were uniformly beautiful. Doubtless some were more attractive than others, in the way of these things, and there would be a bit of a scrum between the most self-confident and suave of the boys to get to them first. Equally some of the boys were even more gauche, or downright simian than the others, and sometimes a girl would hope not to have to say “yes” to one of them. Luckily there were more girls than boys in the class, so that it was possible for a reluctant girl to manoeuvre into the wallflower position if approached by Hale School’s equivalent of Ned of Wales or the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Looking back, I wonder if this was the way of all dancing lessons for 15-year-old boys at the time, or whether to some extent our stress and anxiety was due to our mutual shyness with the opposite sex. At schools like St Mary’s and Hale School, adolescent boys and girls had absolutely no contact with each other, and although I had two elder sisters, they were very remote from me by the time I was in high school. Like nearly all of my friends I was shy with girls right through my school days, although this is not to say that I did not worship one or two from afar. This lasted until I went to university when, all of a sudden, I found myself shoulder to shoulder with attractive young women in lecture rooms, on field trips and in the laboratory.  I not only emerged from my shell at that point but made up for lost time.

Despite everything, I became a competent dancer. Unlike Bertie Wooster I could not “out-Fred the nimblest Astaire” but I knew the steps, and later I could hold my own in that most testing of arenas: country dances in the mill halls of southwest timber towns.

In a Flirtation Barn Dance at the Saturday night hop in the mill hall in a timber town back in the 1960s, a young man could find a large and powerful woman coming at him, very ready for action. These women were mostly 15 years older than you, and by day they chopped wood, dug spuds, milked cows or heaved freshly-sawn nor’west sleepers onto the greenchain at the local sawmill. They invariably had a lovely smile and were beautiful dancers, were sweet-smelling, and as light as a feather on their feet. But they would take you, conquer you and leave you for dead on the dance floor, if you couldn’t cut the mustard.

As soon as the Flirtation Barn Dance was over, I used to reel off to the bar, murmuring a prayer of thanks to the Dancing Mistress back in the St Mary’s school hall who had given me the basic survival skills for these encounters.

Back to the Havelock Street Jazz Band

Having learnt to dance, it was then necessary that the members of The Havelock Street Jazz Band learned to play dance music.

Yes, we were rank amateurs, but it was not long before we were able to meet the most important expectation of a band in those days. This was to provide a "program" of music to which different sorts of dances could be danced. An evening of dancing would be divided up into 'sets', each set comprising three numbers, and with music that allowed a given sort of dance to be performed. We had to play for the waltz, barn dance, foxtrot, quickstep, Pride of Erin, and so on, each with its appropriate timing and rhythm. The new dance set would be announced by the band leader with the traditional call "Gentlemen, take your partners for a Circular Waltz!" or whatever. The last dance of the evening was always a slow waltz, with romantic overtones. This was epitomised by the popular song of the day “Save the Last Dance for Me” which eventually we learned to play.

So when we were asked to play at a suburban or school dance, we knew we not only needed enough material to last out the night, but also we needed to be able to play numbers in different musical time, so as to accommodate the evening's dance program. Sometimes, for example at a school ball, the dance schedule was actually specified in a written program, with which we would be provided in advance.

We were lucky. Dicky Bird's music teacher was Jack Harrison, one of WA's most accomplished and popular musicians. Jack would play First Clarinet with the WA Symphony Orchestra on one night, playing perhaps Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, and then on the next night would play jazz with his own trio at dances or parties, or as the leader of a 10-piece dance band at the Embassy Ballroom. As well as teaching Dicky to play the clarinet and to play jazz, Jack helped him to design dance programs and choose numbers we could play; this was a huge help to a fledgling band.

Jack Harrison – one of Western Australia’s finest musicians, playing several instruments to international standards, but especially the clarinet and the harmonica. He was a classicist, jazzman, performer, band leader and teacher, all to the very highest standards (photo courtesy of Jody Harrison)

I was also lucky. My trumpet teacher was Sammy Sharp, another well-known Perth musician. He was aged in his 60s when I knew him and almost retired from performing but formerly had been a wonderful jazz trumpeter. Sammy loved to tell me about his days as a member of the great dance bands in London or on the cross-Atlantic liners in the years before the War, and while his musical tastes ran more to Dixieland than to Progressive jazz, he loved his music and his instrument. As well as being a great help and inspiration, Sammy treated me as a friend, the first adult in my life to do so. By the time I was 18 I was just about good enough to play little jazz duets with him in his subterranean studio at the top of Wellington Street in the city. I would play the melody and he would improvise around it … such fun!

So, in fits and starts, but with unstinting enthusiasm, our little group started to make music. Dicky Bird would do the arrangements and write out the music for each of us. He would count us in, and did most of the solo parts, while I parp-parped in the background. Leb provided a solid backing of chords on the piano and did an occasional solo, while Kelly Kelsall plugged along with the bush base, giving us a good driving rhythm, and enthralling on-lookers with his outrageously funny facial expressions.

Looking back, I would say that we should really have been more correctly classified as a dance band than a jazz band ... but I recall how this distinction somehow became blurred from time to time, especially during rehearsals. Dick would have us carefully rehearsing a number intended to support a stately Pride of Erin dance, when suddenly one of us (and I am ashamed to say that it was often me) would veer off into a jazz version, giving it a bit of an up-beat. Dick would frown with frustration, but then, not being able to help himself, would soon join in with a wild clarinet improvisation.

Digressing for a moment, Kelly Kelsall’s bush bass was a remarkable instrument, entirely home-made by Kelly himself. The box was an old wooden Tea Chest which Kelly had manufactured into a reverberating sound board. On top he mounted a broom stick to which he attached a G-String from a proper double bass, which was then connected to the box. By manipulating the angle of the broom stick, he could tighten or loosen the tension on the string and change its note. It was hard work, and especially hard on the plucking fingers, and Kelly soon found he had to wear a gardening glove, but it provided a mellow bass note and a solid beat. He was a tireless worker.

A bush bass (image from Google).

The bush bass might have looked like something from a hill-billy Kentucky bluegrass band, but we looked the part, always dressing professionally, as musicians were expected to in those days. We each wore a white shirt with a narrow tie, dark trousers "potted" at the ankles, and polished shoes. The word "cool" wasn't in use in those days in Australia to describe the right sort of dress, but its opposite, "square", was, and we took care to ensure we never looked "square".

We eventually moved on from the Junior School at lunch time and on weekends rehearsed at Kelly's home in West Perth or at mine in Dalkeith. The neighbours must have been very tolerant as we never had any complaints ... although I do remember that my parents always left home for the day when the band was in.

Most of the music we played harked back to the numbers made popular by the great American dance bands and popular singers of the War years or the 1930s. I can remember The Lady is a Tramp, Sentimental Journey, I've Found a new Baby, Caravan, Sweet Georgia Brown, Chattanooga Choo Choo, When the Saints Come Marching In, and others of that ilk, plus some classics like Basin Street Blues.  I think we eventually had a repertoire of maybe 40 or 50 numbers, and although it could be chaotic at times (especially when I attempted a jazzy bit of improvisation), mostly our arrangements and our discipline was good. It was remarkable how quickly we progressed after that first jam session in the Junior School.

Our first gig was at the Nedlands Tennis club, one summer night in, I think, late 1957. I can't remember much about it, apart from the fact that at the end of the night, as was the custom at all functions in those days, there was a requirement to play "God Save the Queen".  We had failed to rehearse this, and started off in different keys, playing by ear, while Kelly Kelsall tried unsuccessfully to put some beat behind it. It was a shambles. Luckily nobody noticed. By 1957 this custom was already falling out of favour with young Australians and instead of standing solemnly to attention while the anthem was played (as adults still did), most of the youngsters took the opportunity to duck off for home. There was a slight chance, I thought afterwards, that people might have thought we were deliberately hamming it up or taking the mickey, but it was more likely that simply nobody noticed.

The Nedlands Tennis Club house where we played our first gig. It looks exactly the same today as it did in the 1950s

I also remember our best gig. This was the St Hilda's Prefect Dance in the Dalkeith Civic Hall late in 1958. Well, I think it was St Hilda's, but it might have been MLC or Loreto or one of the other lady's colleges. No matter. By then we knew what we were doing. It was a glamorous affair, with all the young ladies in ball gowns and the young men in suits. Parents and school officials hovered about, the Hall was magnificently decorated, and there was a lavish supper. We played well all night and actually got a round of applause at the end. However, for me it was a watershed moment. Although I loved playing, I could not help but feel slightly wistful that I was not down below enjoying myself with all those beautiful young people of my own age. It was probably then that I realised that I would never commit to being a professional musician.

Afterlife

The band played a few times in the year after we left Hale School at the end of 1958, but my days in it were numbered. I was studying to become a forester and spent all of the university vacations working in the bush, and then in 1961 I moved to Forestry School in Canberra for two years. Kelly and Barry both left the city to go farming. Dicky Bird was recruited into a couple of serious bands with serious musicians and became well known for a while in the music scene around Perth, but then his business interests took over. In fact, all of us moved on, and the days of playing in the band faded into memory.

Two things still stick in my mind from those days. The first was the utter indifference to our band from the Hale School staff. Not only did we receive zero encouragement, the band might not have existed. I think I remember one occasion when we played for our school friends in the Assembly Hall one evening, but we had to organise this ourselves. Spud Murphy was the only member of staff to turn up, but only as supervisor and he attempted to shut the evening down early. Unfortunately for Spud, Dicky had just played ‘Golden Wedding’ (his piece de resistance) and had brought the house down. Then amidst shouts of "Encore!" he played it again. Spud waited on the steps to the podium, his expression impenetrable.

These days, I hear that Hale School has a large and professional music program with hundreds of participating students, an orchestra and a jazz program. There is a magnificent auditorium with a world-class Grand Piano. Herr Lutz would not have known what to do with that ...

We never amounted to much. But what larks! There was the exhilaration of playing music in an ensemble with our mates, but on top of that the satisfaction that came as we improved, and even (to our ears) mastered the basics of a 1950s dance band and occasionally ventured into the first shallow reaches of a jazz quartet. I have no doubt that if someone back then had made a recording we could not now listen to it without embarrassment. But at the time we loved what we were doing, and we thought we were OK.

And all four of us never lost our enjoyment of jazz. Not too long ago, Bird, Kelsall and Underwood had lunch together (Barry Levinson now lives in Victoria), and it must have amused the young waitress to see these three old codgers humming Sweet Georgia Brown as we waited for the beers to arrive, feet and fingers tapping, and a fork drumming the rhythm of an imaginary bush bass, as we remembered our glory days ....