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
