Port Melbourne, and mainly sold by destitute women trying to turn a quid. When the law cracked down on the trade, many sly groggers turned their attention to the sale of the then legal-cocaine. You could buy a packet of snow on Little Lonsdale Street for two bob, making coke the drug of choice for many denisens of the inner city. Others had more creative uses for the wonder drug: a trainer and stablehand were arrested by police when their horse, Valdoid, won the 1923 Moonee Valley Yaroke Handicap by half the straight and at long odds; turns out the horse was doped up to its bridle with coke!
Inner Melbourne sure was roaring in the ’20s, but then things went a little too bit too far for our god-fearing, racially pure authorities. In 1928, when African-American Sonny Clay and his band came to town, all hell broke loose. As Jeff Sparrow explained in A Short History of Communist Jazz:
‘When Sonny Clay toured with his band The Colored Idea, the Commonwealth Investigative Branch — the forerunners to ASIO — devoted themselves to monitoring the musicians, determined to prevent them “consorting with white women”.16 Eventually, the uniformed police raided an after-concert party. The Truth explained what they found: “Empty glasses, half-dressed girls, and an atmosphere poisonous with cigarette smoke and fumes from liquor — and, lounging about the flat, six negroes”.’17
In their inimitable journalistic style, the Truth newspaper’s headline screamed:
‘Blackout for Sonny Clay’s Noisome Niggers … Australia wants not another coon …’
Following a sustained media campaign from Truth, which respectable papers like The Age joined; a parliamentarian raised the matter in the House of Representatives in Canberra.
‘After reading out headlines like “Nude girls in Melbourne flat orgy” and “Raid discloses wild scene of abandon; flappers, wine, cocaine and revels”, he asked, “Does the Minister not think that in the interests of a White Australia and moral decency, permits to such persons should be refused?”’
The Minister agreed — and six band members were deported. It would not be until 1954 that another band led by an African-American musician would be permitted to tour our sunburnt shores, a huge cultural and musical lost opportunity, for the whole country, but especially for Melbourne.18
Melbourne’s reception towards African-American jazz musicians contrasted to that offered by European cities such as Paris, where jazz was introduced to the French by segregated black soldiers stationed in France during World War One. African-American soldiers — led by Lt James Reese, a well-respected New York bandleader — marched their music through two thousand miles of tiny farm villages and concert halls across France. Everywhere Reese led his 369th Harlem Infantry Regiment band, they created an exciting musical revolution. The French went crazy for jazz and the African-American musicians who played it.
After the war, many African-American musicians, dancers and entertainers returned to France. Many settled in, and delighted cabarets and club audiences of Paris’ Lower Montmartre, which became known as Black Montmartre. Club owners and club-goers from all over the world couldn’t get enough of the syncopated rhythms. In the early ’30s Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Coleman Hawkins — and later Ella Fitzgerald — were treated like royalty by Parisians and so these musicians toured often, up to and after World War II.
Not in sunny white Australia however where politicians and the conservative press had dismissed jazz music and musicians as decadent, degenerate and a direct threat to our racial purity. Such disapproval from community elders, however, spurred many young people to explore the hidden pleasures of this new and exciting music.
Initially jazz was hidden in the popular songs of America’s Tin Pan Alley inspiring Melbourne’s more curious and adventurous musicians to delve further. This study led to jazz appreciation societies emerging across town, and saw both amateur and professional musicians emulate what they heard on records from Chicago and New York. Suddenly jazz bands were the cat’s pyjamas and jazz musicians were cool — especially hot stylists like Melbourne’s own multi-instrumentalist Benny Featherstone and the trombonist-bandleader Frank Coughlan. These bands played a mixture of jazz and popular swing for eager dancers to do the Lindy Hop and Charleston. They played to packed crowds at venues like the Palais in St Kilda or the exotic Green Mill with its state-of-the-art rubber sprung floor, atmospheric lighting, and convenient location across the river from the Flinders Street Railway Station. Frank Coughlan also played informal group sessions at venues like the Fawkner Park Kiosk, as well as gigs at The Melbourne Town Hall.
You can still hear what those ‘cool cats were puttin’ down’ through the wonders of wire recording. In 1925 American band leader Ray Tellier had an eighty-two week run at the Palais with his outfit the San Francisco Orchestra, during which time the band recorded ‘Yes Sir That’s My Baby’. This song, along with Bert Ralton’s Havana Band’s ‘I Want to be Happy’ were the first Victorian jazz age recordings.
Then the roaring twenties gave way to the depressive thirties. Suddenly the capitalist world was being blown apart and chaos was driving its fist into the faces of the poor. The ’30s saw a third of the working population unemployed; the poorer suburbs were hardest hit, as were those aged 20-29 and over forty. Even those who managed to keep their jobs had their wages cut and their taxes increased. Homelessness was rife, children starved, families were torn apart. Those of the working class were reduced to rubble, but the affluent middle class mainly survived. But what’s that I hear? A new sound had crept into the financial ruins of Melbourne, and that new sound was Dixieland jazz — but only those living in a working household, those with food in the icebox, cream-coloured drapes and an HMV radiogram, took any notice.
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
