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
