Jazz at Auckland

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 893, 14 September 1956, Page 30

Jazz at Auckland

A UCKLAND jazzmen were given a " fillip recently by the remarks of a judge at the Competitions Festival. After a men’s aria contest he told patrons he was disappointed at the sparse audience in the Concert Chamber. "Aucklanders should have packed the Town Hall, with singing of this description," he said. But there’s the rub. The Town Hall (in the same building) was packed-for Jock Nesbit’s Miller-Good-man jazz concert. And the jazz boys wore big round smiles, not only because the popularity of jazz concerts had been reaffirmed, but because there was more than a little suspicion that some of the Competitions’ patrons had subscribed at the wrong ticket box. In fact there was a larger than usual sprinkling of older and more conserva-tively-dressed people at Jock Nesbit’s one-night stand. Most of them proved stayers and one couple who survived the first dixie bracket walked out only when they found, in the second half, that jazz treble forte is not as easily toned down in the auditorium as it is on the radio. Others who were possibly introduced to jazz under false pretences found things to amuse them besides the music. There was the screaming of the hep cats and jiving in the aisles; and there was an erotic wiggling among the female vocalists that made grandpa’s eyes just boggle. Jock Nesbit is by no means zealous about his music. His programme was sufficiently varied to satisfy most of the jazz fans and the style was smooth enough to carry newcomers over the transition line. The Glenn Miller-Benny Goodman style is old and tried, almost dated in fact; but it remains popular with the multitude, and films have recommended it to the more conservative. But any devotee who went to this concert in the hope of hearing some natty improvisations and progressive jazz would have been disappointed. These same devotees, however, have long since learned to expect little, if anything, of their chosen style from a so-called jazz concert and wisely invest their money in LPs. There’s a solid core of fine musicians in Auckland centring on Bart Stokes, Colin Martin, and the Crombie Murdoch Trio. Around this core revolve most of the bands and combinations heard on the radio and publicly, other than at dances. Among them is the Jock Nesbit 16-piece All-Star Show Band. Despite the high-sounding title there are only two stars in it. For execution, particularly on clarinet and sax, Stokes is tops. Murdoch’s talents are more diverse and harder to pinpoint. He is a brilliant pianist, but is rarely heard in virtuoso pieces; he is a _ better-than-average arranger and leader; for originality in composition there is no one in New Zealand to touch him; but’ pre-eminently there is in Crombie Murdoch a fund of good taste which, combined with his special skills, achieves music before noise and a deft touch before hamminess. : On stage there is little personal magnetism in Crombie Murdoch or, for that matter, in Jock Nesbit. But Stokes has a surer touch born of complete mastery of his instruments and

confidence in his own ability. Throughout he held together the brass section, which was able to produce a fairly typical sound in the Miller standards "Moonlight Serenade" and "String of Pearls." But in the first-half Goodman bracket Stokes was forced to cover up very murky playing by his colleagues with some fine solo work on clarinet, He went on to raise an erstwhile quiet audience to a high pitch of enthusiasm in his playing of the Woody Herman rlassic "Golden Wedding." ' The vibraphone was supposed to be a great innovation and Bennie Gunn, a Wellington musician, made a_ valiant effort to play it. There is no doubting this boy’s keenness and versatility-he plays a useful guitar and in the dixie brackets slapped a string bass/with more abandon than accuracy. On the vibes Ben Gunn jingled his sticks like so many pieces of eight and never quite managed to get out of the wood. In other ways this concert was strictly on the commercial side. The Miller atmosphere was merely a by-play to screen the plug for Benny Goodman, whose life-story is the subject of a film in the offing. Then there was a fiveminute spot for a record manufacturer’s name-the-disc competition ("first you’ve gotta buy the disc"). And even Myra Love’s dressmaker , received a_ credit line which was not, on second thoughts, undeserved. After all, it must have taken some skill to design a dress that seemed made to fall off rather than stay on. Miss Love, incidentally, was the most appealing of the vocalists. Like her, John Stahl tried to impress on two points-his voice and his clothing. Vocally he was an also ran; his suit would have sent the Tailor and Cutter into a tizzy. Rock’n roll lingers on. It gives drummers a chance to show how much noise they can make and Don Branch made it. Vocalists Benny Levin and Ngaire Gedson gave vent'to a wailing monotone which had the hep cats stamping.

But it was a heavy beat-almost a deadbeat-that served only to drive a few more nails into rock’n roll’s coffin. Ngaire Gedson, however, came up with a few standards in which she gave as good an imitation of Kay Starr as you’d hear south of the line. But neither she nor Myra Love compared with Judy Woods, who slew ’em at an earlier jazz concert this year. Similarly Dave Forman’s Tear-it-Apart dixie group had little of the colour or comedy which Bobby Griffiths brought to the task. Yet it was well-executed jazz that Forman turned on, and it was just that much closer to New Orleans than the 16-piece band’s hotted-up dance music The crowd liked it that way, too. The audience can make or break a jazz concert. The best one this reviewer has attended, given last October under the direction of Bruce MacDonald, was also the rowdiest. The music, as played by ‘Crombie Murdoch, George Camp-

bell, Colin Martin, Lockie Jamieson and others, was of a far higher standard than anything Nesbit’s boys have achieved. But it just didn’t catch on. The crowd yelled for Jamieson’s drums to go wild and clashed with compére Pete Young. Such was the refinement of Murdoch’s music that it was spoiled for a large part of the programme by the stamping and clapping of bodgies and widgies. Jock Nesbit has overcome this problem with a larger band and louder arrangements, and by giving the less inhibited elements in his audience those corruptions of jazz that they demand. For the puritan this leaves the radio and private jam sessions as the only mediums where good New Zealand jazz may be fostered.