Wanted: Paying Customers

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 898, 19 October 1956, Page 10

Wanted: Paying Customers

| WAS talking to a jazz man the other day. He doesn’t blow for a living. He listens and works inconspicuously as an impresario. "There is a public for jazz in Auckland," he said. "Since the war people have come to accept hot jazz and the best of the big bands -call that swing if you like. Now that’s happened at a time when many of the musicians want to experiment with cool stuff, but the public won’t buy much of that yet. It’s always the way. .. Of course, the bread and butter music you hear in the dance halls is for dancing: stock arrangements, not much excitement. Sometimes a small group within the dance bands is allowed a bit of scope playing interludes. During rehéarsals'a band will take a rest and a few of the fellows will improvise on a tune. Then there’s jazz concerts: three or four a year, and the hall filled each time. Probably some come for the jazz and some for the vaudeville items. The promoters play it safe. We know there’s quite a big audience for broadcast recorded jazz. Much bigger than 20 years ago when the big swing bands were starting to catch on in the States; . ." He paused and his eyes took on that faraway focus a jazz man gets when he has to focus across the Pacific. "I suppose there are more chances for good musicians in Auckland than in smaller New Zealand towns," he said, "and more of a public. Ten or a dozen popular groups have’ their turn on the air, but think what it would be like if we had a big population. Holiday makers and visitors in the big towns wanting to spend money and stay up late. Clubs and little night spots where small bands could play for a while and have a chance to watm up and work out their ideas properly. We haven’t anything like that. That’s where you’d hear jazz. The dance halls don’t encourage jazz because they don’t want jitterbugging. It takes up too much room and drives people off the Hoor." I said I thought there was more to it than that: cabaret managers were conventional snobs, (The jazz man winced slightly. Impresarios are too good-natured by habit and trade to ‘want: to offend anybody.) "They’ll take a jitterbug’s 7/6 and then throw him out, making righteous remarks about keeping up the tone of the place," -I went on. The ‘jazz man shrugged his shoulders. "We'll hear more jazz when

some of those small places open up," he said, "whenever that is. The young musicians would get a break then, and be able to play whatever they wanted to try out. -There’s jazz clubs in some of the high schools, you know. They listen to records and blow a bit themselves. It’s slow coming, but we can’t,expect much till we have the population .. . visitors who want to spend money and stay up late." Style Wins OGS in Auckland can ‘take advantage of what must be about the broadest spectrum of destruction in the country. Choose a wavelength for your pet, or a colour band, if that’s how you see spectra. The urban end of the

spectrum, the gross red band? O.K. We have the Great South Road, which Aucklanders insist carries the heaviest traffic flow anywhere. Perhaps it does. It'll do until a heavier statistic comes along, and it’s plenty to flatten out your dog, if he scorns traffic lights. Poor pooch, he should have stuck to the country, shouldn’t he: Cornwall Park’s as close and so peaceful, just the place for a dog to run, .. Fallacy. It’s the other end of the death spectrum. The dog who runs in there, particularly at lambing time, can expect a quick rural death by shooting. The middle of the spectrum presents death forces of other colour: dog thieves, poisoners, waywardness, lust, over-ambition, gluttony and boredom. I think the last-named becomes more prevalent as the city moves in on us. We haven’t seen much yet, not nearly as much, say, as New York, of the apartment house dog, who stares at four walls until he starts to climb them, and the veterinary psychiatrist is called. Even so, in the most mechanised metropolis, I’ll still bet on a good bright dog, and an understanding owner. The way they work things out may be too fancy for New Zealanders, who like their dogs plain, but it can be fun for all. I refer particularly to a couple (foreigners I fear) who got off a tram at the corner of Queen and Wellesley Streets, They stepped on to the footpath a few yards from where I was standing, and the man un-zipped an airways valise which had small, bone-rimmed portholes at intervals round the top. He held the bag open, and out stepped a small-size poodle, black, fancy trimmed, blinking in the light. He stretched, shook himself, and stood looking pleased while the lady snapped on his lead. Then all three set off down town, walking with lots of style. Honest, a Lovely Stoush N American professional spectacles, like baseball and ice hockey, the crowd expects frequent rhubarb, which is American for stoush. So when stoush creeps into Rugby here, we tend to talk uneasily about professionalism and point accusing fingers at Auckland, headquarters of "the other code." Nonsense, lilylivered urban nonsense! Read the reports of assaults on the winning Wellington players (and the ref.) as they left the field after taking the Shield from Canterbury? You did? Right. Who

was reported to have done the assaulting? Gents took care of the ref., but the players met ladies swinging handbags; terrible weapons when filled with jagged fragments of lipstick cases and years old «compacts and key rings and chickens’ wishbones and overdue books from the corner library. That’s not exclusively urban or professional. Ask any country wing-threequarter what happened when he was galloping down the touchline in that game against Kaitangata, with a clear field ahead and a certain try. Why, a lady local supporter judiciously tripped him with her umbrella. The girls don’t have any Oxford _and Cambridge nonsense about them in South Otago, at Catlins, or the Coast, or Waikato country towns, If their men are too soft to kill the other side, they've gat to pile in and help, haven’t they? So would the town girls, likewise primitives at heart, but it isn’t often they can get close enough to the field of play. In these big towns the customers are penned up in remote grandstands, This time they got a chance and they were in, rucking harder than the listless Canterbury pack had done all afternoon. So pshaw Oxonians, Cantabs and all chaps who play Rugger because it’s a jolly good game! Phooey also on professionals, if they turn on occasional calculated stoush for the money! You sporting journalists, too, busy typing DEPLORABLE in caps, just keep your eye on the little helpmeet. She starts a stoush because she loves to hate.

G. leF.

Y.