World's Best Jazz Club: The Story of Bennetts Lane

Century.

INTRODUCTION

The emergence of an institution

IN A LONELY PLANET travel guide to Australia, Bennetts Lane jazz club in Melbourne was described as the world's best jazz club. It came as something of a shock, particularly to jazz aficionados with an eye to America or Europe. What about the New York clubs, such as Blue Note or the Village Vanguard? Or the legendary Ronnie Scott's club in London? Surely they have better claims to being the best jazz club in the world?

Look a little closer, however, and the observation is not so surprising. If we ask the question: 'What is a jazz club?' Lonely Planet's opinion starts to look eminently justified. A jazz club is more than just a place of entertainment, a pub or night club that happens to play a particular style of music. It is an important part of a city's culture. On that measure Bennetts Lane is exceptional. Whereas the famous jazz clubs of New York principally derive their reputations from the city itself – New York's status as the centre of jazz activity in the world or New Orleans' reputation as the origin of the form – Bennetts Lane has acquired an international reputation in a city that is, at best, only a marginal player in the world jazz scene. There have been many fine Australian jazz players, but few would think of Melbourne as one of the genre's epicentres.

In proportionate terms, Bennetts Lane has made a bigger contribution to the night life and culture of the city it inhabits than other jazz clubs. Put another way, without Bennetts Lane it is unlikely that jazz would have become as healthy in Melbourne as it has, whereas the New York jazz scene would almost certainly have thrived irrespective of the survival of specific venues.

BENNETTS LANE ENTRANCES © Laki Sideris

A jazz club has other dimensions. The best become a magnet for famous recordings. The Village Vanguard, for instance, has been the venue for the production of records of live performances of some of the most famous players of the genre: Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Wynton Marsalis, Dizzy Gillespie. On that score, Bennetts Lane is exceptional. In conjunction with ABC radio, the government broadcaster, the club has been the place for the biggest archive of Australian jazz recordings ever compiled, a veritable history of the form over the last two decades. It is also routinely the place for the launching of new CDs.

Jazz clubs have a further role, the nurturing of local talent. On this metric, Bennetts Lane occupies a high position. It has provided an audience for Australian jazz players, which has proved notoriously difficult in the past, especially in some of the more experimental or challenging areas of the music. Unlike in New York, London, Berlin or Paris, jazz is not automatically popular to Australian audiences. Neither is there a ready stream of tourists seeking out the music. By surviving for over two decades, Bennetts Lane has provided a focal point for aspiring musicians, a way for ambitious local artists to find an audience.

The club's strong link with educational institutions such as the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) has contributed to the sense of a career path for well-trained musicians – to the extent that such a thing is possible in a genre as fragile as jazz. Unlike classical music, where there are clearlydefined pathways to success and a reasonable expectation of good salaries, jazz has been a notoriously difficult area in which to earn a living.

Jazz clubs are also businesses, and usually rather temporary ones. Audiences, never willing to pay high prices for jazz music, have over time become even less willing to spend. There has been a growing expectation that music is, if not free, at least cheap. The money that can be charged at the door has varied little over the last two decades, meaning that in real terms it has fallen by more than half. Most venues try to compensate by selling food with reasonable margins but this is not the direction Bennetts Lane has taken. The strategy was always been to focus only on the music, not on dining with music as a background. There have been many clubs that host jazz. But around the world there are very few jazz clubs: places where the music comes first.

Indeed, many venues have a dismissive approach to musicians. Some of the most famous live jazz recordings of the 1950s and 1960s were harmed by the incessant conversation amongst people at the venue – hard to believe when it was performances of seminal artists like saxophonist Sonny Rollins or pianist Thelonius Monk. In these venues, the musical performance was simply an adjunct to the social activity, little better than a background noise providing atmosphere. It has been the curse of many musical venues, with an obviously dispiriting effect on the musicians.

Bennetts Lane founder Michael Tortoni, by emphasising the music before all else – he is himself a bassist who understands the musicians' life – created an environment in which the jazz playing mattered. And making jazz matter has in recent decades proven to be a daunting challenge; the emergence of rock and popular music has pushed jazz into the background.

So when looked at in this wider context, the Lonely Planet's rating starts to look entirely reasonable. This is not to suggest that Bennetts Lane is the best club in the world to hear jazz. There are many other better claimants to that title, especially in New York. But it has been the best place to hear Australian jazz. And as a venue that has fostered and contributed to its local musical culture it has few, if any, peers in the world.

It also enjoys an international reputation. Tortoni likes to recount an occasion when the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis was playing at the club. He was chatting with him at the side of the stage. Marsalis said: There are not too many jazz clubs like this, anywhere.

I knew then I was on the right track, says Tortoni.

This, then, is the story of Bennetts Lane, which is in turn the story of Australian jazz over the last two decades. The characters, the musical styles, the changing aesthetics, the new techniques. Interviews with musicians who have played at the club will serve as a sketch of the artistic endeavour that has occurred at the venue.

CHAPTER 01

The art of making it up as you go

BENNETTS LANE JAZZ CLUB has become the place in Australia where the narrative of an art form has been recounted; an art form that is amongst the most profound and advanced in all music. At its best, jazz produces an immediacy that is rarely matched in any art form. It is based on popular songs, but imbued with a technical advancement that is on a par with the most sophisticated music. Above all, jazz is the arena in which advanced improvisation occurs.

The craft of improvising has largely been lost to classical musicians. For centuries, improvisation was considered a necessary skill. Bach could improvise fugues, Mozart was as famous for his extemporisation as his composition and Beethoven was highly skilled at creating variations of themes on the spot. Schubert was more feted for his improvisations than compositions and Chopin's piano pieces were often written down improvisations. Liszt was a great improviser. Debussy considered improvisation central to his compositional processes.

Everyone who wrote music in the Western tradition was a player, observes guitarist Steve Magnusson. They were all very good. They weren't chumps, they were total monsters. Mozart was an improviser, he could really play. Improvisation might at some times have been a game – who was the best at it, and all that stuff – but Bach could improvise. He would just reel them out, he had the facility. Improvising is not just Charlie Parker. Of course, if they lived now they wouldn't sound like they did then, it is always your time and place.

Yet by the twentieth century few classical players considered improvisation a necessary skill. There is even a proclivity amongst some classical players to regard it with disdain, mere sound effects and a distraction from the central disciplines of the music.

Mark Pollard, Head of the School of Contemporary Music at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), says when jazz started to become more mainstream in education there was a bit of a push back from institutions about the legitimacy of the form. But that has changed as it was realised that it led to original work. "Now, we see jazz very much part of the research question, especially how improvisation brings an original idea into the world.

There are always values in any art form based on historical labels, the vernacular view of what 'style' may be. And there is fashion and those things consistently change. In specialist music training in an institution, the people you have are completely focused on the natural ability to be creative and to make a sound that comes from a different direction.

It is the prospect of being creative that draws musicians to improvisation. Bennetts Lane founder and jazz bassist, Michael Tortoni, recalls that when he went to the VCA, he was principally looking for as many ways as possible to give himself options. He liked classical music – rock, he believes is in many ways very classical – but it was jazz that rapidly took his attention. Like many, he was influenced by the charismatic saxophonist Brian Brown who headed up the jazz course at the time.

BENNETTS LANE FOUNDER MICHAEL TORTONI

I became obsessed by it, the improvisational aspects of jazz, says Tortoni. Improvising is spontaneous composition. When improvising takes off you start to see different things. Music is a universal language, so without having met someone you can play together. But people who are classically trained are terrified, they never let go. You feel like you are giving away your personality, that is the fear.

Improvisation is, at least in theory, original. That has meant that Australian jazz has been able to achieve something that Australian classical music has struggled with: the regular performing of new local work. Pianist and academic Tony Gould undertook a study of the classical music scene in Australia for his Doctor of Philosophy thesis at La Trobe University. He found that only 7 per cent of all music played in concert halls and opera houses is written by Australians.

TONY GOULD

In the classical arena, the heritage rules the whole economics and attitude, says Gould. "The attitude is one of neglect for Australian composers. Fortunately, in jazz we have moved fairly radically away from playing the jazz canon from America and now there is more original music, home-grown composition and improvisation.

"That interests me a great deal. You go to Bennetts Lane now and you are unlikely, with a few exceptions, to see people who do covers, standards. Most of the music played at Bennetts Lane is original, which is incredible.

In the 1970s and 1980s, in most of the jazz clubs, audiences were listening to standards and bebop. That has changed radically over the last 20 years and Gould argues that although Bennetts Lane has not been a direct catalyst, it has provided the venue, or venues, for it to occur on a regular basis.

It is one of the best jazz clubs in the world, in my opinion. It caters for the older generation, people like me, and the younger generation, it is a beautiful mix. You get Allan Browne playing on Monday nights, narrating his famous prose and poetry stuff. Then you get younger generation people. It is pretty amazing when you think about it.

Improvisation is perhaps best described as the pursuit of the eternal moment. Yet it is rarely a matter of working from a completely blank slate. The expression may occur in the moment, but jazz musicians must have learned the musical language, so the past is also always present.

That means the improvisatory art has many contradictions and paradoxes. To aspire to be different each time it is essential to remember what you played before, which necessarily is away from the present moment. Yet to reach an evanescent inspiration, which occurs with the best improvisation, it is necessary to have little sense of anything other than the moment, a degree of presentness. Equally, the best improvisations have a sense of shape, which means remembering what has been done before.

Pianist Andrea Keller describes the presentness that is the aim of all jazz improvisers, a liberation from the pre-prepared that is the antithesis of classical performance. On a night when I am struggling with my own head, the balance is really out or the proportions are really out. She has to resort to learned techniques. But if it is really happening, I am not thinking about the nuts and bolts I am just hearing and responding.

Singer Gian Slater, who approaches the voice as much as an instrument as a vehicle for communicating lyrics, describes a similar focus on the now. I think one of the wonderful things about improvising – and in many ways it is similar when I am composing and getting on a roll – is that you are very occupied with what you are doing in that moment, she says. You would be lying if you said there weren't times when you were thinking about what you have to do the next day, or whatever. But more often than not you are very in the moment, your brain is very occupied with what you are doing. In the same way that anyone who has experienced a level of flow in their work, where they are just totally absorbed and time just passes. For me, that is the optimal experience.

Achieving presentness is intimately linked to listening closely to the other musicians. According to Slater, time tends to slow down in this state, as choices are made in the moment. I think if you are thinking very clearly and vividly about this, each musical decision would be very slow. It is this amazing meeting of all of this language that is internalised. And then there is the moment of putting those pieces together. It creates a certain kind of flow, or momentum, in the same way that happens when you are absorbed in conversations. If you have enough language to express yourself there can be quite a flowing thing where you couldn't possibly be thinking about anything else than what you are talking about. You are really in the moment.

Singer Vince Jones says concentrating on the interaction with other musicians is the key to achieving swing. The art is to watch and listen to the other musicians, in order to lift each other. It's very Buddhist, he says. That keeps you right in that second – that atom of music that is coming out.

To describe the paradoxes of time in jazz improvisation is to reach the limits of what can be said with words. When musicians make up ways of talking about the experience it usually leaves more questions than answers. But what can be said is that jazz is an art form founded on deep tensions. It requires hours of practice and preparation, yet when the playing is successful it is as if only that moment exists, and has ever existed. Similarly, jazz requires intense intellectual and technical effort, yet many improvisers say that when the music is working, they are not thinking at all.

Megan Evans, the manager of the Bennetts Lane jazz club and Tortoni's long-time assistant, navigates the paradoxes of time this way. Being 'present' is more complicated than it sounds. The temporal contradictions that make 'then' a part of the 'now' and the spatial paradoxes that comport notes into journeys means that great live improvisation is in no way as simple as making it up as you go along. There is a dedication to the landscape of music, its history, culture, landmarks, topography, and its hopes that finds expression contextualised by a song and voiced by its performer in their 'presentness'. Just as one can identify themselves by reflecting on the world around them at a given time, a jazz musician in full flight identifies the world at a given time by reflecting on themselves in the 'eternal moment'.

This pursuit of a heightened eternal moment makes jazz a form of music quite distinct to classical or popular forms. Whereas more conventional musical forms involve reintroducing audiences to something they have enjoyed before – a hit song or a well-known symphony – many jazz players aspire to give audiences something they have not heard before, a form of instantaneous musical drama. Inevitably, the results are uneven. Saxophonist Jamie Oehlers says he can be surprised by the audience response. A lot of the time, when you feel that you have had a good night and everything is happening, no-one really cares. The audience is not that interested. Sometimes, when you feel you have had a really bad night the audience is really into it. A lot has to do with the fact that on those nights when you're not feeling like you are making anything, you really are going for things.

The high level of risk-taking in instrumental jazz tends to an uneasy relationship with audiences, far more than is the case in other musical forms. It is made more complex by the different levels of musical sophistication amongst listeners. The frustrating thing is that everybody hears at a different level, comments pianist Joe Chindamo. "Take (pianist) Art Tatum. To some people they will say that is nice tinkly jazz. Others will say: 'Oh, there is a piano, he is doing what Elton John does.' Then someone else will hear it and say: 'My God, he is like the Franz Liszt of jazz'. Everybody hears at a different level. I have walked off stage feeling like I have stopped all wars with my playing tonight and only one person will say: 'That was lovely,