Katie Noonan has won the gong for best jazz album at the ARIA Artisan and Fine Arts Awards for Blackbird, The Music Of Lennon and McCartney
A new performing arts centre was in place for the twentieth Wangaratta Festival of Jazz. Read reviews and blog posts from the anniversary event to find out what went on inside the venue.
Brisbane saxophonist Zac Hurren has won the 2009 National Jazz Award at the Wangaratta Festival of Jazz.
Each year, Jazz Australia talks to the ten finalists in Australia's most prestigious jazz competition, the National Jazz Awards. The award in 2009 is for saxophone.
In Australia he was a rising jazz star, but that didn't count for much in the US, where no one knew his name. So it took a certain amount of courage for Barney McAll to wander into New York's Sweet Basil jazz club and offer his services to the owner, Horst Liepolt. It was the mid-1990s, and Liepolt was a well-known producer who had once played a significant role in promoting jazz in Australia.
Ade Monsbourgh Dies at 89
By Peter Jordan
1st August, 2006
Jazz legend Ade Monsbourgh has died at the age of 89.
The multi-instrumentalist is perhaps best known for his work with Graeme Bell’s band with which he twice toured Europe and England in the 1940s.
These tours had a significant impact, as did Monsbourgh’s own playing. Indeed, he was offered a job in the band of English jazz musician Humphrey Lyttleton but turned it down.
Back in Australia, he played in Len Barnard’s band, became a resident guest musician at the Melbourne Jazz Club and later played and recorded with Nevillle Stribling in Lazy Ade's Late Hour Boys and Adelaide composer Dave Dallwitz.
Wrtiting in the Oxford Companion to Australian Jazz, Bruce Johnson said that Monsbourgh, also known as “The Father” or Lazy Ade”, was “one of the most original and influential jazz musicians Australia has produced”.
“His distinctive approach, both in terms of timing, harmonic line and, especially on alto, his timbre, is central to what is widely, if controversially regarded as the ‘Australian’ or ‘Melbourne’ jazz style.”
Johnson also said that Monsbourgh has been copied “more productively than any other Australian jazz musician, including by overseas musicians”.
In 2003, Monsbourgh won the Graeme Bell Career Achievement Award at the inaugural Australian Jazz Awards.
A fuller appreciation of Ade Monsbourgh’s life and work will appear soon on the Jazz Australia website.
Photo: Courtesy of Peter Cowden, Jazzology.
