Austral Jazz: A Practitioner’s Perspective on the Local Remaking of a Global Music Form

Abstract

This thesis presents a creative practice research study that draws on the fields of music composition and jazz studies. It attempts to address the following question: In what ways and to what extent can a musical genre such as British folk song, which is the ancestral music of quite a large number of Australians and New Zealanders, absorb jazz sounds and processes—and vice versa—to produce new music that can be heard as a local expression of a global form? Methodologically it approaches the question in several ways: through compositional practice that works towards achieving a synthesis of musical styles, and through an essay that sets out a new scheme for understanding local expressions of jazz within a global context. Three large-scale works are presented, each of which draws on a distinct corpus of British folk song and within contrasting self-imposed parameters. The initial work engages well-known printed collections, the second a set of historical recordings, and the third a set of ballad texts for which no known traditional tune survives. The essay sets out a new theory of jazz historiography, and provides a detailed practitioner’s account of how jazz became ‘Austral’, a term that strives to capture the idea of a creative shift in direction in jazz in Australia and New Zealand that took place around 1973, whereby it began to become more noticeably local. Drawing on the notion of ‘double identification’ the essay discusses how in the mid 1970s local jazz began to undergo processes of cultural revitalisation and geocultural connection. This provides crucial context for the creative ‘answers’ to the research question the thesis poses. Part I of the thesis introduces the study, reviews the literature relating to the spread of jazz as a global expressive system, and presents the essay. Part II introduces and discusses each of the creative works, which can be understood as having emerged, in large part, from the processes of cultural revitalisation and geocultural connection that are a feature of Austral jazz as discussed in Part I. The works, and the thesis as a whole, represent the creative expression of a single practitioner working within the Austral jazz scene. Parts III and IV respectively, comprise the scores and recordings of these works.