Jonathan Mallalieu : master of arts

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Born in Rochester in 1966, Mallalieu studied classical piano. He played in the band for the Charismatic Church, which Mallalieu describes as “like gospel but without the jazz and blues”.
When he was 12 years old, his parents adopted a blind Vietnamese boy, Thuy, who also learned piano. Thuy taught Jonathan how to play by ear, and gave him the freedom to improvise. This gave Mallalieu the confidence and impetus to start composing.
A keen artist, Jonathan developed a love of film and trained to be an actor at the University of Wales. He went on to study for a PhD in the early manuscripts of D.H. Lawrence. in 1994, he published a book of short stories called “The Prince of Wales” for which he won the John Llewellyn-Rhys memorial prize.
When asked if he has a favoured art form, Mallalieu is ambivalent.
“I write fiction to get away from music and I write music to get away from fiction,” said Mallalieu.
He came to Australia in 1994 to study film and has since written a play Physics, Chem and Bio – a romantic comedy farce. The script is being read but Jonathan Mallalieu has found the Australian film industry hard to crack.
“It is hard to get film off the ground in Australia without an enormous amount of money,” said Mallalieu.
It was his interest in film that led him to establish Video Dogs in Carlton seven years ago. He started to collect silent movies, which were difficult to find before DVDs and has since developed his own repertoire of music set to film.
“I get bored if I have to follow music, so I like to play to visual images. It breaks up the monotony of my own music,” said Mallalieu.
The public may know Jonathan Mallalieu through his former bar Moo Moo in Melbourne’s funky Flinders Lane. There, he performed improvised sound tracks to silent movies with his fellow musicians, a cellist and a violinist. While he enjoyed this for a while, he felt the creative atmosphere was polluted by corporate types who cashed in on the bar’s creative space to unwind from a day of wheeling and dealing.
Unlike many musicians who get a buzz performing to live audiences, Mallalieu prefers to compose in private, record the sound properly then release it.
“I find audiences distracting. I used to play live to silent movies at the bar but after 20 minutes, I found it exhausting,” said Mallalieu.
The particular recording this writer heard was a sound track called Soundtrack For A Film That Has Never Been Made. Evocative, gentle and passionate, this music is a ballad for a story yet to be told. According to Mallalieu, music for films provides a creative media for classical musicians.
“It is one of the last spaces that people listen to inventive classical music but they don’t realise they’re doing it,” says Mallalieu.
As for his next project, Mallalieu is looking for a new space north of the city to open another bar. He is waiting for review of his last play, which is now being read. And there are his customers at Video Dogs to be served.

Listen to an excerpt from Jonathan Mallalieu's Soundtrack For A Film That Has Never Been Made.

For film makers looking for a script writer, actor or music score: Jonathan Mallalieu is your ‘one man band’. Contact him at j.mallalieu@gmail.com or visit him at Video Dogs, Carlton.

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Astonishing revelations of nothing in particular

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And that is precisely what it is: an invocation, an invitation to the dance, the dance of yin and yang, of give and take, of say and unsay; two steps forward, two steps back, all of the time. Round and round and round. It is to the mind what junk food is to the appetite: it engages and satisfies hunger without nourishing. It is, and has to be as a logical conclusion of its constrained premises, content free. An instance: “For the most part, though, Sundiata speaks from the pulpit of personal experience — and if his political message occasionally swoops into sentimentality, it remains supple and spiritual without ever succumbing to dogmatism.”

This sentence stands both as an instance of the contentless static that this sort of writing presents to the mind and as a manifesto of its smug intellectual coziness and lazy, unexamined adherence to the spirit of the time. The spirit of the time detests sentimentality (however it may be defined and however Sundiata may “swoop” into it; no examples are offered), so we must lament its unfortunate presence. The spirit of the time allows, even enjoins the “spiritual”, whatever that may be; and don’t even think of asking what it may be, because that would be “dogmatism”; which, besides being just a fancy word for “teaching”, is a coded pre-emptive strike against those who might choose to take seriously the call to think about the spiritual rather than just feel it. No one wants to be labelled “dogmatic” because the word is sued to invoke a feeling, not inform us; and as such, it swarms with associations of the “intolerant”, the “unenlightened”, perhaps “mediaeval obscurantism” and the like.
Let’s take a walk through the piece and put a hand to the touchstones that make up the litany of prayer to the autonomous post-modern deconstructed consciousness. A list will do it, as a litany is, after all, a fancy term for list.
History, origins, Africa, politics, black power, anti-war, 1960s, 1970s, conscience, ethics, global empire, rights, moral responsibility, beat poetry, 9/11, preacher, supple, spiritual, non-dogmatic, hip-hop, blues, world (Hindustani) music, blues/jazz fusion, interrogation.
After each of which the reader understands if he is an adept that his response is “amen”.

At this point, it is increasingly clear that there is no point asking what is the use, or even the meaning, of “an impassioned plea for ethical awareness” that is not at the same time “a call to man the barricades”. Because the notes have been played, the emotional tonal centre set, the rhetoric of empty rhetoric has done its job and language’s reduction and assimilation to the state of pleasant sounds (music?) is accomplished.

The list encapsulates the import of the entire article; except, of course, for the names of the singers and band members, who sing and play well, the telling of which breaks the flow and the incantation and the congregation may disperse forthwith (that is, the article is over; stop reading!)

“The 51st dream state is an entertaining and thought-provoking interrogation of contemporary America.”
What was the question?

Read Cameron Woodhead’s original review.

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