Page 3

JAZZ GREAT REMEMBERED FOR LEGACY

...continued from front page

In 1941, a shy apprentice gasfitter named Bruce Clarke signed up for guitar lessons at Buddy Waikara’s Hawaiian Club, at his mother’s insistence. Not that she cared about music – she simply wanted her boy to be more confident and outgoing, and Hawaiian steel guitar was all the rage. She was sure that if her son mastered the guitar he’d be the life of any party.

In a cavernous hall filled with 200 young students torturing their instruments, young Bruce worked his way through his first tune - the Maori farewell, Now is the Hour. After a dozen lessons the budding guitarist was head of the class and within two years he was teaching. What little money he made from teaching and gasfitting he spent on Hawaiian records… until one day he heard Charlie Christian playing Honeysuckle Rose and discovered a whole new musical universe.

At that time Bruce was apprenticed to a plumber with a penchant for chatting up lonely housewives whose husbands were busy with WWII – so Bruce was banished to inside the roof or under the floorboards for hours at a time, where he would crouch with a torch, a few music theory texts and sheets of manuscript. By the end of his apprenticeship he didn’t know much about plumbing but he knew a tonic from a dominant.

Like all great improvisers, he knew when to jump in and when to get out.

By 1949 he was a fulltime professional musician working the nightclubs (both the classy and the seedy) but he already knew the next big thing in music would be broadcast radio. He started playing with the 3DB radio band in a popular variety show called ‘Happy Gang’ and also played on some of the earliest Australian jazz recordings under the Jazzart label. His time with the label made him realise the possibilities of the then burgeoning Australian record industry. He began freelancing with record studios as an arranger, session musician and occasionally as a featured artist. It was also around this time that he first started to learn the commercial side of the music business. He produced many singles – most of which he would joke that he never wanted to hear again.

In 1956 television came to Australia and Bruce knew the new medium would be hungry for local content. He reworked ‘Happy Gang’ for TV. The show became known as ‘Sunnyside Up’ and Bruce remained as chief musical arranger and assistant director for over nine years.

Bruce had an uncanny ability to be the first person to recognise an opportunity and as a result he never missed new movements or trends in music or the music industry. He was also the first to know when to jump ship, before the new wave ended or got boring.

In 1958 he set up Bruce Clarke’s Jingle Workshop, which quickly became the country’s busiest commercial recording studio, producing radio and TV themes, film scores and jingles and employing an average of 300 musicians a month. Over the next 18 years he won most of the major local and international awards for music and sound production and produced over 3000 original scores, many of which he wrote in the back of a taxi on his way to the sessions.

Bruce knew the key to the jingle business was constant invention, so he was always looking for something different. He wrote an arrangement for trumpet and bicycle pump and did another for the flute, but using the actual sounds of the keys as opposed to recording the notes. He recorded a flat-out 60’s rock guitar solo on Indian sitar and wrote an entire orchestral score designed to be recorded forwards but played backwards, just so he could switch the decay of each note with its attack.

He knew the difference between what you’re not supposed to do, what no-one’s ever thought of doing and what you could get away with if you got in first.

In 1968 he created Australia’s first electronic composition, ‘Of Spiralling Why’, and became President of the International Society of Contemporary Music. He directed works written for household appliances and popcorn machines and in 1969 filled the front room of the family home with the Mark 3 Moog Synthesizer, a beast so complex and expensive that only the inventor, the Beatles and Bruce had one.

Then in 1972 he turned off the Moog and went back to playing just for the sheer fun of it. Under the banner of his own record label, Cumquat, Bruce recorded whatever he liked with whomever he liked. His first album Vichyssoise, won an ARIA award and one of the tracks, What are You Doing The Rest of Your Life became the theme of the ABC’s Music to Midnight show for nearly a decade.

Appointments to the Music Board of the Australia Council and as the Kenneth Myer Music Fellow to the Victorian Institute of Colleges gave Bruce the chance to see how music was taught in Australia and what he saw horrified him. He believed it was locked into the thinking of a previous century and lamented that the colleges were turning out people with inadequate theory and no practical commercial smarts whatsoever.

Realising how difficult it would be to fix the existing system, Bruce decided to set up his own educational opportunities. In 1976 he created the Guitar Workshop and produced his own texts and training manuals. With a list of over 200 students, he taught and mentored some of Australia’s finest young guitarists and influenced hundreds more. His Guitar Workshop masterclasses grew quickly in popularity due, in no small measure, to the fact that they often featured the world’s greatest players including Joe Pass, Barney Kessel, Ike Isaacs, Herb Ellis. Between workshops Bruce continued to record albums with his favourite musicians, including lifetime collaborators such as the great Ron Rosenberg.

In 2008, Bruce was awarded the Order of Australia for services to the Arts. In accepting the award he quipped, ‘it should have been for Bravery on the Battlefields of Music.’

Bruce believed that quality and quantity hardly ever happened together and that you had to know when to finish. He made the life he wanted, worked with the people he admired and did everything he ever wanted to do. He conducted the first Australian performances of compositions by Stockhausen, Berio and Webern, performed under the baton of Sir John Barbirolli, Sir Charles Mackerras, Sir John Hopkins and led lecture tours in Australia, SE Asia and Europe. He worked with all his heroes including Frank Sinatra, Mel Torme, Dizzy Gillespie, George Golla, Charlie Byrd, Stephane Grappelli and John Williams. Pick a name, Bruce had their phone number.

He won every award that mattered just by doing what he loved. He told us he was ready to go, long before we were ready to let him go. His timing, as always, was perfect. He filled up his own life and yet still had enough left over to fill all of our lives with music, wit, mischief and love. Everyone who knew Bruce revered and admired him.

In music and in life, he was – and will always be – a tough act to follow.

Home

...continued from front page

Do not assume that there is no possibility of changing the terms of the contract being offered to you as often a clause will be readily removed if you object to it. Uncle Terry strongly suggests that you consult ‘The Young Shark’s Guide to negotiation’, a series which made it’s first appearance in issue 1 of ‘The Dues’ These articles give very useful approaches to the negotiation of deals of various kinds.

‘Standard artist’s percentage’ is not that useful a term, first refer to ‘industry standard’ above then also ask yourself some questions such as: ‘percentage of what?’ The percentage by itself is essentially meaningless, it needs to be considered in the context of the whole contract.

Uncle Terry has been asked about this topic on several occasions so for more useful information refer to his columns in the following issues of ‘The Dues’:

Issue 2
Issue 6
Issue 17

As a final comment, it is important to remember that very few musicians make any significant income from record deals. Many artists make nothing from their deals and a considerable number of artists end up with a substantial debt. Keep this firmly in mind when you are considering signing any contract.

Uncle Terry

Dear Uncle Terry,

We are planning on bringing out a ‘niche’ independent artist for some gigs in Sydney and Melbourne. Is it true that we have to get permission from the Musicians Union?

John

Dear John,

Any overseas musician who wants to travel to Australia to perform must be ‘sponsored’, and obtain the appropriate visa. In the situation you describe this is the ‘Entertainment Visa (Sub Class 420)’. This visa is not issued by the Musicians’ Union, it is issued by the federal Department of Immigration and Citizenship. Details of the application process can be found on this department’s website at:

www.immi.gov.au/visitors/special-activity/420/how-to-apply.htm

As part of the application process, the appropriate union must be consulted to ensure that the imported artist is working in accordance with Australian awards and other conditions. For musicians’ this is obviously the Musicians Union of Australia. The MUA has a Federal Imports Officer who handles this area and whose contact details are available on the union’s website at www.musicians.asn.au

Uncle Terry

Home

...continued from front page

“Ninth” chords

We've included a couple of the alternative names and chord notes, eg: Db9 is really the same as C#9. Remember that all chords, like all notes, can have a number of different names depending on the circumstances. The actual notes will, however, remain the same.

Here are all 12 ninth chords in musical notation (with the alternative note names in brackets):

More Extended Dominant chords

There are also ‘Extended Dominant Chords’ with more than 5 notes. Being ‘Extended Dominant Chords’ they all have a flattened seventh and are part of the Dominant Family, but they also include other notes. The easiest way to spot them is to look for a symbol which consists of just the root note name and an odd number bigger than 5. The easiest way to remember them is this rule:

“Extended dominant chords include ALL of the odd numbered notes in the major scale built on the chord name up to the numeral indicated AND the seventh is flattened.”

Let’s look at a 6 note extended dominant chord:

The eleventh chord 

This chord has a very simple symbol:

C11

Now let’s apply our rule. The numeral indicated is 11 -11 is bigger than 5 and it is odd so the chord IS an ‘Extended Dominant Chord’ and the rule we just learned will apply. All of the odd notes up to 11 would be 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11. Remember the 7th must be flat so we would get:

1, 3, 5, b7, 9, 11

Since our example is built on C, the notes would come from the C major scale and they would be:

C, E, G, Bb, D, F

Here it is in musical notation:

Actually this version of the 11th chord is not used very often, mostly because the 11th is only a semitone away from the 3rd in a close voicing and this can lead to the effect of the major third being obscured. Sometimes the 11 is used to indicate the suspended 4th, this can be very confusing since the logic of the system tells us that there is always a 3rd unless ‘sus’ is used (except for the C5 or power chord exception!). I very strongly recommend that C11 never be used to indicate a sus4 chord since the potential for confusion is very great.

The thirteenth chord
Yes, There is one of these! Use the rule we just introduced to work out what notes are in it. Also work out the notes in all 12 eleventh chords.

Answers and more next issue. As always contact me on musosunion@aol.com if you have any questions.

See you next time.

Home