Little big man

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This genuine warmth and desire to do good eminates from him as he ambles up onto the stage with a comfortable air of familiarity, a big beam on his face. The band features the rhythm section from the Angels and, on guitar, a young hotshot with fast fingers called Marty. They open with Under the Milky Way, The Church's dreamy classic, and Jimmy Little actions along to the lyrics demonstratively. The song closes, the audience applauds. People have come here from all over. There are elders, some people up from the country, some from across the country - I'll get to them later - young, old, some just in for a meal and caught up in it all.

'Will I keep going?' Jimmy teases gently, using his guitar as a leaning post.

The crowd chimes 'Yeah!' loudly. He acquiesces, and the band launches into a Paul Kelly song.

There is a real sense of community in the venue and Little taps into this, despite the clatter and clink and chatter from the eating end of the room rendering me cantankerous and straining to hear what Little is saying. I think he said something like, "This is a global village.... We love food, we love sport…' he pauses, and the sides of his smile stretch out further, "...I'll leave that one to your imagination." A knowing giggle from the audience. He concludes that what we all have in common is that "We love to love."

They play Joey McIntyre's I Don't Know Why I Love You, Jimmy swinging his guitar neck around the mike stand to play to both sides of the audience - a very hospitable host.

'Can I sit down for a while?' he asks. And of course we let him.

Last year Little had a kidney transplant. Though seemingly happy to be performing, he is obviously still weary from the stress it has placed on his body. He's not too tired to tell a story about the next song, the title track Down the Road by Troy Cassadaly and Don Walker from his 2003 release, though the amplification struggled to convey the tale even to me, standing directly in front. And this was a constant beef of mine throughout the evening. Jimmy Little, a great story-teller with a fabulous velvety voice and smooth-as-caramel persona, didn't have a fitting room to perform in. He was up against against a distracting raggle-taggle backdrop of posters, a hole through to a corridor behind, no ambient stage lighting, no proscenium arch to frame the stage and story, and a ridiculously reflective acoustic that ricocheted words worse than a bullet fired into a canyon.

Graciously, Little asked the band if it was okay for them to take a 'lemonade break' while he played a couple of solo numbers (as if they'd say no to this big beaming man). He took the opportunity to sing a song about his grandfather, the 'Blacktracker' of the song's title, one of those indigenous Australians with the innate and learned knowledge of the land to find anyone from bushrangers to convicts to explorers lost in the bush for the 'men in blue.' The song took on new shades as Little raised the key for each new verse, finding his way within the octave range. The band crept in, not taking a walk to the bar for a lemonade break, but staying camped as a backup team for a couple more Little songs, with make-it-up-as-you-go key changes. The crowd dissipated a little at this point, perhaps finding the reverberating venue unsuitable to his more intimate and personal songs. So, finding it difficult to tune the misbehaving and not-so-recently strung guitar, he spun a yarn about a couple of snakes, which again made me long for a more focused environment to frame his story.

The band struck up a calypso/country feel for Falling In Love With You, which rested in a complementary ground between Elvis and UB40 (but certainly better than the UB40 version). Little's warmth lifts these kinds of songs. In the way that Nina Simone barbedly yet vulnerably counteracted Bob Dylan's snide Just Like A Woman, he imbues a conciliatory compassion and radiance into the songs he chooses. Though the closer, Ed Keuper's The Way I Made You Feel was very funky, complete with cool-cat claps, some stepping out from Little and a Stevie Wonder Superstition-esque line from Marty on guitar, Little's just too darn nice to get away with the sting in the lyrics. But hey, it's funky and people wanted to dance, so much so that the enthused applause inspired a brief reprise.

"More! More! Uncle Jimmy! More!" chimed some very striking Aboriginal twins beside me, who I'd heard the girls gossiping about in the toilets. I asked them later, "So why 'Uncle Jimmy?'"

"Out of respect, you know. Because he's older than us." They'd been listening to his music since the cradle. And that's it. Jimmy Little has been around the block, the bush, the world, all of it many times.

He wearily descended from the stage and headed out back, all tuckered out, to emerge changed into a handsome golden-yellow waistjacket, letting the request for an encore go through to the keeper so he could retire to a seat to sign the odd autograph.

And then there was Vic Simms. If you were trying to find a couple of guys whose dispositions were opposite to each other, you'd be hard pressed to find a more diametric duo than Vic and Jimmy. Little is retiring and comfortable, whereas Simms paces, buzzes with energy, and looks like the kind of guy you don't want to get offside. Little takes to the stool between the sets while Simms is restless, talking a mile a minute, all vim and vigour, with Little throwing in the occasional balancing thought. The wiry haired MC has given them a big rap, encouraging triple rounds of applause and now the crowd waits while Vic Simms and his band make the final touches to their stage getup. And then they get up and go.

On drums: a wiry man in a leopard skin collared black jacket over a scarlet red satin shirt, pumping out tom-heavy 50s surf rock beats.
On bass: black jeans and flames licking up a black shirt, playing heavy rhythms with an amused smile.
On keys: a nerdy zigzag shirt and quiet enjoyment, tinkles punctuated by flat-out chords.
On guitar: one of the loudest and yellowest blazers I think I've seen since I last watched Purple Rain.
On second guitar: a blue crocodile skin pattern shirt and leather pants - weeoooh!
Clearly, these guys are rockers from way back in that raw, rootsy, fun-loving, no-bullshit way that gets barns, halls and clubs up and dancing.

And then Mr Vic Simms, reminiscent of a 1930's Chicago gangster in black and white brogues, a cream top, black and white striped denim jacket and a woollen scarf just made for smoking cigars in, ascended the stage.

So, they opened with the Hand Jive, Simms' fist punching the air, rings flashing on his fingers. Fountain of Love, Save the Last Dance For Me; even The Stones got a look in, and they rocked up the tender Bee Gees number You Don't Know What It's Like. The whole floor was bopping, turning, shaking, twisting and not looking like ever stopping. So refreshing to go to a gig in Melbourne and for there to be such a positive energy going on, with a real sense of community, free from pretension and out for good old fashioned fun. Uh huh - fun!

The band kept rocking as Simms left the stage to change into a matching pink woollen sweater and scarf - you couldn't accuse him of not supporting the wool industry. You couldn't accuse him of not giving the audience a good time either. Simms has been playing rock 'n' roll since he was a nipper, starting with Col Joye and the Joy Boys as an 11 year old in 1956. And it was this kind of old school rock 'n' roll appropriated by Vic Simms and Jimmy Little that helped raise the profile of indigenous Australian musicians, forging a path for others in the music industry, even if theirs is still a sub-culture often limited to more remote regions.

It was disappointing to hear these two commentators sing mostly the music of others, with other people's words, rather than their original songs. It can be powerful to interpret and invigorate covers with the Aboriginal voice, and yet I wanted to hear more of their own direct thoughts in music, as well as between songs.

They played All Shook Up, The Twist, playing hard, Simms' fist thumping, keeping people happy, just rocking the night away. And it was at this point that I have to admit I got distracted by the talk of the night.

I told you I'd get back to you about this - the two tall men with wild salt-and-pepper beards and wire-framed glasses and a striking resemblance to each other, looking like some Jungian archetype. These were the twins the girls had been gossiping about in the toilets earlier that evening. The easiest way to tell them apart was that one twin used a walking stick. This lovely fellow told me how he and his two brothers had driven across the country for three days straight to visit family and happened to hear about the show on a blackfella radio station. Then he told me about his personal experience as part of the stolen generation and the amazing story of how he and his twin were separated from their mother at an early age, but managed to remain together. Only recently they had found their other younger brother (also there at the show) and even more recently had undergone the profound experience of being reunited with their birth mother. His recounting of the story was punctuated by a hug from Uncle Jimmy.

I won't name names, even though I won't forget their names, but if you ever meet these beautiful delightful brothers, no doubt they will tell you their story and you'll be moved by it as I was.

What stood out for me other than the sense of community and lack of pretension - often a rare thing in reserved, yet impressionable Melbourne - was that every time an Aboriginal person even slightly bumped into or scraped against me, they said 'sorry' very hastily. To cover their tracks? To avoid any ill feeling or confrontation? What previous experience had led to this extreme caution? So, essentially, the first thing that every Aboriginal person I encountered that night said to me - apart from one cheeky fellow who asked me, "Where are you from, are you a Koori?" (you may guessed by now that I'm very, very white) - was 'sorry.'

I guess it's time we listened and learnt to return the courtesy.

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New Orleans drowns in jazz history

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And it is the birthplace of jazz. Well, you might get an argument from Parisians, Chicagoans, Memphisians and even New Yorkers on that score – nothing is as simple and clear-cut as we would like it to be.

Of course, jazz began when a whole lot of black people picked up band instruments left over from the Civil War. They drifted to the cities, notably New Orleans, and created a new form of music, based on marches mixed with gospel songs and the blues. Jazz traveled by river-boat up to Chicago, where the black populace made their own style. That's what happened, right? Everybody knows that.

Winton Marsalis

Well, maybe there's another side to the story. Under the Napoleonic code, if you has a drop of white blood in you, you was white - were white. Thus Creole society was born. A strong Creole middle class developed in New Orleans in the 19th century, and from this middle class sprang trained classical musicians. Several black symphony orchestras were performing to a high standard during this time. It seems likely that jazz at least partly evolved out this pool of highly-trained talent. The tradition of New Orleans musicians excelling at both jazz and classical music is alive today with the brothers Winton and Branford Marsalis at the top of their fields in both jazz and classical performance.

Those whitefellas sho' have a fine sense of rhythm...the original Dixieland Jazz Band

And maybe jazz did travel by riverboat up to Chicago, as did Louis Armstrong, but the main original audience for it in Chicago was white. The original New Orleans Dixieland Jazz Band were all white. True, jazz did start out as a pretty stiff two-step kind of thing, and there is a lot of evidence black players loosened up the feel, but the jazz thing is as complicated as the meanderings of a stream through the Cajun swamps - the linear and royal progression of jazz is a critical construct far less valid than, say, the lineage from Bach to Haydn to Beethoven.

New Orleans is emblematic of the fertile confusion that surrounds the origins of jazz. Spanish, Cuban and Caribbean influences spiced up an already spicy mix.

Blacks and whites both had a significant share in the origins of jazz in new Orleans. It is unfortunate that more tangible resources are not shared more equally between black and white, but this is in line with the history of America. Katrina has simply taken a knife to the flesh and revealed what, really, we all knew was lying underneath.

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