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The Paramount Jazz Band, the Sydney Jazz Club  and Jazz History Writing

                                                           Daniel Hardie

     

 My story begins long before the formation of the jazz club,   during World War two in fact .  I described this in my 2011 Lecture  for the Bell Library Lecture  Series- entitled Buddy Bolden and me The True Story’:

   *When I was still at high school I began building radios - starting with the  inevitable crystal set and moving on to build one and two valve receivers. Before long I had a radio I could listen to, using a pair of earphones purchased at an Army Disposal Store. On occasions I listened to US Army short wave radio stations broadcasting popular music for their troops stationed around the world.  I recall hearing Frank Sinatra singing with a band on station KWID SanFrancisco.But the experience I remember most was when I was listening one night to the A B C . It was a program that included what was called a Battle of the Bands and it was promoted as a duel between old and new forms of jazz.

I had heard the word jazz and thought it had something to do with popular music, but here they were talking about Dixieland and Bebop. Then I heard a recording by the Graeme Bell Band for the first time. This was a revelation. I have no idea which band was representing the more modern style but the music played by the Bells spoke to me. This was a sound quite different from the popular music around at the time.”

It was the beginning of a hunt for recordings  joined  by   brother Don and culminated in the purchase of a clarinet  by me and for Don a Trombone.

When I was much younger I had learned the cornet in The Manly Salvation Army Band.  My cousin Jim Munro was also  a cornet player in that  band.. Some years later when I was  just finishing  University we formed a small group of local teen agers into a jazz group attached to our  local Presbyterian church.This group did not break any records but kept us occupied. 

At a celebration  the family conducted for my 21st birthday we were able to form a family band the three of us plus my father - who was  a professional drummer, and pianist Peter Davies from the Church group on piano and played Darktown Strutters Ball. 

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At that time, we were able to hear the real thing on Saturday Nights at the North Steyne (Manly) Life Saving  Club  where a jazz group led by Jack Parkes performed for dancing.

Meeting the performers

By this time I had attended the Annual AustralianJazz Festival at Ashfield where I had heard Bob Learmonth’s Band among others. Some time later we heard that Bob’s band was performing one Saturday Afternoon at the local Queenscliffe Surf Lifesaviong Club and our embryo band went to hear them. 

The discussion we had with them led to an invitation to play for them at the house of their pianist Bobby Cowle. We went and played Darktown Strutters Ball. 

After the performance Harry Harman tubist with the Learmonth band approached me and said he was considering forming a band. - I could be the clarinettist with Bob Learmonth on trombone and my brother offered to play banjo. 

Harry’s Band was Trevor Pepper trumpet, me clarinet and Bob Learmonth, tmb, Peter Towson piano and ingenue drummer Bobby Legatt; Don on Tenor banjo.
We began serious rehearsals at Forresters Hall. One day Harry told me that the band would be called The Paramount Jazz Band after the name he showed me printed on the toilet  fittings at the hall. 

After a number of performances for afficionado Ulik King in a garage in Petersham we were looking around for more a more permanent venue. 

The Jazz Club Format 

Around this time I had been reading about the Humphrey Lyttelton band in London and listening to their records and I noticed they used a jazz club as their regular venue.
During a business trip to Melbourne I encountered the Melbourne Jazz Club and was able to attend and see their format working with membership as the basis of the operation. To attend I had to become a member.’ 

This would provide us with a means to establish a club if we could find a venue. I suggested  this to  Harry Harman who became enthusiastic and we set about looking for a venue in Sydney. We saw rooftop halls and others at ground floor level but the one we were impressed with was a basement hall  in Martin Place in the premisses of the Real Estate Institute .We decided on that and Harry set about forming a committee led by City record shop proprietor Fred Starkey.The hall was booked.

             Above: Martin Place showing the location of the Sydney Jazz Club.

Trumpet player Trevor Pepper who was a soldier was moved to Wagga and Ian Cuthbertson took on the trumpet role and Jjimmy Roach took over the piano chair from study occupied Peter Towson. Bob Learmonth returned on Trombone.

The rest is History. We decided on a format that allowed other musicians to perform but the bulk of the program was for the newly formed Paramount Jazz Band. Dancing was encouraged and membership grew at the new Sydney Jazz Club.

 Here’s how the Club announces itself now:

 

The club was a great success - steadily growing an audience of devoted members.
A major delight  for me was the evening when Robyn my wife to be, appeared dancing in the Real Estate Hall. Soon we were engaged
and eventually happily married

                        The club has continued  and eventually outgrew the Martin Place basement and moved to the larger Ironworkers Hall in George street. What was initially a fortnightly event became a weekly occasion. The club  survived serious challenges  with a life of its own, presently conducting a series of jazz performances in a variety of locations in the city..

The Schism and a New future

My Brother and I parted company with the Paramount Band after an incident l broadcast  during the Australian Jazz Convention in Wagga Wagga in 1955.  During a National radio concert one evening I made an awful hash of an exposed break. When it was heard  on replay the band members laughed at me and made scornful comments. I angrily responded and left the Convention returning to Sydney. 

By then one LP series of recordings of the band had been made in a city recording studio.. However, a national record company,  wanted a recording for its Parlophone LP series and this was set down at their studio on the band's  return from Wagga. After the recording session Don and I were told  by Harry that we had to leave as we were performing a too vigorous form of jazz. Bob Learmonth was to take over the leadership and Harry would go to Graeme  Bell’s Band. As it turned out the first recording for  Parlophone  was not technically satisfactory so we had to return for another recording session performed with considerable emotional restraint. .This was not, in my opinion, as good as the version recorded before the  Parlophone sessions. My own  performance sounds strained.

Interestingly, commentators have listed its vigorous style as a positive feature of the PJB’s recorded performances - a feature I attribute to Harry Harman’s forceful tuba style that dominates the recordings. 

I did not continue performing in a regular band after that, though I made some appearances with a local Skiffle group based on Collaroy Surf Club. 

What I did do was to embark on a career as a historian (my major study at university ) first visiting New Orleans and producing The Loudest Trumpet: Buddy Bolden and the Early History of Jazz a work complementary to the biography of Buddy Bolden, the so-called inventor of jazz, by Donald Marquis (In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz) who Robyn and I met and had lunch with in the city.. He was encouraging and suggested a line of further research 

Since then, I have researched and published works on Early jazz including the recently published Historically Informed Performance of Early Jazz. Here’s an adaptation of the publisher’s account of me and my work: 

“ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

                                                 

Daniel Hardie started playing cornet in a boy's brass band at age 8, later played flute, then drum and bugle at High School, and after graduating in History and Psychology at Sydney University, played clarinet in the Paramount Jazz Band - the house band at the Sydney Jazz Club of which he was a founder member. He has a fascination for old boats and jazz history. He has been a member of the Royal Australian Historical Society and the Society of Australian    

Genealogists and a former member of the Australian Psychological Society. During the 1990’s he was a member of the Board of Directors of the Sydney Maritime Museum.(Now known as the Sydney Heritage Fleet).     

         He is the Author of                                                                         

The Loudest Trumpet: Buddy Bolden and the Early History of Jazz, 2000. 

Exploring Early Jazz: The Origins and Evolution of the New Orleans Style 20002

The Ancestry of Jazz: A Musical Family History, 2004. 

The Birth of Jazz: Reviving the Music of the Bolden Era, 2007. 

Jazz Historiography: The Story of Jazz History Writing, 2013 

Jazz and the Jazz Age: Searching for Meaning in a Word.,2020

Jazz and theBlues: A Remarkable Partnership, 2021 

Historically Informed Performance of Early Jazz 2026

Daniel Hardie has also published a number of works and journal articles in the field of Maritime History. He is a maritime painter and has exhibited paintings of heritage maritime subjects in Sydney and other major Australian cities. 

Since 2004 he has been Convenor and Historical Director of the Buddy Bolden Revival Orchestra dedicated to performance of music of the Elemental Jazz era (1897/1907) with authentic instrumentation.”

                                                In Search of Buddy Bolden’s Oeuvre 

  
            

                                         Above: The Buddy Bolden Orchestra ca 1908 

            With the writing  of The Birth of Jazz Reviving the Music of the Bolden Era, I established  the Buddy Bolden Revival Orchestra dedicated to performance of music of the Elemental Jazz era (1897/1907) with authentic instrumentation. 

Again my publishers aptly described the work: 

“Jazz is over 100years old. Conventional histories briefly mention Buddy Bolden but the actual circumstances of its birth are rarely described. Because the only recording made by the band was lost, it has been assumed we can never know how the band  sounded.The truth is that there were many witnesses to to tell the story. How did it sound? By patiently gathering information Daniel Hardie has revived the music and the Buddy Bolden Revival Orchestra was convened by him in 2004 to perform the music in concert. The story of the research and the concert performances is told in The Birth of Jazz Music Of the Bolden Era. Concert recordings enable the reader to take part through internet technology.” 

In the accounts of my works published in my  Bell lecture in 2011 I described the evolution  of my works after the publication of the Loudest Trumpet revealed the amount of data available:

 “The search for that information was to lead to two more books: Exploring EarlyJazz:The Origins and Evolution of the New Orleans Style published in 2002 that told the story of Bolden's career and the bands that followed him and The Ancestry of Jazz: a Musical Family History published in 2004 that described the many threads of American musical history leading up to the Bolden revolution. Since then I have been looking more closely into facts surrounding the birth of jazz itself. 

Did jazz suddenly appear in 1894 at the Globe Hall in downtown New Orleans when Buddy Bolden stood up and played the first blues for  dancing? What did it sound like? What is the truth about its immediate origins. I have been helped in this research by work carried out since the 1990's by other historians that has revealed much about the music of the time, at the    beginning of what has been called the ragtime era. In fact we are now able to understand a lot about at the actual performers of the time and some of the influences that surrounded Bolden in the last ten years of the 19th Century.”

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                                      The Buddy Bolden Revival Orchestra

Geoffrey Bull: Cornet and Vocal; Daniel Weltllinger Violin (Geoffrey Bull Cornet and Vocal; Daniel Weltllinger: Violin (leader); Paul Furniss: Simple System Clarinet; John Bates: Valve Trombone and Vocal; Paul Finnerty: Spanish Gutar; Stan Valacos: Bowed Bass Violin; .Anthony Howe: Side drum , Bass drum, and cymbal .

With the formation of the revival orchestra we were able to perform the music for jazz audiences. A programme of concerts followed in Jazz clubs and other establishments in Sydney, Canberra, Noosa (Queensland) and Mittagong in country New South Wales.Concerts were recorded and video copies produced allowing the production of broadcasts via the medium of Youtube:                                

    Two Youtube concerts are provided under the headings;

1. The Best of Bolden: Introducing The Buddy Bolden Revival Orchestra
2. Jazz Festival at Mittagong
3.  Individual performances are now sprinkled through the youtube
   channels allowing viewers access to performances of single tunes,
4.  CD versions were issued by Paul Finnerty’s Riff Raff Jazz label.
5. I must say I am impressed by the ability of television to disseminate performance cross international boundaries allowing viewers to participate in concert performances - to hear the music as it might have been performed in Bolden’s day and see the performances live.

At the end of 2005 I reviewed the evolution of the Bolden Revival Orchestra and wrote what probably my last book with the title Historically Informed Performance of Early Jazz including new information about the evolution of early jazz
Was Buddy Bolden the inventor of jazz or did it come from the West Coast or Cuba? or Chicago? What did the Cuban Contradanza add to the development of jazz?
I had hoped to launch the work at the Sydney Jazz Club but was not able to arrange it despite encouragement from the club officers. Sadly valve trombonist John Bates has passed away and a number of other members of the orchestra had moved away from Sydney.. We do have some options for replacement, so we may be able  to perform again some time.

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In writing the above I was able to consult the excellent History of the Sydney Jazz Club by Bruce Johnson.  My recollections of the formation of the club differ in some respects from his account.  My own absence from the  activities of the club after the Wagga Jazz Convention has meant that my own role in the establishment of the club has been underestimated in subsequent histories as Harry Harman assumed sole responsibility for its foundation and structure. My own recollection is that I played a significant part  in the choice of the Club setup as the format for the development of a market for our music and the selection of the venue. My own sudden disappearance from the scene has not been noted or explained in later histories. Recordings demonstrate that The Paramount Jazz Band was henceforth a different vehicle and Johnson describes Harry Harman’s growing disinterest in its future. As  I recall it he was already taking an interest in the historically significant Bell group as Graeme  Bell moved his operation to Sydney. The historian in me laments that my own concentration on other aspects of jazz history and absence from Sydney for a time has limited my understanding of the later story of the band that had meant so much for me and my brother. By the time I was working with the Buddy Bolden Revival Orchestra it was all in a dim past. I am grateful for those members and officers of the Sydney Jazz Club who have contributed to its survival.

                                                                    ___________________

Youtube Series 

My Fifth Book -Jazz Historiography - the Story of Jazz History Writing

The appearance of something called jass or jazz around 1915 caused a flurry of commentary in the press and musical journals seeking to define the music and explain its roots. In 1917 Herbert Osgood wrote the first history of Jazz.

Throughout the period of research and publication that led to the publication of my four works on early jazz history I was frequently confronted with the inadequacy of many accounts of jazz history and their distorting influence on perceptions of jazz during some 100 years of its existence. In the last chapter of The Birth of Jazz: Reviving the Music of the Bolden Era I expressed concern that there appeared to be a lack of interest among jazz historian critics in jazz historiography and its limitations, and noted that a number of recent writers had expressed similar sentiments. I was prompted to investigate why this was so.

A brief exposure to much of what has been written reveals deep divisions among jazz historians about the course of jazz history and even the nature of jazz itself. It is this tangled web of controversies that has formed our popular appreciation of jazz history. Untangling this web and identifying the threads that made up its conventional history is the business of Jazz Historiography - the history of writing jazz history.

My attempts to untangle this story led to the publication of Jazz Historiography: The Story of Jazz History Writing in 2013.

It is available at internet sites like Amazon. com in eBook and print formats

 

    Introducing my second book : 

Exploring Early Jazz: The Origins and Evolution of the New Orleans Style

  

                                                                                          Writer’s Club Press 2002 

During the research for   my first book The Loudest Trumpet: Buddy Bolden and the Early History of Jazz it became apparent that there was a need for a more comprehensive study of the musical environment in which jazz was born and the musicians and bands that contributed to its development. 

I soon found  that a considerable amount  of data was potentially available about the development of early jazz in the twenty years before the first jazzrecordings were published in 1917. This was to lead to the publication of Exploring Early Jazz: The Origins and Evolution of the New Orleans Style—a chronological account of the first 30 years of early jazz—2002.

The purpose of this work was to flesh out the story of the development of New Orleans Jazz between 1897 and 1927 and show how it related to the Traditional Jazz of 2001.

·        Part I describes the composition and activities of many New Orleans bands 

of the first thirty years of jazz in approximate chronological sequence. 

·        Part II comprises interpretive and analytic material about early bands and their musical performance derived from information in the sequential account. It also depicts, and evaluates, the events that shaped the life of New Orleans jazz, in order to describe, and recreate for contemporary readers, the musical and other elements that went into its development.

Here’s part of what reviewer Dick Pointon writing for the New Orleans Magazine had to say about Exploring Early Jazz:

“Unlike many so-called 'new' histories of jazz, this book gives an in-depth coverage of the roots of the music with reference to the many musicians and groups that are overlooked by the more superficial researchers and Hardie is to be commended for his assiduity…

It also provides the ideal primer for those unfamiliar with New Orleans jazz and explains how often fact versus fable can confuse one's view of the music, even though oral histories have been of the utmost importance in documenting it.” 

Exploring Early Jazz still sells and has been converted for eBook readers. It is available from most on-line booksellers including Amazon.com

 For More detail go to the Website:

 http://members.ozemail.com.au/~darnhard/EarlyJazz1.html

 

 

 

My First Book - The Loudest Trumpet

I intend to post information about my published works here  for the benefit of new viewers. Here’s the story of my first jazz history publication as posted on the Jazz History Writing Facebook group page -

 

 The Loudest Trumpet: Buddy Bolden and the Early History of Jazz

Although I had been a lover of history, and jazz, and had been a jazz musician, it was not until the late 1990’s that I began to take  an interest in jazz history research. 

What inspired me was the discovery in a local bookshop of a fascinating book - In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz by New Orleans writer Don Marquis. I was fascinated by Mr. Marquis’ diligent research into the history of a fabled figure I had long known as the first leader of a jazz orchestra. I decided to look further into the story, particularly Mr. Marquis’ account of the music played by Bolden and his contemporaries. 

I read what I could find on the subject but there was not enough I needed to know about it in local libraries. In 1997 my wife and I visited New Orleans and spent some time looking at the records at the Jazz Archive at Tulane University. With the assistance of Curator Bruce Raeburn and Alma Freeman, we looked into the information available about Buddy Bolden and his music. Mr. Marquis was kind enough to have lunch with us and made some suggestions about further research into the music.

I found that there was a lot information that needed to be assembled to make an account of the musical side of the story. By 1997 I had a manuscript I thought ready for publication but decided that I would be unlikely find a publisher for such a work.  A friend told me about the on-line publisher Writer’s Club Press, (now renamed iUniverse) that would publish your work internationally for a small charge, and market it.

I submitted the manuscript and it was published in 2000. Surprisingly It began to sell in small numbers and it continues to do so.

            

  “The Loudest Trumpet: Buddy Bolden and the Early History of Jazz summarizes Marquis work and gives an extended account of the music of Bolden and his contemporaries.

Here’s part of what reviewer, Joe Bebco, said about it in the Syncopated Times, after reviewing Don Marquis’ book:

 … “To get the rest of the story you’ll need to read The Loudest Trumpet by Daniel Hardie. The book can be seen as a sequel to or expansion of In Search of Buddy Bolden. The first chapters refresh the reader on the biographical details unearthed by Marquis, but the bulk of 220 pages are devoted to a richly detailed investigation of the musical environment around him, and an attempt to identify his true place in the history of jazz.

             …If you find the preceding paragraphs fascinating The Loudest Trumpet is a must-read book for you. Hardie has done his homework, he is familiar with all of the writers that have approached these topics in the past and cognizant of their biases and controversies. To put his own ideas in perspective, he discusses the ideas of Rudi Blesh, Gunther Schuller, Frank Tirro, and others. As a non-academic discussion of what makes New Orleans jazz what it is this book is hard to top.

Further details of the book and its content can be accessed at: 

  http://members.ozemail.com.au/%7Edarnhard/BuddyBolden.html