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Thursday 25 July 2013

The Write Advice 035: MAHMOUD SAEED


In my opinion, writing about torture is the best way to eliminate such barbaric practices: the harsh treatment of prisoners and even the mistreatment of ordinary people. Reproducing these crimes in art will highlight the ugliness, but most writers flee from this kind of creativity, because describing the suffering of others is very difficult.  Not every writer can expose it.  Writing about what lurks in the shadows is easier than writing about the real horrors of this life.

Finding the Needle in the Haystack (November 2012)



Use the link below to read the full interview with Iraqi novelist MAHMOUD SAEED:

 

http://arablit.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/iraqi-novelist-mahmoud-saeed-finding-the-needle-in-the-haystack/

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 
The Write Advice 025: SALWA BAKR

 
The Write Advice 031: JANA EL HASSAN

 
Poet of the Month 008: MOHAMMED BENNIS

   

Thursday 18 July 2013

J is for Jazz 007: GRAEME BELL


GRAEME BELL
c 1947



 

You are the Australian, you're making the music, you're putting the band together to make the music, and to make a band sound. And then what comes out then, the other endalmost unbeknown to you, is an Australian sound. 
 Talking Heads 
ABC TV –– 21 August 2006 





 

The first Australian performance of the strange new music known as 'jass' or 'jazz' took place on 15 June 1918 at Fuller's National Theatre on Castlereagh Street in Sydney.  The featured performer was an English 'lady baritone' named Belle Sylvia, backed by a quintet led by a North American violinist named Billy Romaine who had been working the city's thriving variety circuit ('variety' was the British and hence the Australian term for vaudeville) since 1912.  A reporter for The Sun newspaper wrote that '…the gay quintettecaused a riot with the audience' but it would take nearly another thirty years for Australia to produce its first fully authentic homegrown jazz superstar.

 

His name would be Graeme Emerson Bell.

 


FREE MAN'S BLUES
GRAEME BELL & HIS AUSTRALIAN JAZZ BAND
GRAEME BELL (piano); ROGER BELL (cornet); 
ADE MONSBOURGH (valve trombone, vocal);
DON 'PIXIE' ROBERTS (clarinet); JACK VARNEY (banjo); 
LOU SILBEREISEN (bass);
DAVE CAREY (drums) 
Recorded in London 
May 1948  



 
Bell was only three years old, living in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond with his parents –– his mother was a well-known contralto singer, his father an amateur actor and variety performer –– when the exciting Ms Sylvia and her band took the stage in Sydney that night.  His first exposure to jazz came courtesy of his younger brother Roger, a self-taught drummer (and later cornet player and vocalist), who was at that time a student at Scotch College in Hawthorn – the same school where the elder Bell had excelled at sport and art before leaving in 1929 to take a job as a clerk in an insurance office.  Roger and his clarinet/trombone playing friend 'Lazy' Ade Monsbourgh needed a pianist to flesh out the lineup of their newly-formed jazz band and persuaded the classically trained Graeme to join them.  'Eventually,' Bell remembered in a 2006 television interview, 'I got to like it.  But I never imagined it would be my profession.'

 
By the end of 1935 the group was playing regularly for dances and had become the featured entertainment in some of Melbourne's most popular nightclubs.  Bell still considered music a hobby, however, and dreamed of making a name for himself as an artist, only abandoning this dream when he realized that working as a paid musician would also allow him to supplement his meagre earnings as an insurance clerk.  He kept his day job at T&G Insurance for what he called '…nine boring years,' dividing his free time between playing with the band and taking art classes with painter Max Meldrum at the National Gallery of Victoria which allowed him to meet and befriend many emerging young Australian artists, among them Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd.  Despite his success as a musician, he never lost his early love of art and even ran his own Sydney-based gallery for a brief period during the 1970s.

 
In 1941 he fronted his own band – Graeme Bell's Jazz Gang –– but soon disbanded it to travel to the town of Mackay in central Queensland to entertain Pacific-bound Australian troops who were stationed there.  (He was disqualified from serving in the armed forces for health reasons.)  He married the first of his three wives in 1943 but his music career, plus the work he did for the army and the frequent absences from home that both occupations demanded of him, placed enormous strain on the marriage, which ended within a year.  Back in Melbourne by then, fronting yet another new band, Bell gained a weekly residency at the Heidelberg Town Hall and another at the Palais Royale pavilion located in that city's famous Carlton Gardens.  (Sadly, this beautiful Victorian building was demolished in the 1990s.)  Not only did playing these higher profile gigs expose the pianist to a larger audience, they also allowed him to quit his day job and led, within a few months, to him making his first recordings for the Ampersand label owned and operated by lawyer/jazz fan William Miller.  By the end of 1943 Bell's combo had also become the house band for the Eureka Youth League (which had formerly been known as the Communist Youth League), performing after its weekly meetings and at the various social and fundraising functions it sponsored.  In time, these performances became so popular that Bell asked the League's permission to start his own club-within-a-club which he named, with his usual panache, the Uptown Club.

 
The immediate post-war era saw Bell's career take another gigantic if unexpected leap forward when he and his band –– now re-christened Graeme Bell and His Australian Jazz Band and featuring his brother, Monsbourgh, Don 'Pixie' Roberts on clarinet, Jack Varney on guitar and banjo, Lou Silbereisen on bass and Russ Murphy on drums – were invited to perform at the World Youth Festival in Prague.  Although they had to run a raffle to help them raise their passage money, the now remarried Bell (who would also become a father for the first time while overseas) and his bandmates left for Czechoslovakia (via London and Paris) in 1947, playing the festival before touring the country and recording –– at the insistence of a fanatically devoted Czech fan –– for the classical Prague-based Supraphon Gramophone Company.  These recordings included original tunes by Roger Bell and Monsbourgh and one of the pianist's own compositions, the catchy and evocative Czechoslovak Journey.  To this day, many European musicians still regard the 1947 visit of the Bell band as the event which marked the rebirth of European jazz following the ravages of World War Two.



CZECHOSLOVAK JOURNEY
GRAEME BELL & HIS AUSTRALIAN JAZZ BAND
GRAEME BELL (piano); ROGER BELL (cornet); 
ADE MONSBOURGH (valve trombone);
DON 'PIXIE' ROBERTS (clarinet); JACK VARNEY (banjo); 
LOU SILBEREISEN (bass);
RUSS MURPHY (drums)
Recorded at Rokaska Studio, Prague 
September 1947



 
 

The band relocated to London in the winter of 1947, living for a time in the house of English trumpet star Humphrey Lyttelton (who once quipped to a friend that he '…had Australians like other people had mice').  Lyttelton was the leading light of the new British Trad Revival movement and, like him, his Australian house guests soon found themselves performing regularly in the English capital, performing live on BBC radio and starting their own club in Leicester Square where they played what they and their manager chose to promote as 'Jazz for Dancing.'  Although their so-called 'desertion' of traditional or Dixieland jazz for swing and a smattering of pop tunes saw them scorned by some jazz purists, their performances were received so enthusiastically by entertainment starved British audiences that they quickly came to be regarded as the hottest, loosest, most exciting band in London.  They combined playing to packed houses in their own club twice a week with a weekly engagement at the London Jazz Club and regular forays into the provinces where their music proved to be equally popular and a welcome antipodean antidote to the dreariness of life in socially and economically depressed post-war Britain. 

 

In February 1948 they were invited to return to Paris – a city they had visited twice before on their way to and from Prague –– where they entered the recording studio again courtesy of Charles Delaunay, friend, manager and future biographer of the already legendary Django Reinhardt.  The eighteen Paris sides and those they recorded following their return to London –– combined with what one English critic described as '…the gale of fresh air' their presence blew through the staid and perhaps overly reverential British jazz scene –– set the seal on their reputation as the most exciting thing to emerge from Australia since the cricket player Donald 'The Don' Bradman.  

 

They returned to their homeland in 1948 but were back in London in November 1950 to begin another tour.  As Bell himself explained:  'it went off like a rocket.  We were brought back again to Europe by a London firm of agents in 1950, and played all over the continent, too.  And that tour lasted till 1952.  During that period, we accompanied a black jazz singer, Big Bill Broonzy.  And that was a wonderful experience for us. That was in Germany [on 15 September 1951].'  Shortly after this tour, however, the original Australian Jazz Band band officially broke up, Roger Bell and Ade Monsbourgh striking out on their own while the pianist sailed back to Australia to form a new band which subsequently toured several Australian military bases in Japan and South Korea.  (The cold was so severe in Korea, Bell once reminisced to a friend, that the horn players had to thaw the spittle out of their mouthpieces over a camp stove before they could even think about trying to play their instruments.)
  

 


WAS LEICESTER SQUARE?
GRAEME BELL & HIS AUSTRALIAN JAZZ BAND
GRAEME BELL (piano); ROGER BELL (cornet); 
ADE MONSBOURGH (valve trombone);
DON 'PIXIE' ROBERTS (clarinet); JACK VARNEY (banjo); 
LOU SILBEREISEN (bass);
RUSS MURPHY (drums)
Recorded in London
May 1948



 
Bell's success and the constant touring needed to sustain it made it difficult for him to settle down to any kind of normal family life and, with his second marriage to Catherine Watson now showing signs of strain, he decided to base himself at least semi-permanently in Australia, settling in Sydney where he was soon being asked to write arrangements and back singers for various hotel and nightclub engagements.  He also found time to give piano lessons –– he was teaching seventy-five students a week at one point –– start his own record label Swaggie Records and become a concert promoter, booking the renowned North American cornet player Rex Stewart to tour and record with him as he would later do with old English friends like Humphrey Lyttelton.  He was also given the opportunity to interview his hero Louis Armstrong during one of the latter's three visits to Australia.  'I was invited into the VIP room by Channel Seven,' he recalled in 2006, 'when they were interviewing him, and the interviewer passed the microphone over to me and said, "Here, Graeme, you know more about this than I do."  Next minute I'm sitting down on the couch interviewing Louis Armstrong for the Channel Seven news.  Now, that is one of –– if not the –– biggest moment in my whole career.'    

 
The emergence of a second UK Trad Revival movement in the early 1960s, led by highly successful acts like Acker 'Stranger On The Shore' Bilk and Kenny Ball and His Jazz Men, prompted Bell to re-form the Australian Jazz Band under the new name of The Graeme Bell All Stars.  This threw the pianist into uncharted territory in some respects, making him a true bandleader for the first time instead of playing his usual role as its easygoing if high profile spokesman.  'With the first band,' he explained, 'Rogerand Ade Monsbourgh were really the musical leadersBut I was the nominal leader, and I inherited some of my parents' showbusiness ability to operate from the stage, talk to the audienceconduct the traffic.  But when I formed the All Stars, I was my own man.  And that was the creative period of my life, really.  And I learnt how to try and get the best out of musicians to produce a band and produce a sound.  My own piano playing became quite secondary to the whole thing.'  The All Stars would continue to perform into the 1980s, while Bell himself continued to play as often as he could physically manage to play, still delighting audiences at the age of ninety and beyond while consolidating his reputation as the grand old man of Australian jazz –– something that was formally recognized when the newly-instigated Australian Jazz Awards were officially named 'The Bells' in his honour in 2003.  His autobiography, which it took him five years to research and write, was published in 1988 with a full discography of his more than 1500 recordings compiled by his friend, the musicologist Jack Mitchell.

 
Graeme Bell died of a stroke, at the age of ninety-seven, on 13 June 2012.  While he may not be considered a groundbreaking stylist by some of the snootier members of the jazz press, he was beloved and respected as few musicians, jazz or otherwise, ever are in Australia or anywhere else.  His music may have been 'light,' 'cheerful' and even possessed of a '…happy Aussie outdoor feel' as he himself once described it, but it was never anything less than indicative of his lifelong passion for the sounds which had seduced him as a young man and then become his life's work.  The editors of DownBeat magazine probably provided him with a fitting epitaph when they wrote: 'Bell's is unquestionably the greatest jazz band outside America.'  While this is perhaps no longer the case, as the always modest pianist/composer probably would have been the first to agree, the statement assumes a new significance when you stop to consider that he'd never played a gig in the USA (due to problems with that country's Musician's Union) at the time it was made.  

 
'Many times in my life,' Bell told a journalist in 2004, 'I've thought it was time to withdraw a little and, other times, I've thought I should disappear altogether.'  I, for one, will always be grateful that he didn't surrender to these impulses.  Without his example to follow, it might have taken much longer than it did for Australian jazz to find its own unique voice and develop its distinctive sonic character. 
 

 
 
Biographical Sources:
 

 
'How Jazz Came To Australia', article by JACK MITCHELL published in the Sydney Jazz Club magazine The Quarterly Rag (2004?)

 
'Trailblazer Still Hooked', article by ANDRA JACKSON, The Age (3 September 2004)

 
Graeme Bell (1914-2012), obituary by HARRIET VEITCH, The Sydney Morning Herald (18 June 2012).

 
Graeme Bell (1914-2012), obituary by IAIN SHEDDEN, The Australian (14 June 2012)

 
Roger Bell (1919-2008), obituary by RAY MARGINSON, The Sydney Morning Herald (8 July 2008)

 
Big Walkabout in London, 1948-1951 liner notes by MIKE DURHAM (Lake Records LACD 166, released 2002)

 
The Historical Prague & Paris Recordings, 1947-1948 liner notes by PAUL ADAMS (Lake Records LACD 262, released 2008)

 
Wikipedia entry 'Graeme Bell' (unnamed author)
 

 
 
 
 
Use the link below to read more about the life and work of Australian jazz pianist and composer GRAEME BELL:
 
 
 
 
 
 
Special thanks to those who take the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.

 
 
 
 
 
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Last updated 2 October 2021 §
 

Thursday 11 July 2013

Poet of the Month 007: ESTHER GRANEK


ESTHER GRANEK
c 1947


 

 

 

CONTRADICTIONS



 

 

They co-exist inside me.
Battling each other without being seen:

 

The past the present
The future and now
Illusion and truth
Gloominess and gaiety
Idiocy rationality
And the 'yes's' and the 'no's'
The love of my body
The disgust that it gives me
The facades that one creates
And what lies behind them
And the fears one swallows
The courage one spreads so thin
The desire to say 'Tut-tut'
And the demands of the struggle
And humanity and beastliness
And the gut and the head
Sensuality and virtue
The hidden and the exposed
Kindness and severity
Prudishness and vulgarity
The talker the stifled one
Bravery and fearfulness
And pride and spinelessness

 

Despite all that I am alone. 


                                                     
                                 
 
                          

Ballads and Reflections
  
(1978)

 
 
 
 
 
 
Translated by
  
BR
 
 
 
See below for original French text





 

 

 

Esther Granek was born in the Belgian capital of Brussels on 7 April 1927 and died in Israel on 9 May 2016.

  

Forced to educate herself because the racial laws implemented by the occupying Nazis forbade Jews from attending Belgium's schools and universities, Granek moved to Israel in 1956 where she worked for thirty-five years as a secretary at the Belgian embassy in Tel Aviv.  She published five collections of poetry – the last of which, titled Synthéses, appeared in 2009. 

 
 
 
 
To my knowledge, the work of Belgian/Israeli poet ESTHER GRANEK has never been published in English translation.  
 
 
 
 
Use the link below to read Contradictions and all her other wonderful poems (alas, only in their original French):
 
 
 
 


 

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 002: MARIANNE MOORE

 

 
Poet of the Month 003: WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

 

 
Poet of the Month 009: JULIAN TUWIM

 





CONTRADICTIONS





Ils cohabitent en moi.
Se battent sans qu’on le voie:


Le passé le présent
Le futur et maintenant
L’illusion et le vrai
Le maussade et le gai
La bêtise la raison
Et les oui et les non
L’amour de ma personne
Les dégoûts qu’elle me donne
Les façades qu’on se fait
Et ce qui derrière est
Et les peurs qu’on avale
Les courages qu’on étale
Les envies de dire zut
Et les besoins de lutte
Et l’humain et la bête
Et le ventre et la tête
Les sens et la vertu
Le caché et le nu
L’aimable et le sévère
Le prude et le vulgaire
Le parleur le taiseux
Le brave et le peureux
Et le fier et le veule…

 
Pour tout ça je suis seul.
 
 
 
 

                                                                         
Ballades et réflexions à ma façon
 
 (1978)






 
Last updated 26 June 2023
 

Thursday 4 July 2013

A Private Man (2004) by MALCOLM KNOX

  


Vintage/Random House Australia, 2004

 

 

 

 

At 6.59pm on the second Tuesday in November, Dr John Brand, a gentleman in late middle-age with an unremarkable face and grey suit, came back up the hill with the sprung stride of the self-worthy and a biography under his arm.  His brain was a powersurging mainframe of permutation and strategy, calculating when to approach the door, what angle of entry, how to hold his head at what precise angle, whether or not to meet other eyes, how to bear himself, how to hide the ever-so-soft tremble in his neck.  Flushed with reward he came to the portal and, without hesitation, sure as a pastor entering his vestibule, he entered this shop that had no door.  These establishments never had doors –– the door was in a man's heart.



 

 

The Novel:  The term 'crisis of masculinity' has now become a common and widely used one in the Western world, capable of provoking earnest academic discussion or disbelieving laughter according to whichever socio-economic group — upper, middle or working class — you happen to belong to.  (Men who live in the Third World appear to share an almost universal immunity to the condition –– mostly, I suspect, because they're too busy fleeing wars and famines or slaving away in dirty dangerous jobs for minimum wage to support their families to have time to appear on chat shows or attend seminars devoted to televised discussions of the subject.  Ditto the elderly, the mentally ill, the physically disabled and the homeless –– none of whom are apparently viewed as being 'real men' by the mainstream media either in Australia or abroad.)  Genuine 'crisis' or not, there's a growing sense that being born male is not the easy, automatically taken-for-granted privilege that it used to be, say, back in 1970.  The damage being done to men's previously sacrosanct image of themselves as the dominant sex by anger, depression, failed relationships, social alienation and the inescapable presence of pornography is making it increasingly difficult for them to relate to the world, to each other and–most alarmingly of all from a species-propagating point of view––to women who are smarter, more successful and generally much better suited to life in the fast-paced internet age than significant numbers of their own sex appear to be.  

 

John Brand, a sixty-seven year old General Practitioner with a well-established practice in the once seedy but nowadays upwardly mobile Sydney suburb of Kings Cross, is one such 'man in crisis.'  Dr Brand has an addiction, but not to heroin or painkillers or alcohol.  His addiction is, in his eyes at least, far more insidious and morally corrosive.  His drug of choice is pornography–dirty magazines, X-rated movies and, to his combined delight and horror, the sexually graphic images that have suddenly become so easy to download from the internet. 

 

Pornography is an obsession that Dr Brand has managed to keep hidden all his life from his wife Margaret and their three sons Davis, Chris and Hammett––all grown men now who, in their various ways, are undergoing their own equally testing 'crises of masculinity.'  Davis' farcical marriage to his high-flying lawyer wife Lucy is clearly in trouble, Chris is struggling to maintain his tenuous position as the super-macho star batsman of the under-performing Australian Cricket Team while Hammett, estranged from the rest of his family as the result of his anti-social behaviour and psychosexual peculiarities, has become a successful purveyor of the same products his father finds so shamefully irresistible. 

 

John Brand's death––long expected by him due to the life-threatening heart condition he had also been keeping a well-hidden secret from his family––proves to be a catalyst for his sons, the unanticipated event which forces them to examine and confront their own demons and failings even as Davis, who is also a doctor and suspects foul play, slowly unravels the truth about their father's hitherto unrevealed sexual proclivities.  What Davis learns about their father––in-between arguing with the tired, pressured and perpetually pissed-off Chris, breaking up with Lucy, falling in love with his pretty young locum, and exposing his father's former medical partner as the greedy, money-grubbing bastard that he is––leads him inevitably to Hammett, the younger 'bad' brother who could never learn how to fit in with the rest of them.  

 

Hammett proves to be the key not only to understanding their father's troubled life, but also to making sense of the complicated and less than fulfilling lives of Chris and Davis themselves.  Far from being their father's opposite, Hammett turns out to be the son that John shares the strongest bond with, the son who taught him––and, in time, teaches his brothers––that confronting and accepting who and what you are is much healthier, in the long run, than living in psychologically damaging denial of it.  Abiding by rules that have been rendered irrelevant by a society where abstinence is now viewed as a worse 'sin' than devoting yourself to a life of continuous self-gratification is, in Hammett's eyes, the epitome of hypocrisy.

  

 

Vintage/Random House Australia, 2010

 

 

Skilfully shifting back and forth in time between John Brand's final few tormented days on earth, his funeral and its aftermath, and the very different yet oddly-linked lives of his sons, Knox creates a picture of Australian masculinity in the twenty-first century that's as unexpected as it is dark, troubling and, in the end, surprisingly positive.  Yes, these men have serious emotional problems.  Yes, they're unhappy, confused and dissatisfied.  (This diagnosis applies more to Davis and Chris than it does to Hammett, whose ability to accept himself makes him more mature than his brothers and, in that sense, more of a 'man' than either of them.)  It's the way the Brand boys face their respective problems––sex (and the lack of it), fame, marriage, sibling rivalry, divorce and intolerance––and how they choose to confront their issues rather than continuing to deny them that makes A Private Man such a rewarding, fascinating and, at times, poignant and slyly funny novel.  (The scene where Davis meets his perpetually busy wife Lucy––a woman he's never actually lived with so as not to 'give themselves a chance to tire of each other'––for coffee in a trendy Darlinghurst café for their postponed weekly catch-up is both hilarious and heartbreaking.  The chapters dealing with Chris' life as a formerly great cricket star on the comeback trail are also superbly handled, something I say as an unabashed despiser of what I consider to be the world's most boring game.)  If you want to know what it's like to be a white Australian male living in the post 9/11 world, trying to balance your 'blokey' side with your 'nurturing and sensitive' side, then you need look no further than Malcolm Knox's smart and engaging second novel.

 

 


MALCOLM KNOX, c 2010

 

 

 

The Writer:   Malcolm Knox was born in 1966 and briefly studied law at the University of Sydney before deciding to switch to journalism.  He also studied at Scotland's University of St Andrews, where his one-act play Polemarchus was successfully performed.

 

In 1994 he joined the staff of The Sydney Morning Herald as a cadet journalist.  He was the newspaper's chief cricket correspondent from 1996 until 1999 and its assistant sports editor from 1999 until 2000.  From 2002 until 2006 he served as the Herald's chief literary editor, during which time he revealed that North American/Jordanian writer Norma Khouri––author of the award-winning memoir Forbidden Love—had not in fact lived in Jordan since early childhood and had only visited the country for three weeks prior to writing what proved to be her largely fictional but widely-praised bestseller.  For his efforts in exposing the fraud, Knox received the 2004 Walkley Award (along with his fellow journalist/co-researcher Caroline Ovington) for excellence in investigative journalism.

 

In 2000 Knox published his debut novel Summerland, a penetrating study of the rivalries and buried tensions that drive, torture and divide two wealthy Australian couples.  The book, which was published internationally, won favourable comparisons with Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915) and F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and was described by The Times Literary Supplement as 'a compelling novel with a sinister undertow.'  

 

Bloomsbury Publishing (alternative UK title), 2005

 

 

Knox is the author of three other novels––A Private Man (2004), Jamaica (2008) and The Life (2011)––and eleven works of non-fiction, including several works about cricket, a short history of Australia and an exposé of the Australian jury system titled Secrets of the Jury Room (2006) which was based on what he experienced while serving as a juror on a murder trial.  The book won an Alex Buzo Prize for research and was later serialized on ABC Radio.  It remains one of the few books in the world that honestly attempts to examine what it is that juries do and how they really function.

 

He was named one of 2001's Best Young Novelists by The Sydney Morning Herald and has been the recipient of several prestigious Australian literary prizes, including a 2005 Ned Kelly Award for A Private Man (published as Adult Book in the UK) and a 2008 Colin Roderick Award for his third novel Jamaica.  In addition to being a regular contributor to the Australian news and current affairs magazine The Monthly he also serves as the author-selected Director of the Australian Copyright Agency.  

 

Malcolm Knox lives in Sydney with his wife and two children.  
 
 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read Lies, Truths and Other Mysteries, a short thought-provoking essay by MALCOLM KNOX originally published in Edition 16 of The Griffith Review:  


 

 


 

 

 

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Last updated 19 April 2023