Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Doo-Wup Doo-Wup Doo-Wup Doo-Wup - John Sangster (1980)

Here's a lesser known release from the later career of Urban Bowerbird patron saint, John Sangster. This is one of a handful of releases on Sangster's own 'Rain Forest Records' imprint, put out in the early eighties - Peaceful being another. Expect more of Sangster's idiosyncratic, mischievous, trad-influenced jazz played by the likes of Tony Gould, Ian Bloxsom, Errol Buddle, Graeme Lyall, Len Barnard and Bob Barnard.  

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Australian Jazz Quintet + 1 (1957)

The Australian Jazz Quintet (also confusingly known as The Australian Jazz Quartet) were an old-school cool jazz act that achieved success both in their homeland and in the United States throughout the 1950s. There are some familiar players in this group with Errol Buddle (bassoon and sax) going on to a prolific career, often playing with Don Burrows et al and Bryce Rohde (piano) becoming a significant jazz composer. The addition of bassoon, flute and vibes to the established jazz format of piano, bass, drums and sax made the band stand out at the time and lead to national tours and television appearances in America. 

The A side of this LP is entirely taken up by the tremendous Jazz In D Minor Suite, written especially for the group by Bill Holman. The flip side is composed of shorter, more conventional pieces which are all impeccably played by the quintet (+1). 

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The Trio Orfeo at La Taverne (~1965)

I picked up this gem at the Winchelsea op-shop a couple of years ago. In the past I may have skipped past a release like this, but I had recently heard and very much enjoyed RareCollections' 'Australounge' podcast, featuring music from the house bands of Australian establishments of the sixties and seventies. The Trio Orfeo were a group of Greek musicians who had relocated to Australia and during the sixties were enjoying a residency at Sydney Restaurant, La Taverne. 

As is described in some detail in the aforementioned podcast, these stints as a house band often resulted in the pressing of records so the group could make a little extra money and the diners could have a souvenir of their experience. The playing and harmonies on this LP are excellent and the song choices are generally fantastic, incorporating Greek folk tunes and some nice surprises such as the exotica standard Adventures In Paradise. Inevitably there is a version of Zorba The Greek and for some reason the trio plays The Mexican Hat Dance - which I'm sure says something about Australia's difficult relationship with racism although I have no idea what. 

I love the sound of The Trio Orfeo and the feeling of being in a 1960s Sydney restaurant, however a contemporary critic said that one of their later LPs made them want to turn their record player off and described the group as "play[ing] inoffensive nightclub music"! No accounting for taste, I suppose.

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A synth soundtrack for the Australian environment: Aurora Australis - Bronzewing (2015)

I love conceptual synth albums from the seventies and eighties, particularly those which attempt to evoke or soundtrack the natural world. In recent years I have been inspired by Vangelis's L'Apocalypse des animaux and Soil Festivities, Joël Fajerman's botanical soundtrack L’Aventure des plantes and of course, Andrew Richardson's conceptual flute and synth oddity Expanse. These days my focus is increasingly on my homeland of Australia. Apart from that last record, where are the conceptual synth experiments from the seventies and eighties celebrating the unique Australian environment? 

There are a few examples. Rob Thomsett's legendary Yaraandoo comes close, but is light on the synths and more of a prog rock freak out. The didjeridu-lead impressionism of Gondwanaland is closer to the mark - creating native Australian soundscapes with didj, synths and field recordings. But beyond these few, there's not much out there in the way of Antipodean, synth-washed nature concept albums from the seventies and eighties.

So, I decided to make one myself! Aurora Australis is the debut album by Bronzewing, combining synthesizers, a little guitar and field recordings that I have recorded myself during my naturalist wanderings in Victoria and Queensland. There are also hints of oud, soprano saxophone and one composition written for and played by the Federation Bells - an automated carillon on the banks of the Yarra River in Melbourne. 



You can stream the album and download it at https://bronzewing.bandcamp.com

The Selling Sounds of the Seventies: Sonic Design - Bruce Clarke's Jingle Workshop (1970?)

As I’ve written previously, I think that ‘incidental’ music such as advertising, television soundtracks and the like is far more evocative of our past than the pop hits that are generally believed to fulfill this role. Don’t get me wrong – I love old pop music – but it gets continually reused by later generations, symmetrically enough often for advertising and soundtracks, and this reappropriation strips the music of its original context and it becomes part of the sonic canon to newer generations. Not so for the advertisements. Ad music is created, used and then forgotten all within a very short amount of time. It is here that you can experience a real time capsule and listen to what the past really sounded like.

Sonic Design by Bruce Clarke’s Jingle Workshop is one such time capsule and a remarkable one at that. Sonic Design is intended as an advertisement of the advertiser’s advertising work. It’s an LP length mixtape of the Jingle Workshop’s existing jingles, campaigns and examples of what they can do in the recording studio. Put this on in your car as you drive down the street and you will swear you are actually travelling through late 1960s Australia.

The Jingle Workshop was a production company helmed by Bruce Clarke – a talented and diverse performer and teacher – and which produced “3000 odd credits for television ads and programmes as well as film soundtracks produced for local and international markets”.  There were apparently a number of similar promotional records produced by the Jingle Workshop, but Sonic Design is the most common, in my experience.

The narration is a bit naff, in that peculiar late-1960s way, but the music still sounds great.

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This Rugged Coast Soundtrack by Urban Bowerbird (197?)

This Rugged Coast was an Australian documentary series that followed Ben Cropp and his team as they traveled around Queensland's Coral Sea  in the 1970s - like a cross between The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau and Ron & Val Taylor's Inner Space. I discovered it by accident a few years ago while watching late night tv and got so excited by it, I wrote a number of blog articles remarking on its amusing anachronisms and my genuine fondness for the show. As I described the program at the time:

The crew is lead by Cropp perpetually standing alert at the helm in nothing but skimpy bathers and a beard, smoking a pipe and continually lifting his binoculars skyward and scanning the horizon for anything film-worthy. The watery, blue depths are his domain and he presides over them like a tanned Antipodean Neptune. He is joined by Hal the fearless sea-snake expert with a perplexing accent and thick-rimmed glasses, a crew that seems to consist mainly of beach-belles in bikinis (it wasn't clear at first what their capacity on-board was, but Lynn was credited with 'sound' so I can only assume the other girls are equally technically equipped), guys with beards who look like they know a thing or two about boats and of course the ship's cat, Skipper. In tonight's episode, our crew are venturing around a treacherous maze of coral reefs called 'The Coral Labyrinth' (the name is repeated at every opportunity by the voice-over guy who pronounces it 'Lab-ee-rinth' with a faintly rolled 'r'.)

Like all good underwater documentary shows, the drama on  This Rugged Coast is constantly underscored by music. I asked James Pianta of Votary Records, about the source of this music back in 2011 and he said; 

"I actually spoke to Ben Cropp a few years back about releasing his soundtrack music, he was less than interested.

Although he did tell me that he uses library music. This is problematic as unless the original cue sheets exist (they never do) it becomes really hard to source all the tracks let alone licensing."

So, I took it upon myself to piece together a soundtrack by ripping the audio from the DVDs. Most of the audio comes from The Coral Labyrinth episode mentioned above. There is the unavoidable presence of narration and dialogue from the program over the music that, at first bothered me as being 'messy' but which I now rather like as it truly recreates the atmosphere and the ambience of the show.



Now, here's a challenge. All of the music on this soundtrack is sourced from library records - does anyone recognise any of these pieces and can you identify them?

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Australian bush soundsdcapes: Various releases - Carl & Lise Weismann, Harold J. Pollock (1964 - 1970)

This post has been written by guest blogger, Roger Close.

Demand for album-length recordings of field sounds is not what it once was. In the mid-twentieth century, though, long before smartphones could summon up any bird-call in seconds, there seems to have been a thriving market. This suite of five EPs from the 1960s and ‘70s (packaged with slim hardback volumes by The Jacaranda Press) brings together a splendid range of field recordings from the Australian natural environment. The earliest two records, Australian Bird Songs (1964) and Australian Bush Sounds (1966), were recorded by Danish couple Carl and Lise Weismann during a ten-month traversal of the continent in 1957. Zoologist Carl Weismann was one of the pioneers of ornithological field recordings, having collecting bird calls for Danish radio as early as the 1930s. However, it was the popularity of their ‘Singing Dogs’ novelty records that financed their Australian tour. Vocalisations on these two albums are presented without a narrator: the interested listener can follow ornithologist Alan Keast’s extensive written commentary. However, the calls are sufficiently distinctive that it’s easy to keep in step with the track listing. The later three recordings, ‘Menura—The Lyrebird’ (1967), Bird and Animal Calls of Australia (1968) and Voices of the Australian Bush (1970) are the end-result of thirteen years of outback travel by of one of Australia’s leading wildlife photographers at the time, Harold J. Pollock. Although these recordings also contain extensive notes, the subject of each track is also announced by Mr Pollock in a delightfully old-fashioned tone.

Nineteen species are included on Australian Bird Songs, all of which are captured clearly and with minimal background noise—perhaps attributable to the gigantic three-foot parabolic microphone reflector dish pictured on the back of the EP (wielded by Carl; his wife (“at this stage a new bride”) operates the portable reel-to-reel tape recorded slung over her shoulder). Recordings were made in a wide variety of remote environments. Both sides of this EP contain a mix of common and lesser-known (and more unusual-sounding) species, although they are frequently referred to by obsolete names, which might confuse modern listeners a little. Accompanying the black and white photographs, Alan Keast provides lively and poetic descriptions of each species’ calls, which are preceded by an informative discussion of the biological roles of bird song.

Additional material recorded during the Wiesmanns’ Australian expedition was released the next year on Australian Bush Sounds. Unlike their previous recording, this EP is not limited to birds, and features several mammals, amphibians (the Weismanns professed to be overawed by the incredible variety of frog calls on offer in this country) and even insects, a greater variety of calls that makes for more pleasant background listening. In particular, the far-off howling of a pack of dingos is very evocative, and one can only imagine how the two Scandinavian globetrotters felt as they captured this soundscape.

‘Menura—The Lyrebird’ is the only EP to focus on a single taxon. Most of the recordings are of two Superb Lyrebird individuals: a male, ‘Wanderer,’ in Sherbrooke Forest in Victoria, and a female, ‘Theresa,’ living near Sydney; the text gives detailed biographies, along with accounts of the natural history of the lyrebird. An anonymous Albert Lyrebird from Southern Queensland also makes an appearance. It seems this release was a tie-in with a now-forgotten documentary film of the same name, during the making of which Mr Pollock lived alongside his subjects for six months. (Pollock also made short documentaries about pelicans, brolgas, red kangaroos and koalas, all financed by the State Bank of New South Wales). The EP gives a terrific impression of the variety of calls and imitations that these peculiar birds are capable of—particularly mimicry of other bird species, although ‘Theresa’ does produce a fine imitation of a dog’s bark.

Bird and Animal Calls of Australia (‘animals’ here being synonymous with ‘mammals’) is the first instalment in this Jacaranda series to be printed in full-colour. The first side of the EP presents calls from a range of fairly common bird species, including the melodious Pied Butcher Bird, the curious but familiar Pied Currawong, and the less-commonly-heard calls of the Cassowary and Brolga. Side two is perhaps more interesting, focussing on mammal species. The male and female koala calls provide an amusing contrast, particularly the ‘courting’ vocalisations; we’re also treated to the sound of koalas fighting and to a baby koala, which is rather cute. More obscure ‘animal’ calls include the Squirrel Glider, Tasmanian Devils (which sound remarkably like feral cats) and Flying Foxes. The natural history of each species in included in the booklet, along with an extensive description of the technical hurdles of recording field sounds, should you wish to attempt your own. If you wish to go down the reel-to-reel tape route, the German-made Uher 4000 Report S is a “lightweight masterpiece of electronic engineering” (only 7 lb. complete with battery); this will no doubt make it easier to lug around your parabolic reflector and AKG microphone.

The final EP, Voices of the Australian Bush doesn’t include Mr Pollock’s announcements, but does cover 29 species of bird, both rare and common, accompanied by colourful descriptions and photographs. In addition to an updated guide to making field recordings, there is a portrait showing Mr Pollock brandishing his equipment.

Download - Mediafire.