Bruce Johnson Currency Press, Sydney, 2000 244 pp. (illustrated; paperback), ISBN 0-868-19601-0, AUS$39.95

As Bruce Johnson notes in The Inaudible Music: Jazz, Gender and Australian Modernity, both academic research into and books about Australian jazz are rare. To demonstrate this, the bibliography in this book lists only four overviews, some discographic and bibliographic work, a handful of biographies, and a small corpus of academically focused texts. This is one of the ways in which Johnson's description of Australian jazz as "inaudible" is quantified. His response to this situation not only fills a gap in Australian cultural history, but takes jazz as a site of social construction and critique to expand on the thesis that Australian jazz was pivotal between the Wars in the development of Australian modernism. Following this, in the late 1940s through international appearances of Australian jazz musicians in Europe and Britain, Australian jazz is also shown as having an effect on musical developments outside Australia. To readers unaware of the development of Australian jazz since the 1920s, much of this questions accepted histories of Australian music, the influences on it, and its influences on other musics. It also offers something rare in depictions of Australian culture, a reading through deconstruction of the reception of a specific musical genre.

As these introductory comments indicate, this is a text that functions on simultaneous levels of discourse. In addition to theorizing about jazz in terms of mass culture in Australia, the cultural politics that surround it, and gender roles in periods of national conservatism, Johnson uses two case studies as lived examples of the social forces at play in Australian music. The first of these is based on his own interviews with Barbara James, a singer prominent from the 1920s to the 1940s. This places James in a period in which Australian cultural tastes were moving away from British/European ones to those influenced by American popular culture, particularly aspects of African-American-derived musical styles such as swing. Combined with the adoption of microphone singing, this allowed women performers like James access to levels of public notice through which gender roles in Australia were challenged and broadened. Concomitant with this cultural shift, and leading to tensions with it, was the continuation of gender restrictions in the world of art music, especially in the teaching of instruments and voice by female teachers to predominantly female students. That jazz was the musical style in which gender roles were questioned, and that this was mediated through technological development by which the gendered voice was privileged over accompanying ensembles, provides Johnson with the circumstances through which his interpretation of Australian jazz as social factor is expounded.

Johnson's second case study is the work of the Graeme Bell Jazz Band and their 1947-1948 tour to Prague and London. Johnson prefaces explanation of this tour by listing the work of other Australian jazz artists who have worked away from Australia--in this way positioning the Graeme Bell Jazz Band tour as one component of Australians' influences on the international jazz scene. This aside, the 1947-1948 tour is still an odd event in Australian music history. The band was to represent the Eureka Youth League, a communist-affiliated association, at the

World Youth Festival. Intended as a two-week tour, this extended to four months of recordings, teaching, and performances in 44 towns. After Czechoslovakia, the band moved to England, where they worked for eight months. The success of the band in Czechoslovakia is put down by Johnson not only to their musical ability, but also to a number of other contributing factors, some of which gave jazz sociopolitical meanings: the lack of a continuous jazz scene in Central Europe so soon after 1945; few American recordings in popular circulation; jazz as representative of anti-Nazi sentiment; the appeal of jazz to youth and subversive elements. In England, the band was the first international jazz group to perform for about two decades; as British citizens, the members of the band had no problems with work visas denied to their American counterparts. Their work in England is directly credited with stimulating an English jazz revival movement.

Alongside his main interpretative examples Johnson manages to include much peripheral information on Australian jazz history: issues of the multifaceted employment world of jazz performers in the days of dance palaces; ways in which the serious study of jazz entered universities and colleges; the work of prominent musicians; interactions between jazz and art music; and the effects of the influx of American servicemen and musicians during the Second World War on style and performance. Despite these factual asides, and the construction of jazz as "the primary musical signpost of the advent of Australian modernity" (169), there is criticism of ways in which Australian jazz continues to be marginalized and that much of its history remains unexplored. This acts as a means of introducing analysis of Australian cultural politics, especially at institutional and government levels. As Johnson comments: "in the context of Australian arts discourse, the level of attention paid to music as a way of mapping our culture is slight. And within that sparsely inhabited category, jazz has a negligible presence" (173). What has led to this are complex, involving reactions to types of popular culture, political manipulations of culture, and what Johnson calls the "aesthetics of exclusion" (175). While the time frame of Johnson's case studies ends around 1950, subsequent developments in Australian jazz that are briefly discussed indicate material worthy of a companion study. Considering developments in Australian jazz and Australian culture, Johnson's method of reading a musical genre for its social aspects might elucidate both.

Peter Dunbar-Hall

University of Sydney

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