My mother stood behind me plaiting my hair while I sat on one of the kitchen table chairs turned sideways, trying hard to stay still. I was about to attend my first live jazz concert with my father, who had bought us tickets to see the Jacques Loussier Trio perform on its 1976 Australasian tour. Mum preferred crooners—like Andy Williams singing ‘Moon River’—to the jazz instrumentalists we were going to see, and was staying home to look after my brother.
As usual, there wasn’t a single strand of hair on my six-year-old head in doubt of its place. Everyone had to be able to see my face. I never understood how my face was obscured by my hair hanging loose to my shoulders—I could see the faces of other girls with long hair very clearly. But the display of abundant hair, without any attempt made to control it, was deeply troubling to my mother. Tucking my hair behind my ears was insufficient.
‘Pull your hair back,’ she’d say to the parade of glamorous strangers who graced our television screen. At night, topping and tailing green beans into her giant silver colander while she watched, she would yell at actresses and newsreaders. ‘Look at that hair. It’s a mess. Why doesn’t she chop it off?’ Hair had to be secured with elastic bands, with braiding, with patience. Even on the rare occasions when I wore my hair down it was still partially up, its front locks restrained by a barrette that, as far as Mum was concerned, represented the only thing standing between her daughter and chaos. I was relieved these women couldn’t hear her; I was used to it but suspected others might find her opinions a bit extreme.
My mother wore her straight hair short but permed, in a style that required a maintenance visit to the hairdresser every Wednesday morning. But it never occurred to me to question why I had long hair, nor why cutting it was out of the question.
My father and I walked up the broad and shallow steps from George Street to the main entrance of the Sydney Town Hall. Inside, hundreds of women’s shoes clicked as they walked across the white marble floor, though my polished round-tipped Clarks made no sound. After ascending a staircase that led to the balcony, we sat about a third of the way down one of the long sides of the rectangular auditorium. I stood up to peer over the edge—our row was close to it—and stared at all the grown bodies filling the seats below us. I was short for my age and understood, as my father must have when reserving the tickets, that I wouldn’t see anything of the concert if I were trying to look over the heads of several hundred adults. On the stage I saw an enormous grand piano, a double bass lying on its side, and a drum kit shaped like a cresting wave. I thought of Schroeder and Snoopy’s combo.
The central dilemma of the Peanuts TV special Play It Again, Charlie Brown is whether or not Lucy and Charlie can convince Schroeder that ‘it’s all right to play some modern music’. Having secured Schroeder his first gig, Lucy is distraught when Peppermint Patty forbids him from playing Beethoven. Instead he’s to play with the ‘combo’, which consists of scruffy Pig-Pen at the drums, Charlie on the acoustic guitar, and Snoopy playing ‘walking bass’ by climbing all over the gigantic instrument. When Schroeder discovers the combo jamming on a bluesy syncopated number, he is so disgusted he mimes a gag reflex to the flummoxed Lucy, pretending to throw up. ‘I’ve sold out,’ he cries.
I had first heard The Jacques Loussier Trio Plays Bach during one of those musical Sunday mornings at home. On that album and many others, the French pianist used Johann Sebastian Bach’s compositions as the basis for jazz improvisations. I don’t think I had ever really listened to the music of Bach before I heard these improvisations. But I was far from alone in my enchantment with Loussier: by the time of the Town Hall concert, his trio had sold millions of albums and been touring the world since before I was born.
Depending on your point of view, Loussier either practised the worst kind of musical miscegenation—playing a white man’s jazz that bypassed the African roots of the genre via a long European detour—or he was a musical evangelist, spreading the love of improvisation and syncopated rhythm to millions of listeners who enjoyed it without knowing that improvising had been part of the music of ancient Greece, of Gregorian chant and medieval secular music, and a common and prized skill among European musicians for hundreds of years.
Today we know Johann Sebastian Bach as a prodigious composer, but in the first half of the eighteenth century he was regarded as an exceptional improviser. Beethoven, whose improvisations in performance were said to be more astounding than his printed compositions, wrote: ‘Real improvisation comes only when we are unconcerned [with] what we play, so—if we want to improvise in the best,
