I was researching a PhD because a scholarship had permitted me to defer any actual choice about what I was going to do and where I was going to do it. I wanted to do everything except become an academic. Write books. Play music. Read everything. Travel everywhere. But I was afraid of my own passion, and corralled it by accepting the scholarship and hiding out in the University of Sydney library. Serious budding academics were devoting themselves to literary theory and years of research to the exclusion of other interests; they weren’t hanging out for the weekly opportunity to play jazz with like-minded enthusiasts. And although playing with other musicians was thrilling, I knew the workshops weren’t the path to professional musicianship: serious jazz musicians were auditioning for the Jazz Studies course at the Conservatorium of Music. At this stage, a sense of purpose, a goal for my research, a vision for my life—or a boyfriend—might have helped.
Jeff, a sweet-natured bank teller, literally and musically speaking stood head and shoulders above the other amateur singers. A veteran of Freddy Wilson’s workshops, Jeff lived to sing jazz standards. Endlessly cheerful, he stood well over six feet tall and sported a mop of thick blond hair and a soft clear voice. He’d walk up Freddy’s unlit driveway at night, scat-singing as a warm-up exercise before class. Whenever I heard the line ‘Why not take all of me?’ floating out of the pitch-dark, I knew instantly it was Jeff and felt bad that my immediate next thought was No thanks.
One night towards the end of my first term, Jeff handed me a cassette tape. ‘It’s my demo,’ he said. ‘Have a listen and let me know what you think.’
Looking down, I saw that he had photocopied a black and white photograph of himself smiling directly at the camera and used it to line the cassette’s plastic casing. I pictured him in his lunch hour, a home-made tuna sandwich in one hand, lurking near the bank’s photocopier.
‘I thought maybe you’d like to rehearse with me sometime,’ he continued. ‘You know, get some gigs as a duo.’ Though flattered, for two mutually exclusive reasons I failed to picture myself performing in a suburban restaurant or shopping mall. The first: I was convinced I wasn’t remotely good enough to perform in a mall. Second, I had fancied myself playing my own compositions to a packed house at the Village Vanguard rather than jazz favourites at Chatswood Chase. But without making a choice, my fantasies of a creative professional life would remain just that.
Despite my reservations, a few weeks later I headed to Jeff’s apartment. It seemed appropriate that he lived in a suburb called Neutral Bay. Historically, Neutral Bay was one harbour in which foreign vessels could safely dock, and I felt few qualms about rehearsing there with Jeff. He welcomed me with a cup of peppermint tea and smiled constantly to put me at ease, which had precisely the opposite effect. I was no Madame Bovary. Instead of inventing piano lessons in order to meet my lover, I had abandoned years of classical piano lessons and chosen instead to rehearse jazz standards with a bank teller to whom I felt no flicker of attraction.
We warmed up for a few minutes before Jeff said, apropos of nothing, ‘Freddy thinks you’re a shit-hot piano player.’
I took a gulp of hot tea and a moment to digest. It was the first scrap of feedback I’d had about my months-long participation in the workshops, and it wasn’t what I’d expected. What did it mean to be ‘shit-hot’? The phrase sounded oxymoronic—not to mention moronic. Was this how real musicians spoke about each other? If so, I would have to toughen up my ears to the professional language of jazz musicians if I wanted to be taken seriously. Clearly I was spending too much time among the dead poets on the library shelves.
But I could neither truly picture myself as a professional musician—the late-night gigs and the lack of money, supplementing performance opportunities with wedding gigs and teaching—nor feel comfortable with the label amateur. The outside chance of playing professionally cast a shameful light on just playing for fun. Perhaps it was my father’s voice in my ear as a teenager, the self-made man urging my brother and me to make ourselves financially self-sufficient by the age of forty (however one was supposed to do that); or perhaps it was my mother’s voice, repeatedly insisting that I always have my own money separate from a man’s. Either way I was fixated on the necessity of having a ‘proper job’ even as I avoided the workforce with the postgraduate scholarship and scraped by living under my parents’ roof.
In a Peanuts cartoon strip, Lucy van Pelt asks Schroeder: ‘What happens if you practise for twenty years, and then end up not being rich and famous?’
‘The joy is in the playing,’ he says.
‘You’re kidding!’ says Lucy.57
Why couldn’t I learn Schroeder’s lesson? I would have discontinued my PhD and forged ahead with the jazz workshops, instead of the other way around. But Jeff and I never tried very hard to get a gig, and I stopped attending the workshops. Unlike Schroeder, I felt ashamed of my amateurism. Somehow I couldn’t simply enjoy being a competent pianist for its own sake. Playing solely for fun seemed pointless—especially when I had few job prospects and a dissertation to write.
31
AFTER THE INCIDENT WITH THE BARITONE, Alice stopped singing in public. ‘Mrs Lloyd let Mr Palmer put his arm around her!’ went the refrain around Yeoval district, my aunt Charlotte recalled, when the pair performed the duet ‘I’ll Walk with You’ at the annual end of year concert in a manner that the locals judged overly enthusiastic. It was the hair-trigger the Baptists had been waiting for ever since Alice Lloyd had arrived in their town
