On Local Scenes

I saw my friend Greta play a show a couple of weeks ago. It was an intimate jazz gig, a group of friends playing music together at Open Studio on a Saturday afternoon, and Greta had pulled together an eclectic mix of original songs and arrangements of other people’s tunes to fill in two sets. They covered a couple of classics – including a great version of a Joni Mitchell tune. They kicked the whole set off with a version of local saxophonist Julien Wilson’s tune Rebellious Bird.

A big part of the jazz tradition is re-imagining older works, often using them as a vehicle for improvisation, and covering other people’s work is nothing new – its part and parcel of being a musician. We learn to play our instruments by learning to play other people’s songs. Many people never get to writing their own music, and that’s fine – music doesn’t have to be original to be good, and there’s a lot of enjoyment gained from playing a song you love.

As a side note – the ’covers scene’ supports a lot of original musicians. Playing weddings and corporate events where we presented versions of songs that people know paid my rent for many years. Playing covers music is a living for many of Australia’s finest original musicians, but it often feels like the setlists are pretty US-centric. Other than a couple of classic Paul Kelly songs, the occasional John Farnham or INXS or Cold Chisel, most setlists draw heavily from music written and recorded elsewhere – there’s a bigger conversation to be had re supporting homegrown talent.

There’s been a slow and steady push over the last few years to redefine the Australian jazz scene. It’s an oft-repeated discussion topic that the Australian jazz scene borrows heavily from the American art-form, and that this is seeded widely by local university courses. Lecturers who learned from American jazz icons push American jazz to the next generation of students, who in turn pass it on to their students. The source material is rich – there’s a much stronger tradition of recorded music from the US, than there is here (blame the record lables, blame the population density?) – although in the last twenty years the local recorded scene has become much more prolific, and the records are available everywhere in digital format, which is a boon for exposure.

Part of the problem is the lack of written sheet music for local artist’s songs – there’s scores of books with leadsheets of old American tunes, but local repertoire requires either asking the artist for a copy of their composition, or transcribing it yourself. Worth noting there’s now an Australian Real Book, but still its so much easier to find a written version of a Metheny tune or a Miles tune than it is to find a Muller or Magnusson tune.

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I’ve got a band called The Backyard Banjo Club – it started as an optimistic attempt to play jazz standards, but quickly evolved into a mish-mash of original tunes, versions of old country songs, the occasional 12-bar blues and a very slight smattering of jazz. If I’m honest, my forte as a banjo player isn’t holding down complicated chord progressions, so I’ve chosen the path of both least resistance and greatest joy, and turned the project into a musical mutt of things I like.

One of the things I really like is local duo Lily and King – the kickarse stompy New Orleansey festival favourite. Since The Backyard Banjo Club started, one of the songs that has been a consistent part of our set is a cover of Lily and King’s Drinking Song. It’s a great song with all the relevant parts that make Lily and King so good – enthusiastic energy, a strong melody and really good tongue in cheek lyrics that are an absolute joy to sing. I love the idea that every gig we do we’re covering a local artist, and I make a conscious effort to talk about their band every time we play the song.

Seeing Greta play Julien Wilson, and playing Lily and King with the BBC made me think about the importance of celebrating our local scene. It’s a trope at this point that going to an open mic or a singer-songwriter gig you’ll get to hear a cover of Bob Dylan or Neil Young or The Beatles, but how often do you see local artists covering local artists?

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Australian youth broadcaster Triple J famously has a segment called Like a Version, where acts cover a song, and it gets broadcast across the nation and uploaded to Youtube to reach an audience of millions. I’ve got friends who’ve done Like a Version and that song becomes an integral part of their live set going forwards – so many people have heard their cover song that they have to play it on festival stages, their version becoming a part of the canon and furthering the original artist’s song. Of course a large part of that equation is that the artists generally pick a well-known song to cover in the first place, and hopefully do something inventive enough with it that the new version becomes iconic in its own way, but the idea of becoming known for a cover of someone else’s song is an interesting one (insert discussion of… Elvis? here).

There’s recently been a weird proliferation of mid to high tier Australian musicians forming supergroups in tribute to other artists – the Australian Rock Collective (members of Spiderbait, You Am I and Powderfinger) playing Led Zeppelin’s IV, or Lisa Mitchell and Eskimo Joe forming a Fleetwood Mac tribute, or even more recently – everyone in town getting together to do a series of sold-out 1500 capacity Taylor Swift tributes.

I get the reasoning – it’s a way to make a living, and lots of people resonate with those songs, but I’m starting to wonder how we shift the scene to be a more collaborative, more introspective thing. I’m not asking for local bands to form tributes to other local bands – there’s enough Cold Chisel and INXS tributes around, but I’d love to go to local gigs and see artists having a crack at playing songs written by their friends, or other people on the local scene. And I’m not talking Somebody That I Used to Know, even though it’s a cracker.

I think there’s possibly a sense of fear in the local community around covering local artists. It’s easy to smack out a version of a Bob Dylan song and if it’s not quite like the original its fine cause we’re so far removed from source material. But doing a version of a song by someone who lives down the road and lives in the scene and has physical tangibility possibly feels like stepping on toes – and I’m wondering how we reshape this and embrace good songs by good people who happen to live in our city.