Australian Jazz. 1920s-40s Dance Bands – Phantom Dancer

My passion for jazz and swing from the 1920s, 30s, 40s at age 3 when I first saw Louis Armstrong on TV playing a cornet solo, just him, his cornet, and his white hankie.

Now, I’m Australia’s only authentic 1920s-30s singer playing festivals including Sydney Festival, Art & About, hotels and private events.

My weekly radio show, The Phantom Dancer, is a non-stop mix of swing and jazz from live 1920s-60s radio and TV heard on 107.3 2SER Sydney and 30 radio stations across Australia – and online.

Kate Dunbar, a blues and jazz singer told me that Joan Clarke, a former dancer at The Booker T Washington Club, a recreation club for US Black Servicemen in Surry Hills, was trying to raise money to have a plaque commemorating the club attached to the building that housed the club.

Joan had written a book about her years there called All On One Good Dancing Leg. I said I’ll approach ABC Radio about making a half-hour documentary, I’d already made two others, one about the German Swing Youth in the Nazi era, and one on Body Scars and the Skin Ego, and that I’d donate the fee to the cause.

DANCING LEGS

The ABC gave me the green light, and Joan introduced me to Aunty Pansy Hickey who danced at the club in her mid-teens.

Pansy then introduced me to Aunty Christine Hinton who also danced at the club in her teens and met her husband there. She remembered dancing to a piano accordion trio at a hall in Oxford St then running to the Booker T. where women guests were given a corsage, she was introduced to potato salad and dancing where women where thrown in the air.

Social dancing in Australia at the time was very much under the guidance of English dance teachers and New Vogue dancing: the barn dance, waltzes, foxtrots, quicksteps all strict tempo and strictly regulated as to what order songs were played was the go.

Pianist, Jimmy Somerville, noted that very few of the black service personnel were into jazz but apart from jitterbugging they were very much into slow drags so that the band would play Honeysuckle Rose for as long as an hour and when one female dance partner got tired, the soldier would ask another.

AUSTRALIAN JAZZ

Sydney had a lot of small bands, trios and quartets, that played for new vogue dancers in suburban dance halls across Sydney like Keatings above Newtown Railway Station. I remember the Albert Palais in Leichhardt still had its pink, scalloped band shell on the stage when I went there as a kid in 1970.

The standard of jazz musicianship in Sydney was high, trombonist Frank Coughlan and clarinettist Abe Romaine had played around the world, a 16 year old Don Burrows played at a Sydney club, Ray Price who played guitar and occasionally electric guitar at the Booker T. became double bassist for the Sydney symphony Orchestra. Jim Davidson lead the ABC Dance Band that broadcast across Australia. US bands visited. Artie Shaw played in Sydney during the war and sat in with a local all-women band he said were best local musos he’d heard. Bob Hope hailed local Roy Rene as one of the world’s greatest comedians.

Bumper Farrell policed Kings Cross with his boots and fists. There was 6pm closing and sly grog shops run by friendly gangsters. Romano’s was the smartest dining out spot in Sydney, playing host to socialites, politicians, and Hollywood stars. Princes in Martin Place regular ignored state liquor laws.

POETRY

The poetry of Kenneth Slessor sums up Sydney life in the 30s and 40s.

At that time indigenous singer Georgia Lee got her start singing for US troops in Queensland. She went on to an international career singing with Duke Ellington, Geraldo in London and Nat King Cole on his Australian tour. Nellie Small recorded in the 1950s. On the B side of one her records was Torres Strait islander singer George Assang who made Australia’s first rock’n’roll record in 1955.

BODGIE

A youth tribe grew up in Sydney and other cities imitating the visiting Americans. The Bodgies and their female Widgies dressed American, hung out in places like Wynyard railway tunnel looking sneering, and danced wildly to jazz whether swing or the dominant improvisational jazz in Australia post war, trad. And the way they wore their hair, you couldn’t tell who were boys and who were girls! And that was the Sydney Nellie knew.