Trigger warning: proceed and you’ll hear Allan Browne’s voice.
Friends, the third Browne – Haywood – Stevens album is getting closer. I have a shortlist of items from which to select the final playlist, and it may in fact be a double album because we have so much stuff, but please know it’s on its way.
The Melbourne International Jazz Festival has just released its program for this year, and features an event called ‘Celebrating Allan Browne’. A nice idea, I guess, because yes we loved him and yes we remember him. But it’s a very, very small fraction of the number of people who played with him, and I have to say that the memorial concert given in his honour in September 2016 was a far better way to go about it. Lots of us played, and there was traditional and modern jazz, representing far more areas of his musical interest than merely the modern, and it felt that even in his absence he was properly represented. Why not put us all in the Sidney Myer Music Bowl and really celebrate him? Anyway.
Part of the process of getting our track listing together for this album is listening to what Al said on the gigs where we played together. His raves are famous, and I’ve given some of them before , and as I said there they came to identify his live performances for some people just as much as the music that was played. We want to include some of his talking among the chosen pieces, so here is a sample.
Al’s extraordinary gift for bullshitting, and his superb sense of the ridiculous, as well as his wide and deep reading, all contributed to these raves. Jeff Kennett came in for a beating frequently, as he was state premier at this time; sometimes certain friends had come to hear us and they would be somehow wound into the discourse. One never knew where things would end since detours, while expected, were totally unpredictable.
We may or may not use this particular selection, which comes from Bennetts Lane on 7 December 1998, I don’t know. There are, in fact, some 101 items from which to choose, and they range in duration from 0:27 to 4:51. This one was actually edited because Al talked a lot more about Peter Bayerer and I’ve no way of knowing how he’d feel about this. I am finding hearing Al’s voice both consoling and a bit heartbreaking; the reminders of the time we spent together are however marvellous and that time is treasured forever.
30/viii/2025