Washboard Shakers - May 2003 Page 2
During the 1940s a group of jazz musicians and enthusiasts pioneered an extraordinary revival of traditional jazz in Australia Centered in Adelaide and Melbourne, they were deeply involved in radical politics and modernism in the arts. Their adoption of a genre ofjazz which had been played in New Orleans and Chicago in the 1 920s, was a part of a wider rebellion against what they considered to be a parochial nationalism in the Australian arts. This revival of traditional jazz was not merely derivative; it was a creative outpouring ofjazz with a uniquely Australian flavour, and the originality of the music was largely due to the compositions and arranging of Dave Dallwitz. Dave Dallwitz was born on October 25, 1914, in Freeling, South Australia. He began to learn the violin at nine years of age and, at fifteen, his interest in jazz was first wakened by his cousin, who played him a recording of the jazz classic Mississippi Mud. At the age of sixteen, he began teaching himself to play jazz on the piano. In 1936 at Teachers College he first heard Duke Ellington's recordings of Mood Indigo and Black & Tan Fantasy, and it was Ellington's music, and the music of Jelly Roll Morton, which were to significantly influence Dallwitz's later jazz compositions. While at College, he produced and performed on his piano his first serious piece, Betting Shop Blues. After graduation, Dallwitz was an art teacher in secondary schools for some twenty five years. In 1942 he was elected President of the Contemporary Art Society and in 1963 accepted a position as lecturer at the South Australian School of Art, which he held until his retirement in 1974.
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© Roy Spence 2002