Vince Jones on an Australian approach to jazz

It’s not often we get an Australian jazz singing legend on Streets of Your Town, but we are lucky enough to enjoy that on today’s episode.

Vince Jones is well known not only in this country but around the world as one of Australia’s most respected jazz musicians.

As he describes it, jazz seduced Vince from his earliest days.

“Yeah, jazz—it’s smitten me. I became smitten when I was quite young,” he says.

“I had no choice. My dad was a jazzer, my Mum’s a jazzer, we’re all jazzers in the family.”

He tells us how the love of his craft started young, in the lively but little known jazz surrounds of Scotland.

“I was born in Scotland. I was born in Paisley, just outside of Glasgow. My Dad was a brass band man. The Scots are Jazz mad and they loved all the great black musicians of Duke Ellington and Count Basie singing,” he says.

"When I was growing up, there was a lot of jazz on the radio and it was the sort of post bee-bop era. And my Dad would listen to the Scottish radio and it was always Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong.

“My Dad had a big band playing that sort of music. He actually recorded it, and all the fellas in the band would come around Saturdays.”

His memories of those influences are vivid even though the family moved to Australia to Wollongong when he was ten.

And now after half a century of performing, and a lifetime of loving music, many would take the opportunity to hang up their hat for a while. But Vince is gladly still on the road, performing and creating his distinctly Australian take on jazz music.

“The American guys always, they would say to me, you have not just jazz, you’ve got sort of soul music and folk, Celtic folk. There’s all sorts of colours in your music,” he says.

“And Aaron Goldberg (American jazz pianist) said to me, we can’t do that in America. We have to just stick to one thing and work through that. And what he said, he found it refreshing that we had all these influences in our music.

“That’s what you can do in Australia. That’s where a song should come from. I didn’t make it up. It’s part of my life, and then they’re the ones that stand out too. They’re the ones that last forever. If you sit down and try and write a song about someone else, it’s never as good, I don’t think.”

He’s even hopeful of releasing a new album later this year. It’s important to Vince that his creativity keeps flourishing, and that keeps the long time members of his band fresh too.

“We’ve written it all. Matt [McMahon—musical director and pianist] and I have written all the songs and the lyrics. It’s just two songs I have to get the lyrics together,” he says.

“I was brought up in a family where everyone sang and played. My Dad was constantly playing piano, and so my brain’s full of melodies. So I’m actually looking for lyrics that are floating around to come and marry the melodies that I’ve had in my head. So I’m kind of hoping that some nice ones will come the next few weeks.

"I’m in a perfect position having a band that I can take on the road and before the show we can rehearse up one or two new songs and away we go.

“I feel that it’s crucial for an artist to persist writing and not just rely on a really creative spurt in their life because music’s designed, I feel, to unite people.”

His strong social justice stance comes through in much of his material, including a recent song he penned on Julian Assange.

“I really admired Julian for taking the risks that he did, the courage of the man,” he said.

“I think that music, we limit it way too much looking for a simple theme and a dance kind of groove. We make it innocuous if we’re not careful.

“So we have to sort of experiment and take risks and take the music to places that people go, ‘Whoa! Really?’”

While international success has beckoned a few times, Vince reflects and feels he had to sacrifice too much to do it and so let those opportunities pass.

“I was touring Germany all throughout Europe every year for about five years. And then I was starting to crack it in America, actually hit the charts with a record called One Day Spent,” he says.

“But then I started doing their festivals and every festival I played at was either run or controlled by an alcohol company, tobacco company, or some sort of drug company.

“And I thought, oh no. And I did it for five years and it was, I think if you want to work in Europe or America, you really, you have to live there. The tyranny, it is a long way away.”

Keep an eye out for Vince as he travels around Australia doing gigs—you can see track of dates by following his Facebook page.