Vale James Valentine

In the last week you may have read news of the death of Australian broadcaster, musician, and author, James Valentine.

I worked alongside James Valentine for over twenty-five years. As the Content Director at ABC Sydney, you aren’t meant to have “favourites,” but James was undeniably mine.

He was in a league of his own. His creativity meant you never quite knew what to expect from a broadcast, but you knew it would be brilliant. Beyond the talent, it was his generosity of spirit that made the station a better place. We were still debating how to make ABC Radio better only a few months ago; he had incredibly strong views, and he was usually right. He cared so much—about the craft, the staff, and the listeners.

Many people know him for his radio work or his time in pop music, but his heart has always belonged to jazz. One of my personal highlights was recording him discussing that genuine, lifelong love for the genre. It’s a moment of radio history I feel so lucky to have captured.

Transcript: Editor’s Choice – James Valentine on ABC Jazz

James O’Brien: James Valentine. Welcome to Editor’s Choice.

James Valentine: Oh, thank you, Mr. O’Brien. Hello.

James O’Brien: Now I listen to a lot of ABC Jazz. I really like a lot of ABC Jazz, but sometimes there is some jazz music that kind of really annoys me.

James Valentine: Well, controversial start.

James O’Brien: But I mean, jazz is not just one thing. It’s a huge variety of music. And within that genre, can you kind of illustrate how big jazz is?

James Valentine: Well, I suppose you would think of it now as a hundred-year-old form. It basically would have existed in some form before recorded music, which begins in the 1920s. But you’ve got a hundred years of music, you’ve got music that’s been created in every country in the world, in every culture in the world that we would think of as jazz. It’s music that interacts with every other form of music.

So therefore you’ve got jazz that’s interacted with the rock music world, you’ve got jazz that’s interacted with Indian music, African music, you’ve got European styles of jazz, you’ve got jazz where people try to take on elements of symphonic music and classical music. So you’ve got an extraordinary range of things that all come under the jazz umbrella, but then you’ve got all this other sort of stuff where people go, “Yeah, I don’t want to call it jazz.” Like Miles Davis, for example, never called his music jazz. He wouldn’t use the word jazz. He’d call it music. “I make music.”

You also have a lot of people that go, “Don’t call it jazz,” because it’s also a funny term where for many people it means different things. Like you just did something that’s very common; if you say jazz to people, they think of the very spiky, assertive kind of contemporary music, which can often be quite dense and hard to follow.

James O’Brien: That’s what I was talking about.

James Valentine: And they kind of go, “Oh, that stuff,” where there is a lot of playing going on, a lot of notes, and “I’m not quite sure what I’m meant to be experiencing here.” For example, you could bring up a little bit of something like anything from Wayne Shorter in the last ten years or so. Wayne Shorter, superb saxophone player, part of Miles’s band, part of the 50s and 60s jazz world, but now is an improviser of such extraordinary ability that when I saw his band live in Sydney a couple of years ago, honestly, you could tell the entire audience—and there’s an audience full of jazz musicians and jazz experts—and we’re all going, “I have no idea where they are now.” But we’re mesmerised by the fact that their improvisational ability is such that you’re going, they know where they are. They’re hearing it, they’re following one another. We’re trying to keep up, but it’s difficult if that’s your entry point.

Jazz also to a lot of people will mean a kind of corny sort of music.

James O’Brien: Like a riverboat sort.

James Valentine: Like a riverboat sort of thing. There’s straw hats and waistcoats involved, there’s goatees, clarinets, and trumpets. Now that’s music that’s harking back to the origins of jazz. But it’s often a very corny interpretation of that. So it’s a word that brings up a lot of emotions and a lot of different musics in many people’s minds.

James O’Brien: So we just heard there are two different types of jazz. What got you into jazz?

James Valentine: Well, what I liked to start with was the Australian musician Don Burrows.

James O’Brien: Who recently died.

James Valentine: Who died in 2020. But Don was a flute, saxophone, clarinet player. I was a nerdy little young classical flute player. I started playing when I was about ten and I started just the standard AMEB flute lessons. I quite liked it, and I turned out to be someone who quite liked practising. I really enjoyed practising the flute and getting better at it.

One of my teachers introduced me to Don Burrows. I went, “That’s fantastic, I like that, I didn’t know that was possible. What is this thing?” So I started listening to that, which also then led me into all the ABC jazz programs. So in the 60s and 70s, when I’m growing up, Music to Midnight was on every night. That was jazz for two hours on ABC Radio. Ralph Rickman in Melbourne had a Saturday morning program called Jazz Action, which was a lot of very 70s mainstream kind of jazz. Eric Child on a Saturday morning played Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller and the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra from the 1920s and 1930s.

There was Room to Move on Chris Winter’s program that would play more prog rock, but would get into the longer jazz things and the Miles Davis Bitches Brew albums.

James O’Brien: I hate prog rock.

James Valentine: And prog rock is not jazz, really, but it has an element of improvisation. On that show, he would play things that crossed into that, like European groups that were sort of “jazz-ish.” Jethro Tull in those days had a sort of jazz element to it. So, this was a fantastic education. I heard everything there and just gradually started to love it. That led me on to wanting to play saxophone and clarinet.

James O’Brien: More jazz instruments. Because you learned flute as a child, how did you end up playing the sax, for which you were very well known?

James Valentine: Thank you. Well, the saxophone, flute, and clarinet are all woodwind instruments. They all have basically the same playing principles, so if you play one, you can more or less play the other. I gravitated towards the saxophone because it was “the” jazz instrument. I’m hearing Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz—the great players of the 40s and 50s on the saxophone. It’s just more common than jazz flute.

Herbie Mann was a very daggy kind of sound. There was a great player called Hubert Laws who was an extremely competent technician, but it had a nerdy jazz-rock kind of sound. Don Burrows himself on the flute was beautiful; he had a beautiful flute sound and his South American stuff was gorgeous. But I tended to like the saxophone players.

I’m born in ’61. Being a kid and then a teenager, jazz was still the music of TV and popular easy listening music. It was still a standard. Rock hadn’t taken over as the standard thing for TV show themes like Hawaii Five-O or even the MASH* theme. They’re coming out of more of a jazz big band background. You still heard jazz as a standard thing—Cleo Laine and John Dankworth, Don Burrows. They were popular entertainers who filled out halls and had TV shows. This music was very accessible. It wasn’t obscure; it was right there in the middle of everything.

James O’Brien: Okay, so it’s 2021 now. What is jazz now?

James Valentine: Oh Lord, who knows? I think one of the things you have to face about jazz now is that it has no prominence whatsoever. It is not a prominent music at all. It’s not part of many people’s lives. In the same way that theatre and poetry are not as prominent as they once were, jazz is not prominent. Jazz is not particularly cool.

There were several periods where jazz was hugely popular—the swing era in the 30s and 40s. Jazz was also hugely popular in the 50s and 60s. You had the Beatles, but you also had Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. Things like Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 were perfectly popular at the time. Right now in 2021, it is not popular at all.

James O’Brien: And there are some people that a lot of younger people might call jazz, like Harry Connick Jr. or Michael Bublé.

James Valentine: Yeah, and these people will still come through. There will always be a Michael Bublé, a James Morrison, a Harry Connick Jr., or Jamie Cullum. Both Harry Connick and Michael Bublé are, in some ways, repeating the Sinatra songbook.

There’s a record label called ECM based out of Scandinavia that’s been going for fifty years. Keith Jarrett started with ECM. They have these beautiful, introspective, icy-looking covers.

James O’Brien: James, I’ve actually listened to quite a bit of Swedish jazz. And the one thing you have to say, it kind of reflects the culture in the sense that it’s really sad.

James Valentine: It’ll often be very introspective, quite melancholy, minor key, with long meandering improvisations. There is an audience for this in Berlin or Oslo, but it doesn’t spread out from there. Talk to a jazz musician—they know it’s hard to make the mortgage payments.

James O’Brien: What about the difference between instrumentalists and vocalists?

James Valentine: Often it takes a long time before the instrumentalists have any respect for the vocalists. They tend to see the vocalists as a necessary evil. “We need a vocalist so someone will at least come and see us.” I was very guilty of that as a young musician.

Vocal jazz is still quite popular. People like Cécile McLorin Salvant or Diana Krall. Most of them are still doing the original Great American Songbook. Someone like Esperanza Spalding is a bit more of a crossover; she’s an incredible bass player and singer.

But if you look at the place of the musical instrument in music itself, it’s more or less vanished. It’s been replaced by digital synthesizers and software. In the 70s and 80s, you’d talk about who played bass or drums on an album. Now, hero musicians like Beyoncé or Kanye aren’t necessarily associated with “hero instrumentalists” in the same way. The instrument has kind of disappeared.

In the 1940s and 50s, the most popular entertainers in the world were clarinet players. Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. At one point, Artie Shaw was the highest-paid entertainer in the US. He was earning sixty thousand dollars a week for his radio show.

James O’Brien: My guest today here on Editor’s Choice is James Valentine. James, not only are you on ABC Radio Sydney, you’re also doing a national program, but you’re also on an ABC radio station called ABC Jazz. What do you do on ABC Jazz?

James Valentine: I do a Sunday morning program for them called Upbeat. Because I began by listening to jazz programs on ABC Radio, I was really moved. It’s like full circle. I wanted a show where we emphasize the jazz that’s fun, the jazz that’s got some soul, the jazz that’s easy swinging. I felt as though ABC Jazz played a lot of the introspective and the intense.

When jazz fans try to introduce people to jazz, they often say, “This is the hardest music ever, try this.” I thought of this as a good intro show where you say, “Have you heard Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt?” It swings and it’s got such joy in it. You’ll hear that and go, “That’s fun.” I want Upbeat to be that kind of show.

James O’Brien: Can you suggest something we should play?

James Valentine: Well, should we hear some Stephane and Django?

James O’Brien: James Valentine is with me today here on ABC Radio. ABC Jazz is a digital radio station available on the ABC listen app, as well as all streaming services, and on TV channel 201. James, what else is on ABC Jazz?

James Valentine: You’ve got the most traditional ABC Jazz show, which is Mal Stanley’s Jazz Track. Jim McLeod had it for a very long time. He programmed it chronologically; at five o’clock on Saturday you started with Louis Armstrong, and at seven o’clock on Sunday you finished with contemporary Australian jazz. Mal Stanley is a beautiful recording engineer and a devotee of the music. On Jazz Track, you hear a lot of Australian jazz that the ABC has recorded themselves.

The ABC’s history mirrors the history of jazz. In the 1930s, when we started broadcasting as the ABC, that would have been the standard music—swinging Australian big bands. Megan Breslin does a morning program and Monica Trapaga does The Dinner Set on Friday night.

James O’Brien: James, not only does it have radio shows, but there are scholarships and concerts.

James Valentine: Yeah, there’s a set of jazz scholarships announced each year. These are young musicians who get mentoring with Australian jazz musicians. ABC Jazz also commissions original compositions.

Recently, James Kennedy, an engineer, was recording a quartet with Mike Nock, Julian Wilson, Jonathan Schwartz, and Hamish Stuart. These are four of the finest musicians in the country. Jazz musicians record very quickly—it’s often one take. It’s the magic of the moment that’s captured. This is happening right now in the ABC. Great Australian jazz musicians are being recorded and captured for all time by ABC Jazz.

James O’Brien: Now I prefer that you stay listening here to ABC Radio, but if you would like to try out some ABC Jazz, redial to ABC Jazz on your digital radio or use the ABC listen app. James Valentine, thank you very much.

James Valentine: My pleasure