Tucked away among shipping containers in Wantirna is a group of volunteers keeping the sound of Australian jazz alive.
Among them is Australian Jazz Museum sound engineer Ken Simpson-Bull, whose service to restoring and preserving vintage jazz music has been recognised with a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM).
Home to Australia’s and one of the world’s largest jazz collections, museum exhibits include treasures such as Graeme Bell’s piano and Ade Monsbourgh’s rare white plastic Grafton saxophone.
Ken, 87, says saving jazz recordings for future generations is his passion.
“I’ve been here 13 years as a volunteer,” he says. “I started my career with the ABC back in 1955 as a radio technician – ’55 was the year before television. The interesting thing is that in retirement I’m now doing what I did way back in 1955.
“Before 1950, all recording was done on acetate discs and they disintegrate with time. So, one of our first tasks is to digitise that music.
“Jazz was the music of young people from the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, until a certain person called Bill Haley came along and introduced us to rock ‘n’ roll. It was the popular music of young people and it wasn’t being recorded. We’ve managed to gather as much as we can so it’s important to keep it or it’ll be gone forever.”
The museum has received funding for refurbishment under Council’s Minor Grants Program supporting community-based organisations and their programs in Knox.
Collections manager Mel Blachford says the museum started in 1996 as an archive to save jazz treasures from the dumpster.
“In 1996, there were a couple of really big jazz collections and it became known afterwards that the families had thrown them all out, put them in a skip and sent them off to the tip,” he says.
“So, there was a meeting called of interested jazz parties and it was decided that they would form a jazz archive to provide a repository for all this material that had nowhere to go.
“What you see here is the result of 27 years’ work. Probably 98% of what we’ve got here is donated and it’s been run entirely by volunteers.
“It’s part of the really important social history of Australia because if you go back to the time when jazz was very popular in the 40s and 50s after the Second World War, up to the time when rock’n’roll started to take over, if you wanted to meet somebody certainly here in Victoria the social places that you met people were ballroom dancing that was done at the big town halls or there were the jazz clubs.”
Australian Jazz Museum is at Koomba Park, 15 Mountain Highway, Wantirna. It welcomes Visitors 10am-3pm on Tuesdays, and offers group and school tours by appointment. Visit ajm.org.au
