Australian jazz drummer, Andrew Dickeson, has played on more than one hundred albums. In-demand as a session musician and as a live instrumentalist, he has been one of Australian jazz’s most prominent figures since he graduated from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music twenty years ago. This week, he and his Quintet release their much-anticipated album, Weaver of Dreams.
Dickeson has been surrounded by music since the day he was born. “Most of my family was musical,” he recalls. “Dad was a great singer. Mum’s an incredible fountain of knowledge about musical theatre and classical music. One grandfather was a classical violinist and the other was a piano player who played by ear; one grandmother was an opera buff, so I couldn’t really avoid it (laughs).
“My earlier childhood memories were waking up in the wings of theatres or in orchestra pits, so it was sort of inevitable. I played piano first, which I was never very good at and didn’t enjoy; flute for a long time, which I loved; and I started playing drums at about age ten - the usual sort of rock ‘n’ roll thing and I got into jazz at about age twelve or so. The rest just happened.”
Dickeson says that he developed an interest in jazz as a teenager when attending Sydney’s Pan Pacific Music Camps, where he heard “James Morrison’s band and a bunch of other great Sydney bands.” He remembers, “I loved the mood of it and the sound of it and the feeling that it gave me and I figured that’s what I’d like to do.”
Dickeson’s teacher in Newcastle, where he grew up, encouraged his interest in jazz. “I had a really good teacher, called Al Bligh,” Dickeson says. “He showed me the ropes. He was an old English dance band drummer who played me a lot of great records; classic jazz albums that he was into…from there, I hooked up with Lisa Parrott and Nicki Parrott and Adrian Mears and John Foreman – the Newcastle jazz young musicians – and we put a band together. We eventually ended up down here in Sydney, where I went to the Con.”
After graduating, Dickeson spent some time studying in New York City with Art Taylor and Vernel Fournier and, in 1992, he was the only non-American to make the finals of the Thelonious Monk Institute International Jazz Drums Competition - judged by Roy Haynes, Jack DeJohnette, Alan Dawson, Ed Shaughnessy, Jeff "Tain" Watts and Dave Weckl.
Dickeson says that studying in New York City influenced his playing, in that he was able to access so many great musicians on the live circuit. “You’d go out every night and you’d hear Hank Jones or Cedar Walton or Tommy Flanagan or drummers like Jimmy Cobb or Elvin Jones or Billy Higgins. Every night, I’d hear these great master musicians who really created the history of the music and that impacted on me completely – the way I hear jazz in my head now as a result of that; and probably 95% of them are gone now, so you can’t actually get that experience anymore. That was a direct connection to the history of the music and to the way that it used to sound...you can't really get that off CDs and they're all we have now…there’s Roy Haynes, he’s 86, and still playing better than everybody; he’s a survivor.”
Recently, Dickeson has been playing with the great Australian saxophonist, Bernie McGann, as part of his Quartet, along with trumpeter, Warwick Alder, and bassist, Brendan Clarke; with pianist, Bobby Gebert; with trombonist, vocalist and band leader, Dan Barnett; and with pianist, John Harkins, as well as pursuing his own projects.
Dickeson’s Quintet has been together for about two and a half years. “Logistically, it’s a bit tricky because Roger’s in New Zealand and Eamon’s in Melbourne, but when I decided to put a band together, it had to be the guys I wanted to play with…I had a concept of how I wanted it to sound and what the music had to be, and I picked the players accordingly. Roger and I go back a really long way, and the rest of the guys, Alex Boneham on the bass and Steve Barry on the piano, they’re hot young players in Sydney, who are really open and they’re great; they’re really mature; they’re really talented. They sound great and they’re good fun to play with. Eamon McNelis is just a ridiculous trumpet player. He can play anything from King Oliver through to Woody Shaw to free jazz; it’s all ok; he just hears music; it’s just beautiful. So it’s a really magic combination.”
For the new album, Weaver of Dreams, Dickeson chose some of his favourite songs and arranged them specifically for his Quintet. “They’re all tunes that I like,” he explains. “There are a few standards. ‘Weaver of Dreams’ is a song that Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald sang, a beautiful song; same with ‘Ill Wind’ – that was another Sinatra tune…I wanted to play songs that I love…There’s Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Isfahan’, a great song; a couple of Charlie Parker things, ‘Big Foot’, which is a duet with just the drums and the bass, and ‘Relaxin’ at Camarillo’, which is just drums; a Bobby Hutcherson tune.
It’s a real balance of stretched out stuff that can sort of go anywhere. That’s the concept – what I wanted was a band that, whatever tune we happened to be playing, whether an original or a standard, a modern jazz tune, it can really go anywhere. We don’t know where it’s going to go on the bandstand and hopefully the listener can join in on the journey and it goes somewhere…it’s always a bit of an adventure…it’s always swinging, that’s the thing for me, it’s got to swing, it’s got to swing hard all the time, but keeping it fun and enjoyable. It’s a fun band to hear…it’s good time music with a bit of art thrown in on top, but not too much (laughs).”
The Andrew Dickeson Quintet plays the Sound Lounge, Sydney, on Saturday, December 2nd.
Jasmine Crittenden - Jasmine Crittenden (B.A.)(Hons.)(First Class) is a writer and editor specialising in music, literature and travel.
