Vince Jones
Vinnie is one of the great jazz singers in the world. I've known Vince since the 70s. He used to come and sit in with these bands that I would play with. I was in a band that played at the Grain Store in King Street with Matt Kirsch and a bass player called Herman Schweiger. Vince would sometimes come with his flugelhorn and sit in. He never used to sing, just play.
In the 80s I moved away to Europe. When I came back to Melbourne for the Christmas of 82, 83, I noticed people had started to talk about Vince Jones. By the time I came back to Melbourne proper, in 1986, he was sort of the linchpin of the Melbourne jazz scene. All of these younger jazz musicians flocked around him like bees to a hive. He was the sort of the king bee of this new neo sort of bop music world that was coming out of Melbourne. It was very different from what was happening in the Sydney scene, where it was still very much being dominated by modern, more progressive kind of jazz, like, as exemplified by acts such as Ten Part Invention.
Vince gave jazz a sort of allure. He made it desirable. He made it cool. I never thought that that would even be vaguely possible, such a thing. Jazz was considered so uncool when I left for Europe. It was ultra, ultra nerdsville, you know. But now it was totally cool. There was young guys out in suits, you know, there was a look. And there was Vince, doing his groove based jazz music.
Some of my good mates were playing with him, like Alan Brown and Eric Costello. I thought, wow, this is interesting. So I got him to sing a song for a movie I was working on. It was a film that Steve Weiser produced called The Bit Part, starring Nicole Kidman. From there a new relationship formed andVince asked me to produce his next album.
Vince's albums were doing really well. He was, you know, I think making gold records which was unheard of for Australian jazz. I produced his album, which he called It All Ends In Tears.
I joined his band in 1989 and spent all that year touring with him. Which had its moments of tension from time to time. There were a lot of big egos in that band. It was tough for Vincent. I left when I took on the Steve Vizard TV show gig and I took half the band with me.
We went separate ways, but we always found a way back. We reunited once for a film. John Paulson, a very good friend of Vince's, directed a movie called Cyan Sunset. I got Vince to sing on that.
Around ten years ago we reconnected, and we started to work again as a duet. We did a duet gig together. And we recorded. It felt like a full circle moment.
We've written some songs, like Rainbow Cake that we are both very proud of. We knew we had a real basis for moving forward. There was an absolute respect musically. I think that was the most important thing. He felt very comfortable playing with me and I loved, absolutely adored playing with him.
