In Appreciation of Vince Jones for Ausmusic Month

Among a stack of vinyl records recently given to me by my father were two LPs by Vince Jones (Spell, and Tell Me a Secret). My dad was a big Vince Jones fan (as demonstrated by close inspection of the back cover of his copy of Spell - see photograph). I hadn’t thought about Vince Jones nor listened to his music for a long time, but as soon as I heard the opening bars on Side A of Spell, I had a remembrance of things past. I don’t know of any Australian musician quite like Vince Jones.

Born in Scotland before moving to Woollongong NSW in 1964 at age 11, the venerable vocalist, songwriter, and jazz trumpeter has been making records for four decades. Nowadays he is something of an elder statesman, reuniting with other Australian jazz icons and helping develop future talent through his academic posting. Adequately positioning Vince’s body of work within the Australian music canon requires the type of long-form journalism I have neither the time nor talent for. Inspired by my Proustian re-experiencing of these two records, this article is limited to Vince’s output during the 1980’s. Throughout that decade he released a slew of albums comprised of subtly interpreted standards and distinctive original songs, and the latter often outshone the former. These were the kind of records that could fit the mood at any stage of a good dinner party – from furtive greetings to lush farewells.

It was in just this setting that I first encountered Vince Jones’s music as a child. After Saturday dinner, I used to watch reruns of late 80’s basketball games and eat ice cream in a bedroom with the other kids while our parents drank wine and listened to records in the lounge room. Like Vince’s family, my parents and their friends had immigrated to Australia from Scotland in the 1960’s. They brought their own taste in music with them, which bore out Vince’s remarks (and those of Annie Lennox) about some connection between the Scots and black music. As well as Vince Jones those dinner parties introduced me to Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, George Benson, Van Morrison, Tony Bennett, Stevie Wonder, and other greats of jazz, soul, and R&B. When I heard that stream of music through the walls at those parties, I didn’t know the titles of the songs, or which songs came from which record, or the names of the artists. All of the music fit together, all of it was great, and it all seemed a perfect accompaniment to the irreverent adulting that was going on in the next room.

It’s hard to think of another Australian vocalist from that era who could fit in that playlist, except maybe Renée Geyer. But Vince Jones belonged there. Consider the Tell Me a Secret LP. Listen to Vince’s soulful phrasing on Hoagy Carmichael’s Two Sleepy People, and how that old standard sits neatly beside Sensual Item, I’ve Been Used, and Too Much Too Soon – fine examples of Vince’s own song-writing. The double bass that rolls in to start Sensual Item would make Ron Carter proud, and could have sent Q Tip on alternate excursions. Vocally, Vince floats in to the track like some prototypical Jay Kay meets Georgie Fame, an aural babushka doll: the future in the past in the present. You can imagine this album playing in between Mark Murphy’s Stolen Moments and Brother Ray’s Come Live With Me. Perhaps that sounds like an exaggerated claim for an album recorded with largely local musicians in South Melbourne in 1986. But when you listen to Tell Me a Secret (or any of Vince’s records from that era) – and I hope you do – the experience is absent overt locality. There is no single place you can point to on a map where the music could adequately be said to ‘come from’ (despite Vince’s obvious love for and connection with Australia). Thinking back to those dinner parties of my childhood, Vince’s sound simply melded with the internal consistency of great jazz, soul and R&B music. Who cared where it came from (to the Beginner’s Mind of a 7-year-old, at least)?

Inspired by Ausmusic Month, I’ve been listening to a lot of Australian music lately. There are a few artists who rightfully loom large in the collective conscience (e.g., Paul Kelly, often described as our greatest songwriter). Vince Jones has been widely acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz artists in Australian music history for a long time, but I’m not sure that captures his reach. It feels a little confining for someone who can hang with Ella and Ray. In recent years we’ve seen Australian artists make great songs that are rooted in black music and take them global (e.g., Daniel Merriweather, the Teskey Brothers). Vince (as well as Renée Geyer) was one of the first Australian artists to do this. After listening to these two LPs from the 1980’s, I’m convinced that he was also one of the best to do it. Maybe it’s time to drop the genre classifications and appreciate Vince Jones as one of the greats of Australian music.