Reviews

Serious Fun: The Life and Music of Mike Nock 

By Norman Meehan

Reviewed by Des Cowley

As he was introducing Mike Nock's performance at this year's Wangaratta Jazz Festival, Adrian Jackson noted: "When it comes to New Zealand actors, horses, or musicians, if they are good enough, then we claim them as our own". While I'm not as up on my horses, the names Sam Neill, Russell Crowe, Rebecca Gibney, John Clarke, or the Finn brothers, do spring immediately to mind. As does pianist Mike Nock.

Meehan's excellent biography on Nock came out a year or so ago, issued by the Victorian University Press in Wellington, but has had limited distribution in this country; which is a shame, given it stands as the most significant biography of an Australian (ok, New Zealand) jazz musician to date, and is well worth seeking out.

The book has many strengths, not least of which is the fact that Nock himself generously supported the project, supplying Meehan with numerous first-hand anecdotes and tales across his fifty year career as a musician, from his early years in New Zealand, his extended period working in the US, up until his more recent activities since taking up residence in Sydney. Meehan has also interviewed many of the musicians Nock worked with over the years, including John Abercrombrie, Bruce Cale, Ron McLure, Eddie Marshall, Tim Hopkins, Bob Moses, Michael White, and others, all of whom contribute original insights into Nock's music.

Meehan briefly covers Nock's introduction to jazz as a teenager growing up in Ngaruawahia, a town of less then 2,000 people situated in the north island of New Zealand, and later Nelson. By age 18, in 1958, Nock had re-located from Auckland to Sydney, and was playing at the legendary El Rocco Jazz Cellar there, and developing what would become life-long friendships with local musicians such as John Pochee, Bob Bertles and Bruce Cale. Nock's band, the 3-Out Trio, was considered the 'hot' group in Sydney at the time, recording their first album Move for the Columbia label. Meehan quotes one writer who summed up the band's appeal: "There were often long queues along Brougham Street, King's Cross, to hear the 3-Out Trio, and those inside stamped and roared, and in the case of one well-known woman, sustained a high moan that can only be described as orgasmic".

But already Nock had his sights set farther afield, and by 1961, was briefly headed for the UK, before crossing the Atlantic to settle in for what would become a seventeen-year sojourn in America. One of the relevlations of Meehan's book is how advanced Nock's musical tastes were in this early period - on his very first night in New York in 1961, for instance, he took himself off to the Five Spot cafe to hear Ornette Coleman!

In Boston, Nock attended at Berklee School of Music, after having won a Down Beat scholarship to study there; and over the next few years, mostly hung out with black American jazz musicians, playing and developing friendships with musicians such as Sam Rivers and Tony Williams. In 1964, he joined Yusef Lateef's band, and his contributions to the group can be heard on the legendary recording Live at Pep's, issued on the Impulse label.

By the second half of the sixties, Nock has re-located to San Francisco, in time for the burgeoning renaissance of flower power and acid rock. Playing in John Handy's band there, Nock met electric violinist Michael White, setting the scene for the next great phase of Nock's career: The Fourth Way.

Meehan's book provides the first real in-depth coverage of the The Fourth Way, a pioneering jazz rock band that was contemporaneous with Miles Davis's Bitches Brew phase, and pre-figured the work of Weather Report, Chick Corea and others. The band developed a massive cult following (which it retains to this day), performing at the Fillmore on the same bill with Santana or the the Grateful Dead, or later with Miles Davis. By this stage, Nock was heavily into pioneering electronics, with one reviewer noting: "A nod to Mike Nock, for some of the best electric piano playing this side of Herbie Hancock. Would be a natural for the Miles Davis Quintet".

Despite critical acclaim, and a European tour that featured a performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival, the band's label Capitol failed to get behind the music, and members went their own separate ways in the early seventies. Chick Corea later said of Nock: "His work with The Fourth Way was beautifully innovative and an important contribution to America's Art Culture and its development". Sadly, to this day, none of the band's four albums have been issued on CD - surely an opportunity for someone out there.

Nock continued to play and record, moving between New York and the West Coast, throughout the seventies. The list of musicians he collaborated with during this period is incredible: Michael Brecker, Tom Harrell, Sam Rivers, John Abercrombie, John Scofield. But, increasingly, Nock's eyes were turning toward home, and, beginning in 1979, he embarked on a series of tours that re-established his connections with the Australian and New Zealand music scene. Since then, from his home base in Sydney, Nock has continued to play and record, including 1981's acclaimed album Ondas for Manfred Eicher's ECM label. Nock also accepted a post teaching at the Sydney Conservatorium, which has provided him with the opportunity to mentor a generation of younger jazz musicians. In fact, in the spirit of Miles Davis or Art Blakey, Nock's bands over the past 20 years have proved a critical testing ground for a new generation of Australian and NZ jazz musicians. Many of the past winners of the National Jazz Awards, for instance, including Tim Hopkins, Phil Slater, Julien Wilson, Steve Magnusson, Roger Manins, have at some point played as part of Nock's various ensembles.

So hectic has Nock's career been over the past twenty years or so - as a composer, performer, and recording artist - that Meehan appears to have had little option but to summarize this activity in the final pages of his book. As an added bonus, his book comes with a 53 minute DVD Mike Nock: a Film, directed by Geoff Cawthorn in 1993.

Publication of Meehan's book was timed to co-incide with Nock's seventieth birthday last year. Yet, considering Nock's extraordinary duo performance with bassist Barre Phillips at the Wangaratta Festival only a few weeks back, it's clear his life and music remains very much an open book. While it will no doubt require an update down the track, Meehan's thoroughly researched and well-written biography will otherwise - and deservedly - remain the definitive record of one of the most important musicians Australia (ok, NZ) has produced.