Jon Dale – författare

Tame Impala’s psychedelic third album Currents (2015) is emblematic of a cultural shift in music production and consumption in the early days of streaming and a project that cemented its creator, Kevin Parker, as one of Australian music’s most unlikely success stories and influential exports.Currents marked a conscious shift in sound and attitude for its creator, West Australian polymath Kevin Parker, resisting his role as psych rock savior to embrace soul, disco, funk and his latent pop instincts. The result was Tame Impala’s most popular and influential album, transforming them into festival-headlining, internet-famous Gen Z idols and turning the ear of popular acts, from Rihanna and Lady Gaga to Travis Scott and Dua Lipa. Parker’s increasingly substantial credits as a collaborative producer and songwriter, with the likes of these artists as well as The Weeknd, Mark Ronson, Justice, Gorillaz and many more, served to enshrine him as a modern architect of pop music. Not bad for a shy, shaggy teen who used to lurk in basement Perth venues and play gigs with a towel on his head.This book dives deep into Currents, examining its context, creation, content and lasting impact on the history of Australian popular music. The album’s theme of metamorphosis and genre-blurring sound embodied (and possibly encouraged) a wider shift in the 2010s of popular music trends, consumption and listening habits.

An Anthology of Australian Albums offers an overview of Australian popular music through the lens of significant, yet sometimes overlooked, Australian albums. Chapters explore the unique qualities of each album within a broader history of Australian popular music. Artists covered range from the older and non-mainstream yet influential, such as the Missing Links, Wendy Saddington and the Coloured Balls, to those who have achieved very recent success (Courtney Barnett, Dami Im and Flume) and whose work contributes to international pop music (Sia), to the more exploratory or experimental (Curse ov Dialect and A.B. Original). Collectively the albums and artists covered contribute to a view of Australian popular music through the non-canonical, emphasizing albums by women, non-white artists and Indigenous artists, and expanding the focus to include genres outside of rock including hip hop, black metal and country.

An Anthology of Australian Albums offers an overview of Australian popular music through the lens of significant, yet sometimes overlooked, Australian albums. Chapters explore the unique qualities of each album within a broader history of Australian popular music. Artists covered range from the older and non-mainstream yet influential, such as the Missing Links, Wendy Saddington and the Coloured Balls, to those who have achieved very recent success (Courtney Barnett, Dami Im and Flume) and whose work contributes to international pop music (Sia), to the more exploratory or experimental (Curse ov Dialect and A.B. Original). Collectively the albums and artists covered contribute to a view of Australian popular music through the non-canonical, emphasizing albums by women, non-white artists and Indigenous artists, and expanding the focus to include genres outside of rock including hip hop, black metal and country.

An Anthology of Australian Albums offers an overview of Australian popular music through the lens of significant, yet sometimes overlooked, Australian albums. Chapters explore the unique qualities of each album within a broader history of Australian popular music. Artists covered range from the older and non-mainstream yet influential, such as the Missing Links, Wendy Saddington and the Coloured Balls, to those who have achieved very recent success (Courtney Barnett, Dami Im and Flume) and whose work contributes to international pop music (Sia), to the more exploratory or experimental (Curse ov Dialect and A.B. Original). Collectively the albums and artists covered contribute to a view of Australian popular music through the non-canonical, emphasizing albums by women, non-white artists and Indigenous artists, and expanding the focus to include genres outside of rock including hip hop, black metal and country.

An Anthology of Australian Albums offers an overview of Australian popular music through the lens of significant, yet sometimes overlooked, Australian albums. Chapters explore the unique qualities of each album within a broader history of Australian popular music. Artists covered range from the older and non-mainstream yet influential, such as the Missing Links, Wendy Saddington and the Coloured Balls, to those who have achieved very recent success (Courtney Barnett, Dami Im and Flume) and whose work contributes to international pop music (Sia), to the more exploratory or experimental (Curse ov Dialect and A.B. Original). Collectively the albums and artists covered contribute to a view of Australian popular music through the non-canonical, emphasizing albums by women, non-white artists and Indigenous artists, and expanding the focus to include genres outside of rock including hip hop, black metal and country.

Ed Kuepper’s history as a rock pioneer with The Saints and Laughing Clowns means that his albums of the early 1990s represent a remapping of the singer-songwriter concept. His classic Honey Steel’s Gold shares a looseness with blues and folk recordings of the 1940s and 1950s, capturing performances that take detours, stretch and contract, wax and wane, such as the album’s hit “The Way I Made You Feel." Honey Steel’s Gold is a landscape to be immersed in, to get lost in. It provides a space not where questions are answered but where we might stop and get a drink; an environment that provides solace, but not platitudes; where we can share a wry smile about the downsides of the human condition rather than attempt the illusion of blocking them out completely.This study incorporates a consideration of Kuepper’s iconoclastic career, at odds with the music industry and the grunge era into which the album was released. Beyond the apparent facts, though, there is interpretation, speculation, and attempts to meet Honey Steel’s Gold on its own terms in some imaginary place.

Regurgitator’s second full-length album, Unit (1997), was produced in a DIY warehouse studio at a time when this was unusual for a major label band. The album went three times Platinum in Australia and won five esteemed ARIA Awards in 1998, including Album of the Year. The album’s success is indicative of a particular point in time in popular music trends, when the world was recovering from the impact of grunge and post-grunge bands. Regurgitator’s subversive attitude toward pop music, punk aesthetic, unique lyrical narratives and an ironic view on their own creative product made their music potent in an alternative market defying the prevailing music trends. Unit and Regurgitator were the focus of divisive critical reviews, yet they continue to rank highly as a quintessentially Australian band. This volume situates the development of Unit amongst the DIY culture of a politically charged Brisbane scene, and breaks down the album through the lens of recording and songwriting processes. This book outlines the impact of Regurgitator’s music locally and globally, by discussing what made Unit a success at the peak of the alternative music genre.

The album examined in this book transformed the singer John Farnham from a faded teen pop star into the most popular solo rock performer in Australia, in a career that has lasted for more than 30 years. Whispering Jack remains the top-selling album by an Australian artist in Australia, and constitutes the turning point in Farnham’s bid to achieve credibility as an adult contemporary musician. The first single from the album, ‘You’re the Voice,’ has achieved such iconic status that it is routinely referred to as Australia’s unofficial national anthem. The book examines the album, its context and that history in order to recover a crucial conjuncture in the development of Australian rock and popular music, one that has previously been ignored in Australian popular music studies.

Kylie Minogue’s self-titled debut album produced hits, controversy and a perfect mainstream storm. The then soap and children’s television star ‘crossed over’ to music with hit writer/producers SAW — and the shamelessly commercial approach of all involved saw the ‘real’ music industry get its back up. This book interrogates the way that commercial pop albums are remembered in both the popular music press and in academic research. Is there a way of dealing with ‘mainstream’ pop without denigrating the music and (just as importantly) without validating it according to the terms of a ‘high art’ canon? This text sheds light on the way that notions of ‘mainstream’ and ‘other’ play out in a local context—specifically, Australia and New Zealand music on a global stage.

The Dead C’s Clyma est mort (1993) is the record of a live gig for one person. Tom Lax was running the Siltbreeze label in Philadelphia and had come to New Zealand to meet the artists he was releasing. He heard The Dead C at their noisy, improvised best, turning rock music on its head with a free-form style of blaring, loosely organised sound. Leading a second wave of music from Dunedin, New Zealand, The Dead C were an assault against the kind of jangly pop that had made the Dunedin Sound famous during the 1980s. This book uses The Dead C and in particular their album Clyma est mort (1993) to offer insights into the way the best of rock music plays vertigo with our senses, illustrating a sonic picture of freedom and energy. It places the album into the history of independent music in New Zealand, and into an international context of independent labels posting, faxing and phoning each other.

Alastair Riddell’s band Space Waltz was a short-lived one-album New Zealand rock act who hit gold with a #1 hit single in October 1974 with the song ‘Out On The Street’ but thereafter failed to achieve anything even close to that feat. While relegated to one-hit-wonder status in the eyes of many, to this day Riddell and Space Waltz epitomize the mid-1970s heyday of glam rock in New Zealand. But in truth their impact went far beyond this. Their generationally divisive nation-wide debut on the hugely popular MOR television talent quest Studio One/New Faces demonstrated the power of mass media exposure – they were instantly signed to a record deal with industry giant EMI – while Riddell’s controversial gender-bending image provided a cultural crossroads that greatly impacted the wider youth culture of Aotearoa New Zealand. In addition, while the album’s most famous track, ‘Out On The Street,’ is rightly regarded as New Zealand’s glam rock anthem, the wider album demonstrates a compositional and musical depth that goes far beyond glam rock and into the realm of sophisticated progressive rock, ultimately providing an unlikely and highly unique musical amalgam.

From entering a high-school music competition to being honoured with the New Zealand Orderof Merit, Bic Runga has an established place within contemporary popular music. Focusing on her iconicalbum, Drive, and including informative case studies of representative tracks on the album, this book provides not only an in-depth study of one album, but skilfully navigates Runga’s creative work over three decades to illuminate some of the key stages of her career. The book discusses the performer’s rise to stardom, musical style, accolades and performance achievements. Blending popular music studies with media analysis, the book is the first to offer a detailed study of Runga’s creativity and a close-up study of her debut and critically acclaimed album.

The Front Lawn is a multi-award-winning, much-loved New Zealand duo-turned-trio made up of Don McGlashan, Harry Sinclair and, eventually, Jennifer Ward-Lealand. A 1980s variety act, The Front Lawn was part of an Aotearoa/New Zealand alternative tradition of duos that combine music, comedy, theatre and film. Their debut album Songs from The Front Lawn (1989) distilled McGlashan and Sinclair’s theatrical stage show and their groundbreaking short films, Walkshort and The Lounge Bar, while also thrusting the band into the burgeoning New Zealand indie scene. The album is a snapshot of ’80s New Zealand, a turbulent, creative period for indie music, indie film and musical theatre, celebrating local identity in new ways.Starting with a social and cultural background of New Zealand in the late 1970s, the book covers McGlashan and Sinclair’s upbringing on Auckland’s North Shore, early artistic influences and overseas experiences leading to the formation of the group. Much attention is paid to the duo’s philosophy, early performances, the process of recording the album – including The Front Lawn’s collaboration with Wellington avant-garde/cabaret group Six Volts and the addition of Jennifer Ward-Lealand as the group’s third member – and analysis of each of the album’s 10 songs. In parting, Matthew Bannister discusses the group’s second and final album, More Songs from The Front Lawn, as well as the individual members’ subsequent artistic careers

Melbourne, 1971: radical counterculture, hippies, opposition to the Vietnam War and consumerism. The birth of Oz blues rock. Influenced by American blues after Robert Johnson, parallel to developments with Paul Butterfield, the Bluesbreakers and Canned Heat, Chain’s music also developed in distinct ways, taking on a style later referred to as Oz blues, or Oz indigo. The emergence of prog rock and the consolidation of blues rock globally made for interesting times. Rock shifted beyond the basics, in the direction of new musical forms and prefigurative politics. In this moment, Chain, four regional white boys with jazz cred and blues licks, recorded the classic Oz blues single Black and Blue and its bedrock LP, Toward the Blues. 50 years later, it remains a monument in Australian rock history. Based on interviews with guitarist and singer Phil Manning, scholarly research and memoirs, this book tells the story of the album’s creation and its cultural impact on the Melbourne music scene in a time of significant social change, seeking to capture the magic of that moment.

The success of the Hip-Hop album The Calling (2003) by the Hilltop Hoods was a major event on the timeline of Hip-Hop in Australia. It launched a formerly ‘underground’ scene into the spotlight, radically transforming the group members’ lives and creating new opportunities for other Hip-Hop artists. This book analyses the impact of the album by drawing on original interviews with fifteen Hip-Hop practitioners from across Australia, including artists who contributed to the album. These primary interviews are interwoven with material from media sources and close readings of song lyrics and album imagery. An exploration of the early histories of Hip-Hop in Australia with a focus on the formation of Obese Records and the Hilltop Hoods’ biography gives way to analysis of specific tracks from the album and the Hoods’ prowess as live performers. The book uses The Calling as a lens to examine the beliefs and practices of Hip-Hop enthusiasts in Australia, including changes since the album was released. Published in 2023 to coincide with the album’s twenty-year anniversary, the book is an engaging evaluation of a musical release that was so significant that people now use it explain two distinct periods in Australian Hip-Hop (pre or post The Calling).

Released in 1996, Kitten Licks catapulted Brisbane indie-rock three-piece Screamfeeder into the '90s alternative-rock boom alongside Powderfinger, silverchair, You Am I and Regurgitator. International tours, regular festival shows, and TV appearances followed. And yet, commercial success for Screamfeeder was comparatively short-lived. By the end of the decade, the band’s outlook was bleak: at a career standstill and unable to record new music. Today, both Screamfeeder and Kitten Licks endure as fiercely loved cult icons. In its vitality and idiosyncrasy, Kitten Licks captures a moment of cresting change for a band, a city and a national scene, while continuing to delight and inspire those who discover it anew.This book tells the story of Kitten Licks in the words of those who lived it, and who still do. How it was made, how it was swept up into '90s mythology and what the journey tells us about the fickle nature of music production in Australia, namely: how to survive it.

Michael Brown undertakes a thorough study of Eyeliner’s BUY NOW, a vaporwave homage to the kitsch electronic sounds of the 1980s and 1990s.Eyeliner’s BUY NOW (2015) belongs to a new genre for our times: vaporwave. Emerging in the early 2010s on the internet, vaporwave originated with a cohort of millennial artists who reimagined the musical soundtracks of 1980s-1990s consumerism with an adroit mixture of irony and sincerity. One of these was Eyeliner, the alias of New Zealand computer musician Luke Rowell (a.k.a. Disasteradio). For his vaporwave masterpiece, Rowell harnessed computer software to craft a unique album, a catchy, funky, and witty tour through the utopias of advertising at “the end of history.” BUY NOW epitomizes a new kind of album for the internet age: made DIY-style, all digital, free, licensed under Creative Commons, and released to a “virtual” community, an online scene without geographic center.Drawing on original interviews and the album’s production archive, this book uses BUY NOW’s story to investigate what it means to create, distribute, and consume independent music in an era of global networks and digital technology. It places the album in both the real-world and online contexts of Rowell’s life and career, from early websites to the Spotify era, from Lower Hutt to the world.

A critical guide to the experimental music compositions of Australian composer Liza Lim's post-climate crisis album Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus.When humans have gone, what will become of singing? Across her 2020 album Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus, Liza Lim dreams of how nature itself would sing on that first morning after the death of humanity. Creaking vestiges of Western music swirl in oceanic gyres with choruses of bioluminescent fish; plastic trash is taught to sing by magical animating forces; and music itself rises in the absence of all humans to speak in tongues we will never understand.In this roving collection of essays, Ty Bouque traces the many currents of Lim’s album to better understand how music might teach us to imagine timescales and environments beyond our own. Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus unpacks Australian music’s most profound statement on the climate crisis to date, and asks, without the promise of an answer: what would be the music of a drowned, post-human world?

A critical guide to the experimental music compositions of Australian composer Liza Lim's post-climate crisis album Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus.When humans have gone, what will become of singing? Across her 2020 album Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus, Liza Lim dreams of how nature itself would sing on that first morning after the death of humanity. Creaking vestiges of Western music swirl in oceanic gyres with choruses of bioluminescent fish; plastic trash is taught to sing by magical animating forces; and music itself rises in the absence of all humans to speak in tongues we will never understand.In this roving collection of essays, Ty Bouque traces the many currents of Lim’s album to better understand how music might teach us to imagine timescales and environments beyond our own. Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus unpacks Australian music’s most profound statement on the climate crisis to date, and asks, without the promise of an answer: what would be the music of a drowned, post-human world?

Intertextual, passionate and personal throughout, Crowded House’s Together Alone is a key addition to the surprisingly limited range of scholarship on one of Australasia’s most successful and adored bands. Fusing pop music with place and landscape, Crowded House’s Together Alone (1993) was unprecedented in its Australasian context, and in the process of making this album, the group’s sound transformed profoundly. Crowded House’s Together Alone examines why Neil Finn took the daring decision to record amid the wilds of Karekare Beach, West Auckland, considers how British producer Youth impacted the band’s dynamics, and places the album within a wider artistic context, expanding beyond pop. The book also recounts author Barnaby Smith’s visit to Karekare on the trail of Together Alone’s atmospheric melancholy – a psychogeographic adventure exploring what it means to visit a landscape under the spell of the music it has inspired. A song-by-song analysis further explores the fragile alchemy that produced the most poetic statement in the Crowded House catalogue.

In this critical appraisal of The Clean's landmark release, Boodle Boodle Boodle, Geoff Stahl explores how it impacted the emergence of a new DIY scene alongside a retrospective on the role The Clean played in shaping New Zealand’s independent music industry.The Clean’s 1981 EP catalysed independent music in Aotearoa/New Zealand and defined what became known as the “Dunedin Sound”. At the time, The Clean were seen as ambassadors for a burgeoning independent music culture in Aotearoa, drawing on the DIY spirit of punk and post-punk centred around Dunedin, on New Zealand’s South Island. Geoff Stahl considers the influence and legacy of the EP and band on indie music in New Zealand and elsewhere. Examining the myth of the “Dunedin Sound” associated with The Clean, the EP, and Flying Nun Records, he details how this myth emerged, its repudiation by many of the artists it presumes to cover, and its complicated persistence in the contemporary New Zealand imaginary.

Saturday Night Fever is simultaneously one of the biggest-selling albums of all time and one of the most reviled. How can a record create such a polarizing reaction?Australian writer Clinton Walker attempts to answer that question and finds that, among other things, a certain seemingly unlikely Australianness is part of the reason.Fever was a supernova for disco, for the Bee Gees, for the domineering Robert Stigwood, producer of the film and its true auteur, and for the entire record business. This book traces all the interdependent convolutions that fed into the film and its music – not least the Australian roots that Stigwood and Gibb brothers shared, which gave them an Otherness and almost gormless, shape-shifting self-determination – and it finds that sometimes great art can be made by a committee ... that sometimes, five songs are enough to change the world.

Revisits Australian rock band silverchair's globally successful debut album Frogstomp (1995) and asserts that the band is not an imitation of American grunge nor an emblem of Gen X angst. Frogstomp transformed Australian rockers silverchair from an(other) unknown teen garage band to an internationally popular rock outfit. The album was released in 1995 and became a global sensation. Due to silverchair’s grunge aesthetic, the band’s success has often been attributed to its imitation of North American grunge bands and associated Generation X stereotypes. Jay Daniel Thompson demonstrates that the album has greater musical and cultural significance than that framing suggests.This book argues that Frogstomp is culturally significant not only due to its international success, but because it suggested an impact of globalization on Australian music in the late 20th century and because of its eclectic, and little-discussed, array of pop culture influences. Through an engagement with Arjun Appadurai’s work on ‘global cultural flows’, scholarship on Australian 1990s popular culture and grunge music and textual analyses of both the album’s track list and silverchair’s live performances, Frogstomp is seen in a distinctive new light.

This is the untold history of Oceania's 1960s lost psychedelic album, The Happy Prince.Recorded in Sydney by the La De Das, an Aotearoa/New Zealand band, this was the first LP in Australia that told a single story, creating an audio world. The La De Das were – and are – one of New Zealand’s most loved bands. By 1967 they had numerous hit singles and two albums of diverse music. What drove them to experiment with an art pop form? This book answers that question by digging into archives, dusting off historical memories of those who were there. Released in 1969, this album is a collection of original songs based on an Oscar Wilde story, published in 1888. The tracks include narration by Australia’s pop poet Adrian Rawlins. It was a technical and artistic statement, the likes of which Australian music had not previously heard. At EMI’s studios in Sydney, the production experimented with 8-track recording, using electronically synchronized four track machines. EMI provided an in-house producer but the album was independently funded. At the time, it was hailed in music magazine Go Set as “the best thing ever recorded in Australia”. Yet the album disappeared, rarely promoted and never charting. That line up of the band did not record another album. This book finally tells their story.

This is the untold history of Oceania's 1960s lost psychedelic album, The Happy Prince.Recorded in Sydney by the La De Das, an Aotearoa/New Zealand band, this was the first LP in Australia that told a single story, creating an audio world. The La De Das were – and are – one of New Zealand’s most loved bands. By 1967 they had numerous hit singles and two albums of diverse music. What drove them to experiment with an art pop form? This book answers that question by digging into archives, dusting off historical memories of those who were there. Released in 1969, this album is a collection of original songs based on an Oscar Wilde story, published in 1888. The tracks include narration by Australia’s pop poet Adrian Rawlins. It was a technical and artistic statement, the likes of which Australian music had not previously heard. At EMI’s studios in Sydney, the production experimented with 8-track recording, using electronically synchronized four track machines. EMI provided an in-house producer but the album was independently funded. At the time, it was hailed in music magazine Go Set as “the best thing ever recorded in Australia”. Yet the album disappeared, rarely promoted and never charting. That line up of the band did not record another album. This book finally tells their story.

An in-depth look at the rise of enigmatic Australian rock band TISM, the unexpected success of their 1995 album, Machiavelli and the Four Seasons, and the continued trajectory of their storied career.Focusing on one of Australia’s most enigmatic bands, This Is Serious Mum (better known as TISM), Tyler Jenke forms an in-depth analysis of the anonymous, pseudonymous Melbourne collective’s rise to prominence and unlikely success on the popular music charts with their third album, Machiavelli and the Four Seasons (1995). Jenke details TISM’s origins as they slowly went from a bedroom concept to an underground success to a staple of concert stages and commercial radio in Australia, growing a rabid fanbase in the process.Despite the anti-commercial tendencies of TISM, whose album artwork didn’t feature the band, whose band members performed under pseudonyms and who rarely gave interviews, never mind sincere answers, TISM became a commercially successful group. In this book, Jenke identifies the steps the band took to shift their sound from their tried-and-true experimental Australian pub-rock roots to the burgeoning, youthful electronic music genre, employing synthesizers and samplers. With their new sound, TISM incorporated Dadaism – the use of unusual or everyday sounds – and both avant-garde and classic pop musicianship. The band’s new sound resulted in both top ten success and an ARIA Award. This is the first book to dissect TISM’s rise to fame within the Australian music industry and analyze TISM’s status as one of the most memorable, mysterious and paradoxically successful groups in the country’s vibrant alternative music scene.

When Gary Shearston released his worldwide hit version of "I Get A Kick Out Of You" in 1974, he had already been recording for over a decade, and years of creative adventure lay ahead. His most commercially successful album, Dingo, provides a lens through which to study his role in establishing and developing a purposefully Australian variant on '70s pop and rock music with its poetic evocations of Australian landscapes, topographies, character and cultural identity, mixed with connections to Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and 1970s London. These blend with the Bush Ballad tradition, native Australian music and rhythms, the '60s folk and protest song boom, of which he was a key figure and prime mover. All these elements combine on this album to provide a fresh and enduring evocation of what Australian music was, is and could be, and provides a link back to traditional forms and a signpost forward to acts such as The Go Betweens and Nick Cave.Drawing on the author's correspondence with Gary Shearston from 2008-2013, this book contains previously unpublished primary material from the artist himself. Peter Mills digs into the "Australian-ness" of Shearston's music, and how such a term came to defined.

When Gary Shearston released his worldwide hit version of "I Get A Kick Out Of You" in 1974, he had already been recording for over a decade, and years of creative adventure lay ahead. His most commercially successful album, Dingo, provides a lens through which to study his role in establishing and developing a purposefully Australian variant on '70s pop and rock music with its poetic evocations of Australian landscapes, topographies, character and cultural identity, mixed with connections to Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and 1970s London. These blend with the Bush Ballad tradition, native Australian music and rhythms, the '60s folk and protest song boom, of which he was a key figure and prime mover. All these elements combine on this album to provide a fresh and enduring evocation of what Australian music was, is and could be, and provides a link back to traditional forms and a signpost forward to acts such as The Go Betweens and Nick Cave.Drawing on the author's correspondence with Gary Shearston from 2008-2013, this book contains previously unpublished primary material from the artist himself. Peter Mills digs into the "Australian-ness" of Shearston's music, and how such a term came to defined.

A study of John Sangster’s jazz suite The Lord of the Rings contextualized with biographical and cultural studies of the composer in the 1970s.In three volumes and more than six LP recordings, The Lord of the Rings suite, produced during the 1970s, based on the Tolkien books, is the most ambitious, stylistically and emotionally wide-ranging compositional oeuvre ever undertaken in Australian jazz. Its composer (and one of its performers) John Sangster embraced the historical spectrum of jazz styles, from traditional to the avant-garde, through performance, recording and film/TV music. Sangster, whose career spanned from the late 1940s until his death in 1995, was one of the most complex figures in Australian music. In both temperament and musical style, he ranged from light to darkness, idolized by his colleagues, yet susceptible to (literally) homicidal rage. Nothing in the recording history of Australian jazz, and perhaps Australian music in general, matches the monumental stature of these volumes, which he called his musical autobiography.