Let There Be Rorke

There he blows…

aving made the move from the Woodstock of Australia to Dublin, his love for jazz has actually taken tenor and soprano saxophonist Daniel Rorke all around the world.

From tours in the US, across Europe and down under, the man also completed his Masters in Jazz Performances at NTNU Jazzlinga in Norway, which looks pretty cool beside his Bachelor in Jazz Performance with first class honours from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and his PhD in music from the University of New England.

Which is a longwinded of saying, hey, when it comes to exorcising saxophones, the guy knows what he’s doing.

And it’s live on stage when the Rorke lad gets truly lost in the music that he loves, having performed at The Cork Jazz Festival, the Trondheim Jazz Festival, The Bushwick Improvised Music Series, Moods in Zurich, the Central Park Summer Stage in New York, London’s Jazz Café and The Reykjavik Jazz Festival. To name but seven.

It was all, of course, just practise for The Daniel Rorke/Rick Simpson Jazz Quartet at The Whale on Thursday, February 1st – details here.

Before the big day, we got a little history – and some pivotal influences – from the man himself…

I grew up on in the sub-tropical rainforest in Northern NSW, Australia, on a hippy commune called Billen Cliffs, outside the town of Nimbin.

Nimbin is sort of the Woodstock of Australia. Shoes are banned by public order. The town is covered in rainbow-coloured murals of (presumably) psychic dolphins flying through space, delivering enlightenment and chakra balance to all of sentience. That whole area is rather unique, being extremely fertile land around the base of a long-extinct volcano known as Mount Warning – named such as it provided a good warning marker to avoid the dangerous reefs due east for early European invaders in their ships. It is perhaps more famously known today for being the pointy blurred thing in the background of duck-faced Instagram influencers’ selfies, taken from the beaches at nearby Ibiza of Oz – Byron Bay.

It was a good thing that I grew up in an isolated place because the saxophone is loud, and few people want to hear a teenager trying to imitate Coltrane from Sun Ship for months on end. My father is a bass player, and I used to listen to jazz from a young age. I was really into John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter as a squirt.

Now that I have allegedly grown up I am really into John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter. One time, at the local market, a sarong wearing hippy lady, likely emblazoned with henna tattoos and astrological jewelry, gave me a vinyl copy of Charlie Parker on Verve. I really liked that record, and it got me into bebop. Often, I would play with my Dad in different bands, and then a local musician from Nimbin, the very musical Neil Pike, enlisted me into his group called The Pagan Love Cult. I think that was the first gig I got paid for. I’ve since lived all about the world – Sydney, Norway, New York, London, Iceland and others – playing jazz, and after a conspiracy between a bat and a pangolin made life in New York difficult, I have returned to Dublin where I now get to play with the amazing musicians here and teach the pagan art of astrological jazz cultism at DCU.

Since I am currently back here in the sweltering heat sitting in Ballina (NSW, Australia), and drinking a schooner of Coopers at The Australian Hotel while leathery old men yell at a cattle dog and the absolutely unintimidated dog yells straight back, I thought I would share with you six tracks from six of my favourite Australian jazz recordings and what they mean to me.

I hope you enjoy them…

Dale Barlow Thick As Thieves [From the album Hipnotation (1990)]
This was one of the first records (well, CDs) that I bought for myself. The record store in Lismore (NSW, Australia) special-ordered it for me. I had heard of Dale somehow, and knew he had been in New York playing with The Jazz Messengers and Cedar Walton. I still keep a copy of this recording on my electronic telephone so I can always listen to it. His playing is at once straight-ahead hard-bop,with lots of Coltrane, Mobley and Rollins, and also more contemporary, reflecting aspects of players like George Coleman and Steve Grossmann.

Less tangibly, in Dale I also hear a type of very Australian saxophone tone that is shared by Bernie McGann and others on this list. I had the privilege of studying with Dale when I was at The Sydney Conservatorium, and I used to save up my lessons so I could turn up at his house with a full rhythm section and use the afternoon for a session. One of the most outrageously great musicians I have ever met.

Bernie McGann Spirit Song [From the album Kindred Spirits (1987)]
Bernie McGann is an iconoclast. Mythology has it that he used to be a postman, and would take his horn on his postal route in South Sydney and practice in the bush during his lunch.

He sounds like he has been playing outside. The tone is broad and full on the alto saxophone. One could be forgiven for mistaking it for a tenor at times. The closest comparison I could make is to someone like Steve Lacy perhaps – but also not really at all. His playing is fierce, and seems somehow drenched in heat and dust and blood. I only ever got to meet him a couple of times briefly and when I did it was a big moment for me – but I heard him live a lot when I was still quite young visiting my grandmother in Sydney. I really like his compositions too. I am thinking we might play one at the gig The Whale in Greystones in February.

Mark Simmonds Freeboppers Virtue [From the album Fire (1993)]
I used to go and see this group in the 1990s at the Strawberry Hills Hotel in Surrey Hills. I walked away a mess every single time. Mark Simmonds is to a Sunday afternoon jazz audience at the local pub what T.E. Lawrence was to the Ottoman Empire. You can’t see it coming, you aren’t ready to respond. A blustering sandstorm of a saxophonist (okay, okay, I drop the analogy here). You just have to hear him to know it is the real deal.

It is entirely his music, raw and ruthlessly honest, but sure there is a lot of ’60s Free Jazz and post-Trane in his approach too. An absolutely unique Australian improviser. The band are all killing too. Scott Tinkler on trumpet, Steve Elphick on bass, and Simon Barker on drums. Simon Barker is one of the few drummers who could have done this gig in my opinion. I once saw Mark play with a pick up rhythm section in a different city, and no mercy was spared for the drummer.

Gordon Brisker Wozzeck’s Dilemma [From the album My Son John (2001)]
The first Coltrane-influenced tenor player to play in Woody Herman’s band, Gordo also played with the likes of Gerry Mulligan, Louie Bellson, Bobby Shew and Ireland’s own Jim Doherty. He was the most important teacher I have ever had, teaching me at The Sydney Conservatorium after retiring to Sydney from the USA.

He was the sort of teacher that taught you more than you could have expected, by not really teaching you at all. “Hey man, what tune do you want to play today?”, was most often the first and last assignment for the lesson. Then we would trade choruses, eights, fours and play bass lines and guide tones through the changes while the other would improvise. He really taught music as an oral tradition, and taught in a way where you felt he was sharing with you an inheritance. One of the sweetest humans ever, and what a sound!

Mike Nock Land of the Long White Cloud [From the album Ondas (1982)]
Mike is another one of my past teachers. He is a Kiwi originally, who lived in the USA for a long time playing with Yusef Lateef’s band and also The Jazz Messengers, plus many other very significant American Jazz musicians. The album, Ondas, was one he made for ECM, and features Eddie Gomez on bass and the Swedish jazz drummer Jon Christensen from Keith Jarrett’s European Quartet. Mike taught me composition privately and I also played in his ensemble at the conservatorium. He was somewhat famous for bollocking his students, and sure he did not accept mediocrity at all. But as soon as the lesson was over he was the sort of guy to take you for a coffee and talk for hours about life and books, music and the universe. Although I do remember re-writing an arrangement for him thirteen times (thirteen!), he never failed to teach with a lot of love at the same time. He is one of the many people on this list I am daily grateful to have learnt from.

Jamie Oehlers Knuckles [From the album Strut (1998)]
This last record is really special for me, as it features my late friend, the trumpeter Rod Mayhew. Playing with Rod was some of the first real Jazz gigs I ever did. That was an experience! We had a great time, however most of those stories are unsuitable for publication. He grew up not so far from me – in the Northern NSW town of Glen Innes. At the age of 18 he won a scholarship to promote the Miles Davis movie Dingo, set in Australia, and galivant around the USA playing with people like Wynton Marsalis, Eddie Henderson and Eric Reed. He was a special player, and his untimely death a real loss.

This record also features, of course, Jamie Oehlers, who is an unbelievable saxophone player. If you want to hear really insane stuff on the saxophone made sound easy – he is your guy. Sydney pianist Bobby Gebert is also notable here. It seems this album is out of print and not digitised, so instead here is a link to a very young Rod playing with Aussie Jazz legends Bernie McGann, John Pochee, and the singular singer Joe Bebop Lane.

Noice. you can catch Daniel Rorke alongside Ricky Simpson, Dave Redmond and Shane O’Donovan at The Whale on Thursday, February 1st 2024, tickets here. You can also find out more about the Rorke lad here.