BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
This story also features in Warp Magazine, June 2018.
Joshua Dunn, 27, returns to his home state of Tasmania for the first time since making it big in New York.
The jazz guitarist achieved a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to study, and in the past year he’s performed about 300 shows on the jazz circuit.
This University of Tasmania graduate tells us about life in the states, before he tours Australia’s southern-most island this month.
Joshua, first of all, congratulations on your success in New York City. Tell us about the circumstances surrounding your departure from Tasmania.
It’s great to speak with you! It was complete coincidence that I heard about the Fulbright scholarship, actually. I happened to meet a visiting American Fulbright Scholar in 2012 who is now a close friend. She’d come to Tasmania to study Tasmanian folk dancing, and as someone who was a part of the Tasmanian folk scene, it completely floored me that there were people out there who would pay for someone to come to all this way to study such a niche project.
So, I thought: “If they’re willing to fund an ethnomusicological study on Tasmanian folk dancing, surely there’s hope for me.”
Then I received a study grant from Arts Tasmania and Australia Council for the Arts to travel around the United States in 2013, and halfway through the trip I stepped off the plane in New York and thought: “This is where I need to be.” So I started work on the application while I was there, and got lucky!
I love Tasmania, and it will always be a home for me. It still has one of the most vibrant arts scenes of any place I’ve ever been, and I feel very lucky to have grown up surrounded by a community of excellent musicians and mentors. The thing I value about New York is that jazz musicians from all around the globe are attracted to it. It’s a hub for this music, and because of that it has some opportunities that a small island at the bottom of the world doesn’t. But I’m still so excited to be coming back.
So what have you been up to in America, anyway?
I’ve been coming back and forth between the US and Tasmania, for one reason or another, most years since 2013. The Fulbright, with assistance from UTAS, funded me to do my Masters at William Paterson University; a really great, small jazz program just over the border in New Jersey. I graduated from that in 2017.
The course was great, and I learnt a lot. However, the main reason I wanted to be there was to immerse myself in the jazz scene in NYC. So in the evenings after I finished classes, I’d usually take the train to Manhattan or Brooklyn and play gigs, go to sessions, and watch performances. That was hugely important for me, because it meant that right after graduation I moved to Brooklyn already knowing a lot of musicians, and I was able to start gigging most nights.
Now, that’s just what I do I play pretty much exclusively early jazz in a variety of bands and formats, five to seven nights a week in the city. It’s big change from Tassie life, but I love it.
For an Aussie muso, performing in the jazz clubs of New York would surely be a dream.
As a performer, it’s so exciting to be able to get on stage and know that the audience is there because they know and love jazz. So if you play an obscure Cole Porter tune, people will recognise it because they’ve been listening to this music their whole lives.
Like everywhere, though, there’s always a compromise to be made between artistry and economics. I’d love to be playing at big-name jazz clubs every night of the week, but the reality is that only a small number of people can make a living from that, and that a lot of a working musicians’ lives are spent performing at dive bars, weddings, private parties, and pubs, because those gigs pay the bills.
Thankfully, I enjoy that side of things too. I [recently] played solo guitar for a few hours at some marketing executive’s penthouse in TriBeCa, and had a great time. It’s definitely very special to be playing on a stage where you’ve watched some of your musical heroes play in the past, but I’m still just excited to be earning a living from playing guitar every night.
What’s been your most memorable experience to date? Anything extremely exciting (or anxiety inducing)?
There’ve been a few really memorable moments, like performing with Bill Charlap at Dizzy’s Jazz Club Coca Cola last year, or playing with my trio at Cornelia Street Cafe in March, or playing at the Lincoln Centre last month.
But one of the most nerve-wracking was a gig I did last year, just before I moved from New Jersey to Brooklyn. I got a call from this singer that I had never met for a gig on a Saturday night. I said yes, and then looked him up, and it turns out he’s pretty well-known in the jazz scene, so I thought ‘great’.
Then, on the Saturday morning, I get a message from him asking me to make sure I wear a tuxedo (at the time, I owned one very cheap suit I’d bought from a menswear store on Macquarie St in Hobart) and told me who else was on the gig.
It turned out that the bass player in the band was someone I’d listened to for years on albums and YouTube, and the saxophonist was one of Australia’s premier jazz musicians in NYC. In my mind, the gig was a trainwreck from start to finish, but it mustn’t have been too bad because the singer is now my main employer in the city.
I still need to buy a tuxedo, though.
You’ll be hitting up some fantastic venues on your Tasmania tour throughout June. How do you feel Tassie audiences respond to or understand jazz, in comparison to what you’ve seen in America?
I feel that Australian audiences respond to jazz and improvised music in a different way to audiences in New York. I guess there’s a reason why it’s called The Great American Songbook — it’s a repertoire that reflects American culture and history, and it’s very understandable that Australians don’t have the same connection to that world. So a performance of jazz standards in Australia becomes more about the interaction and connection between the musicians themselves, and the audience. It’s a subtle difference, but it’s one that is really key, I think.
I’m excited to be coming back to play in Tassie for a few weeks. Danny Healy is a bit of a hero of mine, and has been a really important mentor in my life; we’ve got a bunch of gigs lined up together that will be great fun, especially with Hamish Houston on bass and Tom Robb on drums, who are both fantastic musicians.
What are some of the key lessons you have learnt in the US so far?
I learnt so much at William Paterson University. My guitar teacher Gene Bertoncini was a fantastic mentor to me, he’s just turned 81, and has played with the great figures of jazz history, like Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Chet Baker, Clark Terry, and so many others. He still performs a lot and I’ll regularly catch up and sit in with him.
I also benefited a great deal from the other students in the program. Being immersed in an environment filled with young, talented, and competitive jazz musicians was an excellent way to challenge and extend myself.
Most importantly, however, I learnt that music school is only one part of your education. The most important thing I did while in school was to finish my classes and go to shows, gigs, and jam sessions most nights to put what I was learning in a practical context. School can only offer so much, and can’t prepare you for every challenge that real life presents. Nor should it.
What do you love most about living and working in NY?
The cliche is that New York is fast-paced, really big, and never sleeps. That’s actually what I love most about it — there’s so much music happening at any given moment. That means that there’s a tonne of work as musician, but also that you can go and see your friends perform after you finish your gig, or go and see any one of a dozen other arts events that are happening around you.
And as big as NYC is, there’s a strong sense of community. Because there are so many musicians here, there’s a shared view that we’re all getting through the grind together, and there’s a lot of support for one another and a sense of camaraderie that I really appreciate.
Why are you coming back to Tasmania now – and what are you most looking forward to?
It’s been almost two years since I’ve been back in Tasmania, and I’ve been meaning to make a trip back for some time. I love winter in Tasmania — there’s so much going on and Dark Mofo is always terrific, so the trip is based a little around that. I also have family and friends that I want to see, and I need to do some life-organising so I can keep going back and forth between Tasmania and NYC.
Will we ever get you back, or are you going to spread the love for jazz in NY far into the future?
I think that somewhere in the fine print of UTAS helping to fund my study there was the condition that I come back to do a PhD here at some point, so I expect that I’ll continue to go back and forth between Tassie and NYC for the foreseeable future. I’ve got a fair few things to finish in New York before I’m ready to settle in Tasmania for good, though.
Any parting words?
I think that’s about everything. I should probably get back to practice.
Catch Joshua Dunn on his Tassie tour:
- June 12 — Hobart Jazz Club, Claremont, Hobart
- June 17 — Mona atrium, Berriedale
- June 24 — The Wharf, Ulverstone
- June 27 — Henry Jones Art Hotel, Hunter St, Hobart
- June 29 — Willie Smith’s Apple Shed, Grove, Huon Valley
- June 30 — Yambu, Elizabeth St, Hobart
Shout the writer an avocado on toast?
We volunteer our time here at CutCommon. Shout Stephanie brunch for putting together this story, if you like. It’s completely up to you.
Images supplied. Pay what you like through PayPal. (You don’t *actually* have to take the writer out.) We protect your personal information.
