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Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Correspondence: Jack Brokensha RIP

October 31, 2010 by Doug Ramsey

Mark Stryker, music critic of the Detroit Free Press, sent this note:

Thought you might be interested in this— a couple months ago I recall a comment on your Mitch Miller/Bird post including a reference to the Australian Jazz Quartet/Quintet. The vibraphonist from the group, Jack Brokensha, a longtime Detroiter,Brokensha.jpg died this week at 84. This is a link to the Free Press obituary.
Couldn’t find any YouTube clips with Jack, save a few Motown hits where he’s playing various percussion instruments and/or vibes. There must be film of the band somewhere; I can’t imagine they weren’t on television at some point, particularly when they went back to Australia to play. Interestingly, Jack once showed me a fascinating reel of home movies that he had taken back in the middle ’50s when the AJQ was traveling widely as part of package tours with Miles Davis’s band, Brubeck, Carmen McRae and others. The films were super 8 and they were silent. What stays with me 14 years later is that you saw all the cats relaxed on tour, waiting for the bus, hanging on the street, smiling for the camera (Miles too), plus film of the marquees and clubs in various cities. My memory is hazy but I think he also had film of the various groups performing though the reason this doesn’t stick out is that, as I said, it was all silent footage.
Brokensha was a sweet guy with a firecracker personality. He was a real fixture here.

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Comments

  1. Larry Pryce says

    November 1, 2010 at 6:09 am

    So sad to hear of Jack’s passing. I was fortunate to speak at length with Jack a year ago and was hoping he would have archived photos and/or film of him playing at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge back when he was part of the house band. He couldn’t offer up any resources at the moment, though it sounds like he had a significant stash of archived material.
    Currently I’m working as Associate Producer for Sherman Oaks Creative, a company doing a documentary on the history of Baker’s Keyboard. If you or anyone else delving into Jack’s history unearth any materials linking him to Baker’s Keyboard or playing in Detroit in the late 50’s, please contact me.
    My email address will be changing by New Year’s, but phone numbers would be 989-879-4116 or Cell 989-430-8804.
    Thanks much for your consideration.

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

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Doug’s Books

Doug's most recent book is a novel, Poodie James. Previously, he published Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. He is also the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers. He contributed to The Oxford Companion To Jazz and co-edited Journalism Ethics: Why Change? He is at work on another novel in which, as in Poodie James, music is incidental.

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