Reviews

Backbeat Project - Johnny Lippiett
Sleep in the 24-hour society - Philippa Gander
Kaimai Crash: New Zealand’s Worst Internal Air Disaster - Richard Waugh
Victorian Poetry as Cultural Critique - Warwick Slinn

Backbeat Project - Johnny Lippiett

Jazz saxophonist Johnny Lippiett, the drive behind the Backbeat Project CD, traces his musical journey back to church: a Pentecostal church near his childhood home in Portsmouth, England to be exact. “They had these amazing singers and musicians up there on stage, and the whole place was going off like it was some Baptist church in the deep south. The first band I ever joined was a church band, simply because of the energy, the way gospel comes straight from the heart,” he says.

From gospel he went to rhythm and blues. Clapton, Page and Hendrix became his idols. But jazz lay in wait: his father was a collector of bebop and “one day he took me to see this American big band playing a tribute to Stan Kenton, and man, I was in awe, watching this hot saxophone section going off right in front of me… and then I got given this Muddy Waters album for my tenth birthday, and that was it dude, I was gone.” At school Lippiett was one of the three boys in his class keen on improvisation. “Here we were, wanting to learn how to wail on our instruments, and our teacher used to say ‘well, you boys go in the music cupboard, and I’ll see you at the end of the lesson’.”

Lippiett went on to study jazz. He was a finalist in the Young Jazz Musician of the Year competition. He toured in support of jazz luminary Courtney Pine, winning plaudits from the Independent as “one of the most exciting and original new voices to be emerging onto the jazz scene.” He played in Montreal, New York and London, which is where he and his band were based when he met Wairarapa-born Phoebe Thorp. Which is how he came to holiday in New Zealand and to meet jazz lecturers Paul Dyne and Roger Sellers. Which is how he became a tutor at the Conservatorium. “The three of us instantly hit it off. Roger had been a resident at Ronnie Scott’s in London, so we had much in common,” says Lippiett.

For those who know their jazz sub-genres, the Backbeat Project is probably best defined as 70s funk. This may not please traditional Winton Marsalis jazz purists, but Lippiett is unrepentent. “I’ve done the straight jazz albums, and my granny still loves them, but no one my age is listening to this stuff. So Phoebe said, ‘Why don’t you make an album so my girlfriends and I can come and support you at your gigs?’ I thought about it and said ‘Why not?’ There’s still some challenging jazz harmony in there, I’ve just put it in a different frame.”

The Backbeat Project was recorded live at the Conservatorium by Richard Caigou. An alumnus, Ben Wilcox, plays the Fender Rhodes; a student, Deva Mahal (daughter of Taj), sings on two tracks; a drum tutor, Lance Phillips, is percussion; a former lecturer, Noel Clayton, plays guitar; and a postgraduate student, Manny Abrahams, who leads the Whitirea music programme, is on bass.

Sleep in the 24-hour society - Philippa Gander

How do dolphins and other marine mammals that must periodically surface to breathe manage to sleep? The answer is that they have the ability to have one half of their brain asleep at a time.

It is sometimes light-heartedly suggested to Professor Philippa Gander that this might be a good stratagem for our own time-pressured species. While Gander is not so sure about living half awake, she can see why the suggestion might be made.

Surveys have shown 37 percent of New Zealanders to be sleep deprived, and one in four has a chronic sleep problem lasting more than six months. Yet sleep, an activity that occupies one third of our lives, has not had that much attention.

No longer. Sleep in the 24-hour Society is accessible and comprehensive, exploring sleep in its many aspects. There could be few authors better qualified to write about the topic than Gander, who spent a number or years working at the NASA Ames Research Centre in the Crew Flight Fatigue and Jet Lag Program and now heads the Sleep/Wake Centre.

Kaimai Crash: New Zealand’s Worst Internal Air Disaster - Richard Waugh

Taking Off: Pioneering Small Airlines of New Zealand 1945-1970 Richard Waugh with Bruce Gavin, Peter Layne and Graeme McConnell

On the morning of 3 July 1963, a day of thick cloud and driving rain, workers at the Gordon quarry, hard alongside the Kaimai ranges, heard an aircraft engine drone overhead then stop abruptly. They phoned the Matamata Police, who called the Tauranga control tower, which had lost contact with ZK-AYZ, a DC-3 carrying three crew and 20 passengers. The plane had flown into a bushed hillside in the Kaimai Range, close by Matamata. There were no survivors.

Kaimai Crash: New Zealand’s Worst Internal Air Disaster documents the loss of ZK-AYZ, the passengers and crew it carried, the rescue operation – which made good use of helicopters – and the court of inquiry that followed.

The next fatal accident of a scheduled airliner on New Zealand soil would not be for another 20 years. This book and a roadside memorial at Gordon unveiled on 3 July 2003 mark an event still strong in living memory, both of the search and rescue men and women and of the friends and relatives of the dead.

ZK-AYZ was owned and operated by NAC, the National Airways Corporation of New Zealand, but post war there were also a host of small airlines doing whatever they could to stay in business and flying a plane-spotter’s delight of small aircraft. Taking Off: Pioneering Small Airlines of New Zealand 1945–1970 is a comprehensive – 200 pages with many photos and illustrations – look at the eventful history of these airlines and the resourceful and adventurous individuals who ran them.

Alumnus Richard Waugh, whose father was a pilot, has written prolifically about New Zealand aviation history. He is also an ordained minister.

Victorian Poetry as Cultural Critique - Warwick Slinn

If poetry reflects cultural processes, including
the politics of its time, what should we make of:
Some ways can be trodden back,
But never our way,
We who one wild day
Have given goodbye to what in our deep hearts
The lowest woman still holds best in life,
Good name.

The excerpt is from Augusta Webster’s 1870 monologue dramatising the private reflections of a courtesan. It is one example cited by Professor Warwick Slinn in his new book, Victorian Poetry as Cultural Critique: On the politics of literary language.

The book focuses on Victorian writing but it has far broader aims and was developed in response to the tendency of recent cultural studies to neglect poetic language. The argument is that if we are to understand fully the function of figurative language in cultural processes, we need to devote serious attention to that language. The poems selected for analysis address social issues such as slavery, sexual politics, prostitution, consciousness, agency, aestheticism, religious faith and philosophical idealism.

The book is part of a series on Victorian literature and culture produced by the University of Virginia Press, which receives a high academic profile in North America. Professor Slinn is Head of the School of English and Media Studies.