28 Nov 2024
Primitive Art Group emerged into the Wellington music scene in the late 1970s, a free jazz ensemble with practically no local role models and very few contemporaries. By the beginning of the 1990s, the group was no more but its impact shaped many careers.
Daniel Beban has put the development and evolution of this influential group of musicians into social and political context in Future Jaw-Clap: The Primitive Art Group and Braille Collective Story.
Daniel went deep into the story, interviewing 55 individual musicians, artists, and political activists, and trawling through unofficial, personal archives for photos, posters, and recordings to select 130 images for the book.
“I wanted the book to mirror the innovative nature of the music that is its subject. So, just as the individual musician is given freedom to express themselves within a collective improvisation, this book gives space for individual voices. The interview chapters punctuate the chronological narrative, and those personal accounts bring the story to life,” Daniel says.
The story started when saxophonist Stuart Porter and drummer Anthony Donaldson began playing as a duo in 1978. By 1982, after several permutations, Primitive Art Group was a five-piece. By 1984, they’d formed the Braille Collective and were releasing LPs on their own label, Braille Records. The members of Primitive Art Group and Braille split in different musical directions later in the 1980s, spreading beyond Wellington and continuing to evolve.
Listening was central to the practice of the musicians, to the extent that Daniel’s working title for the book was Listening Through Other Ears. The final title, Future Jaw-Clap, is taken from Primitive Art group’s second album, released on Braille Records. Founding member Anthony Donaldson described it as ‘Dada word assemblage,’ a phrase from which everyone takes their own meaning.
“The title reflects that these people were willing to take risks, to create spontaneously, and to experiment. They were committed to their own sound, an original style of music that stemmed from their place and time in the world,” Daniel says.
As the story developed, Daniel realised readers also needed the experience of listening. He did some experimenting of his own and created a streamable online music selection that is accessed from a QR code that comes with the book.
“I wanted readers to hear this distinct music language that draws on free improvisation, contemporary composed music, radical jazz, ragtime, musique concrète, gamelan, and Pacific music. With all those elements in the mix, the sound is somehow unique.”
The music selection was drawn from about 50 hours' worth of unpublished, mostly live recordings from Primitive Art Group and the various Braille ensembles. Some were on reel-to-reel or cassette tapes, so the sound needed engineering and mastering to get near the quality of the published recordings.
“It was quite daunting, trying to decide what tracks should go on the playlist. Just listening through to all the recording back-to-back would take more than two days! In the end I trusted my intuitive musical judgment and chose the tracks fairly quickly. It's a soundtrack and parallels the trajectory of the story, so the tracks follow on from each other year-to-year from '78 through to the early '90s.”
Members of the Braille Collective have gone on to become some of NZ's most successful musicians and screen composers. Janet Roddick, Steve Roche, and David Donaldson now work together as Plan 9, composing soundtracks for television and film. David Watson has become a highly respected performer based in New York. David Long performed with The Muttonbirds during the 1990s and now composes for contemporary music ensembles, dance and film. Anthony Donaldson, Stuart Porter, Neill Duncan, and Gerard Crewdson have had successful musical careers, and most continue to perform and record regularly.
Daniel thinks stories like this are important, and need to be told.
“These musicians often slip through the gaps, but what they achieved musically is just as important as say the Flying Nun bands coming out of Christchurch and Dunedin around the same time. So it's important to broaden our understanding of music in Aotearoa, and to value and respect the mahi of these musicians and the contribution they have made. For all of us musicians in Wellington, it's really great to be able to read this history of our musical family. And I hope it will enable future generations of musicians in the city to know who came before them.”
Daniel Beban, Future Jaw-Clap: The Primitive Art Group and Braille Collective Story, publ. Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington Press, 2024.
Daniel Beban’s work has been supported by Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage Oral History Award 2014, the 2019 Lilburn Research Fellowship and the Lilburn Trust, and an Arts Grant from Creative New Zealand towards the cost of publication.
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