Above image: George Washingmachine
Stephen Washington and I first started playing music together in 1985 and every now and again we still do it… A reminder for all musicians; whatever you think you are doing and however serious you think you are, it’s all “novelty music”.
– Ian Date
This concert at Church Street Studios on Saturday December 20 celebrated the 40th anniversary of two of Australia’s greatest jazz musicians playing together: singer/violinist George Washingmachine and guitarist Ian Date, who met in 1985. These two masters were joined by two similarly outstanding musicians, drummer Andrew Dickeson and a relatively new kid on the block, double bassist Jacob Graham. This quartet produced a faultless exhibition of what one might call “small band swing jazz”, which contained endless delights.
I’ve been waiting for many years for an opportunity to hear Ian Date playing live again. I last heard him some 30 years ago at one of those legendary Thredbo Jazz Festivals sometime in the 1990s. Since then he’s been mostly overseas, primarily resident in Ireland I understand, but now is back in Australia, and living in the northern rivers area of New South Wales. As he’s one of the leading Australian jazz musicians whose exceedingly successful career deserves to be to be fully documented, I hope to do an interview with him soon for my Australian jazz history website.
At that Thredbo festival I mentioned, there was as usual a stellar line-up of leading performers, but Date was very much one of the stars of the event, performing with groups under his own leadership, and also sitting in with many of his likeminded colleagues during a packed weekend of brilliant performances.
This must have been circa 1996, as my partner and our two small kids came along too. We stayed in Thredbo village in very pleasant surroundings, where many concerts took place in various venues. My daughter Carla, then about seven years old, was learning to play the violin, so I particularly wanted her to hear the violinist Ian Cooper who was on the program. I was hoping that the experience of hearing such a world-class violinist might turn her on to jazz. Carla was indeed impressed by him, and I was glad she was able to hear him, as he was then, as far as I knew, one of the two outstanding jazz violinists in the country, the other being of course George Washingmachine.
Sorry for the pun, but Washingmachine of course had another string to his bow, which Cooper lacked – George was also an impeccable singer with an encyclopaedic knowledge of standards in the Great American Songbook. That includes not only their lyrics but also their melodies, which he’s able to deliver with virtuosic accuracy. He opened this gig with the 1943 Cole Porter classic You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To, followed by If I Could Be With You (One Hour Tonight) which later I was interested to discover, was written by James P Johnson in 1926. The third number was It’s The Talk of the Town, written by Jerry Livingston, published in 1933.
The latter is not the sort of song one hears very often. Perhaps only a listener who’s been around for as long as I have will have heard it before. Such tunes were common fare in my experience circa 1965-85 when our bands were playing dance music in the licensed clubs, and backing an army of cabaret artists.
Whenever I’ve heard Washingmachine perform, his programs are always a judicious mixture of familiar tunes, and others less well-known. He does not limit himself to the well-known. He’s always likely to spice up his repertoire with very unusual numbers which provide variety, not to mention the sound of surprise, for example the rarely performed Palm Springs Jump.
This great tune was apparently included on the spur of the moment at Church Street Studios, as Date chimed in with the story that they had performed this tune in the company of the composer Slim Gaillard himself – actually, I was informed later, at a concert that took place in Newcastle Upon Tyne in the UK in 1986. Apparently Gaillard couldn’t remember that he’d written it. In order to celebrate this story Washingmachine grabbed his phone, where the lyrics were available, and did a spontaneous rendition. That sort of spontaneity was endemic to this performance throughout.
There were several tunes that I don’t remember hearing before, such as Shorty Rogers’ Love is a Rose; Fats Waller’s rarely heard Persian Rug; and the Nat King Cole hit song of the mid-50s, Don’t Let it Go to Your Head. That’s the beauty of hearing an artist such as George Washingmachine, with his comprehensive command of the broad literature of jazz; you’re always likely to hear tunes you’ve never heard before, and you’re immediately glad that you did.
Of course, there were familiar tunes too: To Each His Own, written by Jay Livingstone for the 1946 film of the same name; Nature Boy, given to Nat King Cole by the unique composer Eden Ahbez in 1948, which needs no explanation to all music lovers; Hoagy Carmichael’s spirited Riverboat Shuffle; and two other more contemporary numbers Witchcraft, written by Cy Coleman, probably best-known for the 1957 Frank Sinatra version; and Just You Just Me which, although it dates back to 1929, has been recorded umpteen times by so many jazz musicians over the years, that it sounds quite modern to contemporary ears.
I mentioned above the idiom “small band swing jazz”. I feel this needs some defining, in order to distinguish it from the music played by big bands of the swing era, which in my mind is a somewhat separate idiom. The shorter term “swing jazz” is rather lightweight for me, so I googled it, and was surprised to find, courtesy of AI, a definition which is well worth reproducing here:
Swing jazz is a vibrant, dance-focused jazz style popular in the 1930s-40s, known for its “swing” rhythm (lilting, syncopated eighth notes)… and strong rhythmic drive, creating an irresistible, buoyant feel that made it America’s pop music of the era. It emerged from earlier jazz, emphasized improvisation over written arrangements… and provided a joyful escape during the Great Depression.
This is a model definition of the sort of music played by Washingmachine and Date. Their approach recalls the pre-bebop era, and also for that matter the pre-vinyl era, when jazz groups were recording 78s and a tune might go for no longer than three minutes. This meant that soloists had to say what they needed to say very briefly, as there was no time available for them to go on indefinitely. Throughout this gig at Church Street both Washingmachine and Date emulated this tradition, showing they were absolute masters of the short improvisation.
Also, the pre-bebop era was characterised by fun and joy in the music, which meant that the jazz played then was much more entertaining than in subsequent eras. With the advent of bebop in the mid-40s, that fun in the music tended to dissipate, as the bop musicians believed they were not so much entertainers, but rather were now playing art music, and should be taken more seriously than the previous swing musicians.
I feel that the music we heard on this night at Church Street Studios can best be understood in these terms. Washingmachine and Date are, in my view, performing an invaluable service in keeping alive this joyful spirit in the music that more modern forms have lacked since the advent of bop.
The normal modus operandi is for Washingmachine to sing the tune, then it’s over to Date for a solo – relatively short, usually no more than one or two choruses – then Washingmachine plays a solo of similar length on violin. Then it might be over to fours or eight-bar breaks with the drums, or breaks spread around the four players, and possibly a bass solo before the vocal is sung again.
As for Andrew Dickeson, whether he was playing with brushes, or using sticks on his cymbals, or playing parts of his solos using hands and fingers, or using his mallets, there was always an armoury of nuanced techniques available to him on the drums to provide contrast in the music. Thank heavens he is teaching at the Sydney Con and therefore influencing new generations of professional jazz drummers. There are two things in particular I love about his playing: his willingness to bring the volume down to a whisper from time to time; and when he really wants the music to swing, the use of his stick on the rim of the snare drum, creating impeccable momentum while at the same time leaving space in the music for the sound of improvisations to be clearly heard.
A quick final word on double bassist Jacob Graham. Little more needs to be said than he was in no way outclassed by the three virtuosic musicians who surrounded him. On the contrary it should be enough to say simply that he was up there with the others, anchoring the rhythm section along with Dickeson, and playing exceedingly brilliant solos which were distinguished by a great sound. I would unhesitatingly bracket him with the other four great bassists active in Sydney jazz: Swanton, Scott, Hirst and Zwartz. I believe that Graham, even at his relatively young age, is in their class.
This concert took place at Church Street Studios on Saturday December 20, 2025. It featured singer/violinist George Washingmachine, guitarist Ian Date, drummer Andrew Dickeson and double bassist Jacob Graham.
