Spring News

The Ellington Jazz Club is the classiest and most sophisticated jazz venue in Perth. Since 2009 when the club was established it has been my dream to perform there. My girlfriend Maneera de Mel has made that dream come true. On Sunday 2 November 2012 I, along with my jazz band Mint Jazz Band, will be performing there! Tickets can be purchased here.

Rehearsals for the show at The Ellington as well as another gig with Mint (7-10pm on Friday 12 October at The Wild Fig Café, Scarborough) have started. The set list for those gigs will feature a selection of songs from the repertoires recently published on the Jazz Singer and Funk/Soul/Pop Singer pages of this website. I aim to upload some songs from earlier jazz performances when the chance arises.

Working as an Administrative Officer as part of the New Approaches to Teaching Team for The University of Western Australia’s School of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine has been challenging and exciting. I am currently writing an article about that for MeDeFacts which will be submitted in November this year. In addition, my interview with Damien Leith was recently published by Drum Media Perth who also gave me the opportunity to interview Dennis Mackrel, the musical director of The Legendary Count Basie Orchestra. The Freelance Journalist page of this website will feature these works after they are published.

In terms of the literary arts, I am currently undertaking an online course in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry with The University of Pennsylvania that is available for free through social entrepreneurship company Coursera. I am also looking forward to watching one of my favourite plays, Henrik Ibsen’s play “Ghosts” (1881), with Hanna Scott who studied it with me in Year 12 English Literature, as well as seeing Sarah Kane’s play “Crave” (1998) with my friend Marcus Platt who will be departing Perth for Melbourne soon. Those two friends of mine have been a key part of Jake’s Book Club since I started it last year.

Jake’s Book Club meets once a month to discuss, over drinks and nibbles, a modern classic that is no longer than 250 pages. If you know someone who would love to join our book club direct them to our Facebook page. These are the books of the month that we voted for then read so far:

2011
January: Charles Webb’s The Graduate (1963)
February: Truman Capote’s Summer Crossing (1950)
March: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
April: Elie Wiesel’s Night (1955)
May: Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse (1927)
June: S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1965)
July: Andre Gide’s The Immoralist (1902)
August: Tennessee Williams’ Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958)
September: David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1993)
October: John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946)
November: Ernest Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
December: Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist (1988)

2012
January: Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
February: Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923)
March: Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915)
April: Tim Winton’s In the Winter Dark (1988)
May: Milan Kundera’s Identity (1999)
June: Bret Easton Elis’s Less Than Zero (1985)
July: Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898)
August: J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999)
September: Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962)

I will finish this blog with a haiku I wrote and published earlier this year in the Creative Connections 2012 Anthology that uses spring as its theme:

gold seeds in moist earth

catch light with first leaves: children

clasp bright falling stars