Tall Poppy From Ngaruawahia

Mike Nock
1450
22 / 04 / 05

Tall Poppy From Ngaruawahia

“In many ways, Australia is something of a cultural desert - there is the occasional oasis but too many areas where Art is simply not valued. Interestingly enough many of the best Australian musicians happen to be New Zealanders! There are more artists per head of population and a better general standard of artistic awareness here in New Zealand than in Australia because I believe the Arts generally get better support here.”

This glowing assessment comes from one of those very musicians - Mike Nock, ONZM, an ex-patriate New Zealander living in Sydney, who has forged a stellar international career as a jazz pianist, teacher and composer.

Mike Nock was back in New Zealand over the first weekend in April on behalf of Oxfam, to play a concert in Wellington to help raisefunds for the victims of the Dafur humanitarian disaster. [The concert, recorded by Concert FM, will be broadcast later in the year.] He was also visiting his mother in Nelson, and delivering a commission to the New Zealand Piano Quartet before heading back to teach at the Sydney Conservatorium. His accent is appropriately polyglot – New Zealand expressions spiced with a soft American drawl and tempered by an Australasian twang

“It’s great to be back,” he says with a languid smile. “Even through all the years in the US I knew that I would come back to this part of the world because I feel at home here. I don’t think of Australia and New Zealand as being very different - it feels like the same part of the world to me.”

Mike was born in Christchurch but spent his childhood in Ngaruawahia, just north of Hamilton. “It was a little town in the 1940s,” Mike recalls. “The roads were unsealed and we didn’t have many luxuries. Kids were pretty much left to their own devices and had free run around the neighborhood. I was a pretty feisty kid - always getting into fights and trouble but music-making proved my salvation.

“It was my father that started me on piano. He taught me from the Art Shefte piano method books and would insist that I learned each page thoroughly before going on. But as soon as he left the house I would skip ahead to get to see what was on the following pages. I’ve continued to be an impatient learner like that like ever since, although I’ve come to understand there is no short-cuts and what you overlook you eventually have to return to and come to terms with.”

“I grew up hearing a wide range of music on National Radio. In those days they had a fairly catholic approach. For example light classical pieces, jazz, pop or dance music were often presented together. Radio nowadays is much more regimented. It tends to be commercially driven and listeners are told what to like. I believe having access to a wide range of music is very important, especially in the formative stages of one’s life.”

“As a 10 and 11 year old, I decided to get a neighborhood band together. We had the piano, a cornet and a guitar, together with some miscellaneous noise makers - such as alarm clocks etc. Spike Jones and his City Slickers were an early influence - we’d heard them on the radio. Of course we couldn’t play any tunes as such - so we made up our own. It was a case of improvisational necessity being the mother of composition!”

At 11, Mike’s father died and his mother took him and his two younger sisters to live in Nelson. Mike continued to teach himself to play, and to improvise with musicians that he met. “I had some pretty strange ideas as a kid. I was convinced that I would die young, and that I could achieve anything I wanted with sufficient willpower. When I was improvising, I often used to imagine being surrounded by the spirits of old jazz musicians listening intently to me! I joined a local jazz club and was introduced to this wild world of jazz. It was somehow ‘sinful’ but also very exciting, a mysterious and magical world. I had a bit of trouble with the law, nothing too serious, but remember that at one point I was on the verge of being sent to borstal. When I realised that I wouldn’t be able to play the piano once there I straightened myself out! Playing piano was always a source of solace for me. I couldn’t have survived without it.”

Mike worked at Beggs in Wellington for a while then joined a band called the Fabulous Flamingos, based at the time at Palmerston North’s motor camp, but with Jazz in his blood it was inevitable that he would end up in America. Over the following 25 years he worked with many of the top names in the genre: Coleman Hawkins, Yusef Lateef, Dionne Warwick and Michael Brecker to name just a few. “Actually, I never got a gig by auditioning!” Mike admits almost shyly. “It was always through people who knew me. I would get a phone call asking if I was interested in playing for so and so, and that would be it. Like many New Zealanders in that era, I tended to be terribly self-conscious. The ‘Tall Poppy Syndrome’ was an active reality and it worked against me somewhat in the States. There were many times I could have put my career forward, but so often when meeting my idols, or anyone for that matter who I thought might have been influential work-wise, I would become a blithering idiot. Nowadays the young generation of New Zealand musicians are far more sure of themselves and of their abilities.

“ I’m constantly amazed by the high level of musicianship I find among young musicians in Australasia. There is generally a very high level of competence and awareness. We do have to maintain the entry standards for our performance courses though. Students need to be challenged, not indulged. We need always to aim for excellence and that includes saying ‘No! That is not good enough!”

Mike moved back to the Southern Hemisphere 20 years ago eventually settling across the Tasman. Before he moved back though, in 1982 he visited and hosted a highly successful television series, Nock on Jazz, for TVNZ. Since moving back to this part of the world he continues to tour internationally with various sized combinations from solo piano to his ten piece BigSmallBand and tutors at the Sydney conservatorium where he has the luxury of leading his own hand-picked ensemble and is spending more time composing for various combinations of instruments and players.

“I don’t find it easy to let a piece ‘go’ – I’m always changing things right up until the last moment. I find engraving the pieces via computer, is an endless process of revision and adjustment. Even the solo piano pieces that I play, which everyone thinks ( myself included ) should be easy! But it is one thing to perform improvisations and quite another thing to compose and then learn the pieces as written. I believe a different part of the brain is used. Jazz musicians express themselves in an idiomatic way that involves so many things which can’t be notated; particularly the feel. With composition you give the piece over to the person or group who will play it and it is out of your hands. You just hope that it will sound the way you intended it to! Sometimes it sounds even better than you imagined - its always a bonus when that happens.

Given his teaching commitments, it is no surprise that Mike writes a lot for Jazz ensembles. But he also has a piano concerto, several works for ensembles such as the New Zealand String Quartet, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Synergy, Melbourne WindPower and Ensemble 24 among many others, as well as a sizeable repertoire for solo piano to his credit. And now, of course, his latest commission - the work which he delivered to the New Zealand Piano Quartet while he was in Wellington.

“When I write music, I don’t just write jazz pieces. Usually I’m writing with a particular group of players in mind, and the style and genre of that group informs my composition. Composition takes time and concentration and it is often really hard to get enough of both. A while ago I received a two year Fellowship from the Australian Arts Council which gave me some ‘breathing space’ and encouraged me to really work at my composition. It was like a ‘seal of approval’ from the establishment and gave me a big confidence boost to continue in my direction.

“I tend not to be formal in my composition - I write what I want to hear rather than following prescribed forms like sonata or rondo or contrapuntal forms. My relationship to music has always been emotional - and that is something which comes through equally in my playing as in my composition. Most of my pieces represent an emotional journey. Finding the starting point is often difficult, but once underway I like to see where it goes. I think of myself as a storyteller with sound. “Although I find,” he adds as an aside, “the more I compose, the more I realise just how great some of the great composers were!”

Mike has a website on www.mikenock.com. You can also find more information about him, his CDs and scores through www.sounz.org.nz, the website for SOUNZ: the Centre for NZ Music. A comprehensive list of Mike’s compositions can also be requested from at SOUNZ.

ENDS

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