Overview

A study of John Sangster’s jazz suite The Lord of the Rings contextualized with biographical and cultural studies of the composer in the 1970s. In three volumes and more than six LP recordings, The Lord of the Rings suite, produced during the 1970s, based on the Tolkien books, is the most ambitious, stylistically and emotionally wide-ranging compositional oeuvre ever undertaken in Australian jazz. Its composer (and one of its performers) John Sangster embraced the historical spectrum of jazz styles, from traditional to the avant-garde, through performance, recording and film/TV music. Sangster, whose career spanned from the late 1940s until his death in 1995, was one of the most complex figures in Australian music. In both temperament and musical style, he ranged from light to darkness, idolized by his colleagues, yet susceptible to (literally) homicidal rage. Nothing in the recording history of Australian jazz, and perhaps Australian music in general, matches the monumental stature of these volumes, which he called his musical autobiography.

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Bruce Johnson is honorary professor in a range of disciplines including Music, Cultural History and Communications at University of Technology Sydney, Australia; University of Turku, Finland; University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK. He is co-founder of the Australian Jazz Archives, government advisor on arts policy, author/editor of over a dozen books, mainly on jazz, and is an active jazz musician.

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