Graham Reid | | 1 min read
For a man who has spent his life in the earnest art of jazz, Mike Nock laughs a lot, enjoying his deep well of anecdotes, appreciating a joke at his own expense and – when it's suggested a hallmark of his diverse career is that there's no obvious hallmark – laughs until he's breathless.
It's no surprise Norman Meehan's 2010 biography of 83-year old Nock was titled Serious Fun.
Nock spent much of his formative years in Ngāruawāhia, a small town musically, emotionally and culturally distant from Sydney, New York and San Francisco where he made his name.
Yet he maintained strong connections here, returning frequently for concerts and recording albums as diverse as the soundtrack to Geoff Stevens' 1983 film Strata, improvised duets with drummer Frank Gibson on 1987s Open Door, and more recently with the NZTrio, Auckland saxophonist Roger Manins and others.
So, no hallmark.
“I'm not really a jazz musician,” he says despite a shelf of Australian awards and considerable evidence to the contrary. “I'm definitely from that music which shaped and formed me . . . but I'm a white boy from New Zealand,” he laughs, not for the last time in a digressive conversation.
Adding to the many awards in Australia, his home for decades, Nock – made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2003 for services to jazz – is being inducted into the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame at the APRA Silver Scroll Awards in October.
“Why I'm so happy to receive this award is I think of myself as not so much a jazz musician but just a musician. Period. I express myself in jazz . . . but this is special because it's just a New Zealand music award, a culmination of everything I've been about.”
Despite his cavalier attitude – “Jazz? What does that even mean anymore?” – he has described jazz as “a calling”, imbued with deep personal meaning.
“It goes back to when my father died. I was about 12 and at his deathbed in Ngāruawāhia. I'd been a staunch Catholic, an altar boy and all that, and . . .
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To read the rest of this extensive interview go the Listener online here where there are also five important Mike Nock albums singled out.
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There are number of album reviews and interviews with Mike Nock at Elsewhere starting here.
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