Mark Morand, One of Melbourne’s Finest Jazz Guitarists

JGT Contributor talks to a jazz guitarist from ‘down under’ in the beautiful city of Melbourne, Mark Morand.

Mark Morand is a master at accompanying singers.  Of course, he is great as a leader or a sideman in combos, but he works a lot with singers.  He is a “first call” guitarist in Melbourne, Australia, and elsewhere.  In addition to his jazz gigs, he has a lot of fun playing in his funk band.

JB:  Talk about when you started to play guitar and what inspired you to play jazz.

MM:  My first instrument in high school was the bassoon, which I studied for four years.  I didn’t know it then, but it would later be very useful to have learned to read in bass clef, and the fingering of the bassoon is identical to the saxophones, which really helps me today when scoring for my compositions and arrangements.  But at the time, I only had the school instrument, and no money, and a burning desire to pursue music, so after leaving school I got a job and bought a $300 guitar at the local music store.  I had to borrow my first amp – which was carpet-lined, to give you an idea of its quality.  I was nonetheless hugely grateful to the musician friend who loaned it to me.

JB:  Did you study jazz guitar in college and if so, what did you appreciate most about that era of development?

MM:  Some years later I studied jazz theory and improvisation at the University and played guitar in a university ensemble.  I also studied classical theory, and twentieth-century 12-tone theory and sang in the University choir, which gave me a broad-brush appreciation of the giants on whose shoulders we all stand.  I particularly enjoyed hearing the lecturer say things that I thought were true but was not confident about.

JB:  To you, what are three of the most influential jazz guitar albums and why?

In my twenties I worked in two record stores so had access to Spotify-level quantities of music in the pre-digital age, which was pretty good.  Many albums influenced me, but three of them are:

Wes Montgomery’s Alternate Takes.  This is a double album of Wes’ which features two versions of some of the songs.  I still remember my amazement at the infinite reach that Wes had for playing the same song completely differently, it was very inspiring.

Second, The Further Adventures of Jimmy (Smith) and Wes (Montgomery).  This album is still super-cool and, in the same way, that Coltrane took on “My Favorite Things”, shows how pop songs can be transformative in the right hands.

Third, the great Django Reinhardt.  Not an album so much as a body of work. I remember writing a paper on Django at the University and learning that he was amongst the most prolific record makers ever – apparently more than 900 tracks.  His playing and productivity are so very inspirational to me.

JB:  Tell us about your most recent album.

MM:  I am currently mid-way through a major project called 32 Bars which will be a 3-volume set of my original vocal jazz compositions.  We are performing, filming, and recording 32 songs in 32 different venues, and releasing live recordings and videos of each song, one at a time after it is filmed and recorded.

I compose the songs (words and music); arrange them for an 8-piece band (including vocals); book the musicians and the venues, and we perform, film, and record each song in a different club. I do the audio engineering from the stage, set up the seven or eight cameras, play guitar, and try to “be cool Yolande” with varying degrees of success.  Then I do all the audio and video post-production and publish the songs on YouTube and all the streaming services.  The live show has four different vocalists, two of whom are also in the four-piece horn section.

About 40 musicians have contributed to the work so far.  We are about to release the 18th song, “Catapult”, filmed in the eighteenth bar, of what will become a thirty-two-song collection of recordings and videos.  You can check it all out at 32bars.com.au

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JB:  Reflect upon what you find so rewarding in working with singer Jennifer Salisbury.

MM:  Jennifer is hugely talented, has boundless energy and a stylistic range that is wider than any other singer I have ever encountered.  Whether it’s a torch ballad, a swinging standard, a filthy blues, a pop song, or one of my own compositions, Jennifer can deliver it stylistically with one thousand percent. She is also a very talented songwriter with two albums of original music to her credit so far.  I find our duo work to be particularly rewarding – we have been performing in duo format now for more than five years so we have that mysterious stretchy dynamic that can only be created with time.  We also love the same music, so it makes working together a lot of fun.

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JB:  What do you appreciate most about the guitar that you use?

MM:  My Gibson ES-335 is brand new, looks great, and is super-easy to play.  The design of the body allows me to reach right up to the high D, and build chords from high C down. This is something I really love to do, and I have found some guitar body-shapes are not so suited to.  Tonally it’s also great, though I use a modeller to get to the tone that I really want.  I also like the fact that, with a volume control for each pick up, I effectively have a mute switch on the guitar because I use the neck pickup exclusively.

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JB:  What is most rewarding about the solo guitar gigs that you do?

MM:  Playing solo is pretty demanding because you’ve got to deliver both the melodies and the chords and there is absolutely no net.  It’s a great way to really get to know a song intimately.  I prefer to approach a song differently every time rather than map out a single version of it, and playing solo gives me great freedom to do that.  So, I would say that the most rewarding thing about it is the musical standard that it forces you to reach for (and sometimes achieve!)

JB:  Talk about the jazz scene in Melbourne and how you are able to make a living playing music there.

MM:  Melbourne is my hometown and also my favorite city in the world so far, although I really loved Tokyo when I visited there last year.  There are lots of jazz venues, hundreds of live music venues, and about six jazz festivals in the Australian state of Victoria annually.  

The Melbourne Musicians Facebook group has over 30,000 members, in a city of about five million people, so on those figures that’s about one in 160 of us who are, on some level, “musicians”.  Recently one of our jazz musician colleagues had a health crisis and there was a huge and truly heart-warming response from the jazz and wider community, both financially and generally in love and kindness, to support that person and their family.  This pretty much sums up how I experience the live music scene in Melbourne – it’s filled with lovely people who want to do right by everyone.  

All the venue owners I work with are beautiful people who work hard to create the space and possibility for live music to be seen and heard.  Economically, times are tough for everyone – musicians, punters, and venues alike.  Most of the musicians I know take a portfolio approach to their incomes – playing gigs in multiple bands, teaching, recording/session work for the super-talented ones, part-time jobs – you name it there’ll be someone doing it! 

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