Allan Browne & Richard Miller
ALLAN BROWNE & RICHARD MILLER: MODERNISTS & TRADITIONALISTS Interviewed by Adrian Jackson* __________________________________________________________ [This article appeared in the Winter/Spring 1986 edition of Jazz Magazine.] rummer Allan Browne and saxophonist-clarinettist Richard Miller have been making music together for more than 20 years now. Their partnership began D in 1965 when Miller joined the Red Onion Jazz Band, led by Browne and still remembered as the most successful Australian jazz band of its time. None of their records is currently available, but a cassette (Anteater 002) which contains excerpts from some of the band’s early EPs, plus a recording from a concert in Warsaw in 1967, shows that the band’s reputation was founded on real musical qualities. Many of those qualities were re-captured when the band staged a couple of sell-out reunions at the Limerick Arms Hotel in 1984. The members of the quartet Onaje, L-R, Gary Costello, Bob Sedergreen, Richard Miller, Allan Browne… Since mid-1985, the pair have also displayed their mastery of traditional jazz in the Allan Browne Jazz Band, which plays every Thursday night at the Emerald Hotel in South Melbourne. The other members of that band are trumpeter Peter Gaudion, __________________________________________________________ *In 1986 when this was published, Adrian Jackson was a freelance writer, who had been jazz critic with the Melbourne Age since 1978. 1 Richard Miller (left) and Allan Browne, outside the Limerick Arms Hotel… PHOTO COURTESY AUSTRALIAN JAZZ MUSEUM trombonjst Bill Howard, clarinettist Fred Parkes, bassist Leon Heale and guitarist- banjoist John Scurry; Browne’s wife, Margie, occasionally adds vocals or piano.
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