Denis Le Neuf, a former News journalist, editor, adman and freelance writer, died on October 13, aged 74.
Music was the consuming joy of his life. Jazz first fired his passion and he was already playing trumpet when he took the train to Melbourne aged just 16, to see Louis Armstrong, in 1964. He thought Satchmo’s attack and improvisations were the stuff of genius: nearly 60 years later, discovering a previously unknown video clip of Louis playing Potato Head Blues with his Hot Five in 1928 would refuel that same excitement — and with the miracle of YouTube he could share it with his friends.
Passionate: Music was the consuming joy of Denis Le Neuf’s life.
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“The swing is the thing,” he would say — that elusive, hard-to-define element of jazz where the note lags behind the beat, creating a tension-and-release that gets people snapping their fingers and wanting to dance — the swing that elevated his spirit and thrust him on a lifelong quest for the difference between music that was good, and music that was great. He became a jazz evangelist.
By his late teens he was playing trumpet in a local band, Strine, along with Ian Mason, Foster Adem, Sue Kanake, Paul Rayment and Alan Spalding; they won Hoadley’s Battle of the Sounds in 1967. Live music flourished in the ’60s and ’70s, with weekly dances at what is now Eastbank, as well cabarets and pubs around nearby towns.
Born and schooled in Mooroopna, then Shepparton High School, he joined The News as a cadet journalist and almost immediately started penning a weekly column, In Time, about local gigs and all things music. And he learned how to use a camera.
Prodigious reader: Denis Le Neuf, a former News journalist, editor, adman and freelance writer, died on October 13, aged 74.
There was much to write about and photograph. The Sherbourne was The Commodore back then and every Thursday night there was Jazz At The Quarterdeck upstairs — a vibrant gathering where he found friendship with jazz lovers from all over. One mentor was local Ford dealer Barney Govan-Smith — a vintage car collector, wine buff and jazz aficionado with an impressive collection of early jazz and blues 78rpm records. Another was the dental technician and trombonist Alf Hurst, who played with Dudley Griffiths, Ken Parsons, Rod Thompson and Bruce Eddy in venues all over the north-east.
His habit was to move quickly, as though there was no time to waste. His reading was as prodigious as his listening and included the existentialists such as George Steiner and Colin Wilson, while many of his friends were still reading The Phantom. An early visit to an abattoir convinced him to become a vegetarian for life. An atheist, he abhorred violence and discrimination, and often included asides in his columns, perhaps attacking the Ku Klux Klan or remarking on the shortcomings of formal religion.
A canny old sub-editor, Rowley Moody, urged him to read The New Yorker to learn how to make his writing sound agreeable to the ear, and how to make his meaning clear. When his first issues arrived in the mail he discovered, to his delight, The New Yorker’s legendary jazz critic, Whitney Balliett, whose rich descriptions of performances and recordings were musical poetry. He was hooked. He celebrated each new year thereafter with a fresh New Yorker diary, and they became the scrapbooks of his life.
His rounds included covering Shepparton’s magistrates’ court, where he would routinely write the lede of each story during the court’s frequent delays, enabling him to return to his typewriter after court and complete 30 or more stories on copy paper, ready to sub.
One court day he heard an inquest witness explaining his presence at the fatal accident preceded a visit to the Quarterdeck. Sensing another jazz fan, Denis introduced himself outside the court to Euroa farmer Geoff McLean, kindling a lifelong friendship.
It was McLean who played him the first solo album of the brilliant improvising pianist Keith Jarrett, whose surname Denis later bestowed on his eldest son (the second son was Dylan) and a beautiful song from Jarrett’s Facing You became the name of his much-loved daughter, Lalene.
In the meantime, in early 1973 Denis departed for London, where he landed a job on the fledgling Australasian Express, a weekly free newspaper that brought news from home to the large cohort of young Australians and New Zealanders working there — with a weekly circulation of 50,000.
London proved a feast for his senses: after assuming the role of editor, he interviewed the likes of Joanna Lumley, Spike Milligan and Dudley Moore. At night and on weekends he frequented Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in Soho, where a cavalcade of jazz greats arrived over the English summer: Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Dave Brubeck, Erroll Garner, Oscar Peterson, Sonny Stitt, Stan Getz, Blossom Dearie, Buddy Rich, Bill Evans, Joe Pass and Stéphane Grappelli among them.
At Royal Albert Hall and Wembley stadium there were the big concerts with The Eagles, The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Peggy Lee, Eric Clapton, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Van Morrison, Elton John, The Who, The Rolling Stones and, of course, Keith Jarrett. After his five-year visa ran out, he reluctantly left to come home.
If he could have stayed, he would have. His colleagues remember him as a good editor, with a strong sense of journalistic ethics, supportive of his staff and willing to back them against management. After cosmopolitan London, he struggled to adjust to suburban concerns back home.
Returning to Melbourne he worked briefly at The Melbourne Times before taking a copy-writing job at Kutt Skinner Bennett, an advertising agency. Along with Paul Custance he later set up The Adstore in Shepparton but soon returned to Melbourne, taking on freelance writing roles and shooting training videos. Earning a living was a pesky interruption to his feverish reading, photography and listening.
He remained a prolific correspondent with his many friends, alerting them to concerts or record releases, passing on details of talented young artists he came across at jazz festivals or found on record. The coming of email was a boon to him — a quicker way to communicate — but YouTube was bliss: he could find clips of his favourite artists and discover new ones, and social media allowed him to pass them on to many friends at once.
His excitement for new music never dulled and, despite a lengthy and debilitating illness, his enthusiasms were infectious. On the same day, he might forward friends rare clips of Joni Mitchell, Bix Beiderbecke, Eva Fernández and Blind Willie McTell — along with meticulous and well-informed commentary — and perhaps birthday greetings. He never forgot a birthday.
His personal life was complicated. He was a better friend than a partner, and a weakness for beautiful women got him into trouble: two failed marriages taught him he wasn’t well suited to living together with another person. And he ruefully admitted to earning a “fail’’ on fatherhood. Mostly, the music could shut it out.
