William Horberg: This Must Be The Place

If you were to look up "jazz club" in the encyclopedia, the picture you found there just might look like "Bennett's Lane" in Melbourne, Victoria.

Miramax executive Mike Falbo and I were wandering lost, trying to decipher our google map, when we finally stumbled into a dead end alley just off Little Lonsdale Street, saw a hint of neon and heard, or felt really, the tiniest vibrations of an upright bass walking the beat.

The club at the end of the alley was tiny, intimate as the best jazz clubs should be - a room, a bar, some tables, fewer chairs, and a piano, bass and drums crammed onto a stage that would be hard-pressed to hold an octet, let alone a big band.

The trio was mid-song when we entered, and even though it was a modern interpretation, I recognized the old ragtime melody poking through - Louis Armstrong's "Struttin' with Some Barbeque". The reedy gray-haired man on the drums, Allan Browne, turned out to be a bit of a local legend. He was joined by pianist Marc Hannaford and bassist Sam Anning, in what turns out to be the regular Monday night house band at the Lane.

The band was smoking, the club was well-attended but not packed, and the friendly bartender worked out a two-for-one deal with me, not on drinks as Falbo and I were resolutely sober on this work night, but on cd's, as I bought one of the Allen Browne trio, and she gave me one for free of another local - pianist Jex Saarelaht - which was recorded live at Bennett's!

I found out more about Browne when I went into the studio for work the next day. In one of the small world coincidences I love, it turns out that his son and daughter are working as assistant editors on our movie!

I asked his son Billy about the dire, nihilistic Russian poetry that Browne read aloud between songs during the set, and he said it was a common thread in the life of this bohemian artist. Browne had retired from the scene a few years back for health reasons, but has made a comeback, and was in fine form, especially when he dropped the sticks and brushes and played the tom toms with his soft supple fingers for one of their groovy ballads.