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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this website contains names, images, and voices of deceased persons.

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Roger Emerson Bell (1919–2008)

by Ray Marginson

Roger Bell was the younger of the two Bell brothers who spearheaded the resurgence of improvised jazz in Australia after World War II. He was a gifted and virtually self-taught player and inimitable vocalist, his bright, driving but melodic and lyrical trumpet lead was much of the striking sound that characterised the Graeme Bell Band from the 1940s onwards.

Bell's family was seeped in music. His mother, Elva (nee Rogers), was for many years a contralto recitalist of distinction and had toured Australia and New Zealand in Nellie Melba's company; his father, John, was known for musical comedy and music hall performances, and on the early ABC.

Roger Bell is credited with seducing his older brother, Graeme, from classical piano into the world of jazz. At Scotch College he met with kindred spirits, the late "Lazy" Ade Monsbourgh and the future medico "Spadge" Davies, and his musical path was set.

He and Graeme became absorbed in the recordings of the classic American black-and-white jazz spectrum, and by the mid-1930s, with Roger initially on drums, they were playing at local dances.

These associations developed into reasonably disciplined ensembles, with the music developing jazz character, despite the need to meet the requirements of playing popular orchestrations and featuring "old time" dances. This was followed by less restricting quartet engagements at Portsea and St Kilda.

By the early '40s, with Monsbourgh on trumpet and trombone and Don "Pixie" Roberts on clarinet, Bell was leading a group of musicians by then known as the Bell Band, playing at big dance venues. Graeme returned in 1943 from entertaining troops in Queensland to assume full-time leadership of what was now a formidable jazz music ensemble. All the other members of the band had day jobs - in Roger's case it was engineering and drafting.

In 1943 William Miller, an Oxford-trained Melbourne lawyer, started his recording label Ampersand, which spread the band's reputation. Further, the first Australian Jazz Convention, which continues today, drew players and bands from interstate. Roger's playing and singing was exposed to a larger, Australia-wide audience in the pre-rock'n'roll period of immensely popular jazz for dancing.

All this was consolidated when EMI became the first big recording label to put out the band's music in 1947. There were few dancers of the era who did not know these records, with Roger singing on Ugly Child and other Graeme Bell Band standards such as Smokey Mokes.

The band came to Sydney for a series of concerts before leaving for Prague in 1947 to play at the World Youth Festival. By the time they returned in 1948 they were widely known in Europe and had sparked a "jazz for dancing" movement in Britain. Roger's infectious playing and singing were very much part of the success of that tour, and a three-month ABC tour of all states back in Australia consolidated the band's reputation.

The band again visited Europe in 1950, and after the core band broke up in 1952, Roger played lead trumpet in popular jazz groups such as Frank Traynor's Jazz Preachers, Max Collie, the Melbourne Jazz Club house band and with his own group, the Pagan Pipers. He continued to make recordings, particularly with the latter, and played at many festivals.

His substantial body of compositions of basic themes for improvised jazz were recorded by his and other bands, and he again visited Europe in 1971 and 1981, playing with old friends such as Humphrey Lyttelton, who died in April, and Claude Luter in Paris.

Witty and well-read, Bell was an engaging companion with a wide range of friends in the music and art worlds. Stories abound of his off-hand comments. When Bell's close friends, Peter Glass, the Meldrumite painter (Graeme Bell also trained with Max Meldrum) and Gordon Ford, the celebrated landscape architect, bought several hectares of land in Eltham and began building mudbrick houses, the humour was hilarious and often literary. When Gordon hit his foot with a mattock, Roger muttered: "Ford Madox Ford", a literary bow to the English novelist, poet, critic and editor.

Bell was known to his friends as the "Badger", a literary genuflection to his devotion to Kenneth Grahame's Wind In The Willows and to the nature works of Henry Williamson. So much so that when he had difficulty in finding a badger for a record cover he substituted a stuffed wombat from the Museum of Victoria.

Bell's first marriage to Bonnie Henderson failed; he later married Lorraine Watson, a physiotherapist, with whom he travelled widely and who was his constant support during a long, degenerative illness.

Roger Emerson Bell, who has died aged 89, is survived by Lorraine and the children from his first marriage, Helen, John and Jean, his six grandchildren and his brother, Graeme Bell, now a redoubtable 93.

Original publication

Citation details

Ray Marginson, 'Bell, Roger Emerson (1919–2008)', Obituaries Australia, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://oa.anu.edu.au/obituary/bell-roger-emerson-15210/text26411, accessed 5 October 2024.

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