For a man who has spent his life in the earnest art of jazz, Mike Nock laughs a lot, enjoying his deep well of anecdotes, appreciating a joke at his own expense and – when it is suggested a hallmark of his diverse career is that there’s no obvious hallmark – laughing until he’s breathless. It’s no surprise that Norman Meehan’s 2010 biography of 83-year-old Nock was titled Serious Fun.
Nock spent most of his formative years in Ngāruawāhia, a small town musically, emotionally and culturally distant from Sydney, New York and San Francisco, where he made his name.
Yet he maintained strong connections here, returning frequently for concerts and recording albums as diverse as the soundtrack to Geoff Steven’s 1983 film Strata, improvised duets with drummer Frank Gibson on 1987′s Open Door, and more recently with the NZTrio, Auckland saxophonist Roger Manins and others.
So, no hallmark. “I’m not really a jazz musician,” he says, despite a shelf of Australian awards and considerable evidence to the contrary. “I’m definitely from that music, which shaped and formed me, but I’m a white boy from New Zealand,” he laughs, not for the last time in a digressive conversation.
Adding to the many awards in Australia, his home for decades, Nock – made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2003 for services to jazz – is being inducted into the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame at the Apra Silver Scroll Awards in October.
“Why I’m so happy to receive this award is I think of myself as not so much a jazz musician, but just a musician. Period. I express myself in jazz … but this is special, because it’s just a New Zealand music award, a culmination of everything I’ve been about.”
Despite his cavalier attitude – “Jazz? What does that even mean any more?” – he has described jazz as “a calling”, imbued with deep personal meaning.
“It goes back to when my father died. I was about 12 and at his deathbed in Ngāruawāhia. I’d been a staunch Catholic, an altar boy and all that, and he died. So, my prayers had been to no avail.
“And at that point, I remember it very clearly, jazz became my religion, my calling.
“And why jazz? Because I felt there was an element of truth in the music … a truth I didn’t see anywhere else, or in religion. That truth resonated with me and that’s been my life.”
As a young teen with some piano lessons behind him, he was captivated when he heard the famous 1953 album Jazz at Massey Hall – legendary players Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and others – on the radio.
He thought it was an Auckland band, but so different from band leader Charlie Kunz, singer Winifred Atwell, Fats Waller “and maybe Duke Ellington”, whom he’d been hearing.
“That [Massey Hall] music really spoke to me, that was how I wanted to play.”
He joined Johnny Cooper’s travelling show around the central North Island: he worked the door, played a blind pianist (then, to the audience’s delight, would follow a pretty girl around), and accompanied the talent-show contestants.
“I think of myself as a Kiwi Tom Sawyer or a Huckleberry Finn or something. This is the way it was.”
He went to Auckland and backed emerging rock’n’roll star Johnny Devlin, which was not his thing: “It paid me. I also worked here in Australia with Johnny O’Keefe, who was the daddy of rock’n’roll. But I could never take [that music] seriously! You kiddin’ me?”
To hear Nock tell it, opportunities always lead somewhere else: he left for Sydney at 18 to play serious jazz, then after a short period with the acclaimed The Three Out trio, he went to the UK, then on a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he studied jazz and classical music. But not for long.
“In Australia, I’d practised my buns off on a piano I’d prepared with lead weights because I thought you had to have strong fingers. I knew nothing about sensitivity and touch.”
The scholarship wasn’t enough, so “I washed dishes to survive, and as a dishwasher, the concept of America being a classless society was blown out of the water.” And he laughs again.
He was going to quit Berklee, but his piano teacher offered a gig playing jazz four nights a week with excellent players and a grand piano. “After that, I started getting all kinds of gigs and my career took off. Maybe it was being a Kiwi and a little cocky, but I thought I was as good as anybody, I really did.”
However, his classmate in the next practice room at Berklee was the legendary pianist Keith Jarrett. “We started playing together. And Chick Corea was asking me for advice a few years later. “I’ve known all these players and was one of them, whether it was warranted or not,” he says, in something like disbelief. “That’s what it’s all about, about finding your tribe. I never tried to play like any [other pianist], but the spirit of those people really got me, this spirit of truth.”
When Nock spins anecdotes about his long career, a catalogue of great jazz names appears, those he worked with or knew as friends: Yusef Lateef; Quincy Jones before he became Michael Jackson’s producer; Coleman Hawkins; Bud Powell, the pianist on that influential Jazz at Massey Hall album; Sonny Rollins, with whom he rehearsed, and Miles Davis, who called him up and said as a compliment, “I hear you’re a motherf---er.”
“True to my New Zealand roots, I deny it. When someone says that, you say, ‘Yeah I am.’ But we don’t do that in New Zealand.”
Davis had seen Nock play in his innovative Fourth Way band of the late 1960s when Nock moved onto an electric keyboard. Legend has it that Davis watched them when they opened for his band and, in a much-told story, said, “Man, I’m never going on second again.”
Fourth Way – which lasted just three years, playing to rock audiences in San Francisco and at the 1970 Montreux Jazz Festival – were in the vanguard of electrified jazz-rock of the kind Davis, Herbie Hancock and others were starting to explore, although Nock never saw that as a new direction for him.
“To be honest, it was pragmatic. I’d been playing piano and it doesn’t speak the same way. Little uprights didn’t have the same impact a horn or a vocalist would have. And the Fender Rhodes [electric piano] gave me that; an equal voice in the band. That’s why I gravitated to it.”
Although pushing into a new area, he once more moved on because he didn’t like the rock context and was searching for his own voice: “I’ve never been a commercially oriented musician. I always just wanted to express myself the way I wanted.
“I was with [singer] Dionne Warwick, and when I had enough money to buy my Steinway grand, I said I was quitting. She said she’d pay twice the money and I could also open her shows.
“But what I would have been asked to play to open was not what I was into. I was into doing my Cecil Taylor thing!” he says, referring to the free-jazz pianist renowned for hammering pianos into submission.
He could probably do that even now. He exercises regularly, is unbowed after being run over in 2018, walks with a cane, but attends the Centre for Strong Medicine in Sydney, which supports those living independently.
“I’m still the same, but I’m old. Whaddaya gonna do? You gotta deal with it. I’ll be 84 when I come to Wellington [for the award].” And he laughs again. Serious fun.
These days, he plays with musicians a third his age, still records (three typically different albums in the past five years, from experimental electronic sounds to elegant solo piano) and, although not much given to reflection, he acknowledges he has been fortunate.
“I’ve been a reluctant leader [of bands] because I wrote. I never wanted to be ‘the best’, I always wanted to be part of something.
“I succeeded because I was never the best,” he laughs. “But I’ve been around wonderful musicians and, for some reason, people have always supported me. That’s why this [Hall of Fame] award is so wonderful. It’s the culmination of a life in music.”
2024 Apra Silver Scroll Awards, October 8, St James Theatre, Wellington.
Five of Nock’s best
Mike Nock’s long career weaves from solo recordings through numerous groups he has led and into many collaborations. But as he looks back on a lifetime of music and the ongoing interest in it, he says, “Well, you get to be an age where people think, ‘Wow, this guy has got a history’ and they follow it through.” Graham Reid picks five of Nock’s most vital albums
The Fourth Way: Werwolf (1970).
In the late 1960s when Nock moved from acoustic piano to electric Fender Rhodes with effects pedals, he wasn’t being intentionally progressive just pragmatic: he wanted to be heard in the band of Ron McClure (electric bass), Michael White (amplified violin) and Eddie Marshall (drums). They were ahead of jazz-rock/fusion as this exploratory album – recorded live at the 1970 Montreux Jazz Festival – shows. Herbie Hancock – in Miles Davis’ band – took to Rhodes around the same time, and Weather Report formed the year of this recording. By the time fusion took off, Nock had moved on and back to acoustic piano.
Mike Nock: Ondas (1981).
This subtle, understated acoustic trio album (bassist Eddie Gómez, drummer Jon Christensen) was Nock’s only album on the European ECM label, but was much admired by the label’s headman Manfred Eicher. “Partly it was the tyranny of distance,” says Nock of why he recorded no others for ECM, “because I’d moved back to New Zealand. To some people in this part of the world it meant a lot, but in the States and Europe it didn’t have the impact one might have hoped”. Includes the reflective, eight-minute Land of the Long White Cloud.
Mike Nock, Frank Gibson: Open Door (1986).
Jazz album of the year in this country, a remarkable collaboration between Nock (on acoustic piano) and drummer Gibson. It springs off three Nock compositions, a lovely treatment of Danny Boy and then four improvised musical conversations. An inspired pairing and, at the time, there had been nothing like it in local jazz.
Mike Nock Trio: An Accumulation of Subtleties (2010).
With siblings Ben and James Waples (bass and drums) – both less than half his age – this double disc captured the trio in free improvisations in the Sydney Opera House studio in 2008 and at a live concert. Nock’s reach is from tickling inside the piano or hitting deadened notes to thrillingly vigorous interplay with the rhythm section and, as always, some tastefully delicate pieces. Winner of the Best Australian Contemporary Jazz Album award 2011.*
Mike Nock Trio, NZTrio: Vicissitudes (2016).
With another Nock trio (bassist Brett Hirst and drummer James Waples) and the NZTrio of cellist Ashley Brown, pianist Sarah Watkins and violinist Justine Cormack, the players explored concise but challenging improvisations and worked a series of beautifully daring variations to bring the different approaches together. Finalist in our 2017 jazz album of the year category.
*All are available on the main music streaming services, this is only on bandcamp.
Windy city jazz blast
Mike Nock’s induction at this year’s Apra Silver Scroll ceremony in Wellington is a curtain-raiser of sorts to this year’s Wellington Jazz Festival. The five-day event has among its international guests American bassist-producer Marcus Miller, a prodigious pop session player and soundtrack composer whose best-known connections to jazz include his collaboration on three late 1980s Miles Davis albums, including Tutu. Another American bassist and singer – and former Harvard professor – grammy winner Esperanza Spalding is also coming to the festival. Among the local offerings will be a special performance by the Rodger Fox Big Band, paying tribute to its late leader, and a new show by the Fly My Pretties collective.
Wellington Jazz Festival, October 16-20.
