Thursday 30 April 2015

Mileham Hayes - clarinet, banjo, band leader, entrepreneur


from Bruce Johnson, The Oxford Companion to Australian Jazz (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1987) 175.

Became interested in jazz at 14 and in 1957 started a jazz club at school. Attended jazz functions at La Boheme, where Sid Bromley encouraged his interest. Bought a clarinet, but shortly switched to banjo after meeting Lachie Thompson , an association which led to the formation of the Varsity Five with which Hayes remained, with brief interruptions for study, throughout its lifetime.

From 1964 to 1974, apart from Australian Jazz Conventions, he retired from music to concentrate on his career as a doctor. Upon returning from a period in Edinburgh in 1974, he lobbied the ABC regarding the lack of broadcast jazz, and was given his own programme, Stomp Off, Let's Go.

He was President of the 1976 Australian Jazz Convention in Brisbane. During the mid to late 1970s his jazz activities included functions at the Melbourne Hotel (from whence he presented a TV series, Dr Jazz), journalism, the establishment of the Cellar Club, and taking a band to the Commonwealth Games in Edmonton in 1978, during which he also performed at Eddie Condon's in New York.


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From 1978-82, he promoted a series of jazz festivals which gave Brisbane audiences exposure to top American and Australian musicians on an unprecedented scale. He established the Queensland Jazz Club (1980-83), and organised the first national conference on jazz. He bought the old Pelican Tavern in 1983, and reopened it as the jazz restaurant Sweet Patootie, which, as well as featuring local and imported bands, [was] the main venue for his own group, Dr Jazz.