As a teen, pianist Judy Bailey usually heard classical or pop music coming from the cream-coloured Bakelite radio that hunched on the Formica kitchen bench of her family’s home in Whangarei, New Zealand. But on this particular afternoon, her 13-year-old ears heard something new. She recognised the song, East of the Sun, yet after the melody the band seemed to be making up the music as they went. During the three years she’d studied classical piano with the local nuns, they’d never mentioned improvising.
Judy was instantly enthralled, and when what turned out to be the George Shearing Quintet had finished, she dashed to the piano, and worked out that the made-up music was happening over the song’s chords. A week later the Stan Kenton Orchestra gave her an even bigger thrill, the thought of which still gave her tingles decades later.
At 14 she began regularly accompanying a singer on Radio Northland, through which she met the Newbury twins, Peter and Paul. When they weren’t helping their father prepare bodies for burial, they ran an acrobatic troupe – yes, really – for which Judy, 10 years their junior, became musical director.
So music was already tugging her in different directions when, at 18, she began studying classical piano more seriously in Auckland. Once, when her teacher asked to hear her homework, and could tell she hadn’t really practiced it, he stopped her and said, “No. Play me the stuff you’ve been working on. Not the stuff I gave you.” So Judy came clean with her jazz, only to find the teacher intrigued and supportive.
Her parents, who’d assumed her future as a classical pianist was a given (after she’d pursued it with sufficient commitment to gain her Associate of Trinity College London diploma remotely) were less thrilled, but Judy was not to be swayed. Her jazz activities included arrangements for the 16-piece Auckland Radio Band, among other groups, before she sought to expand her horizons, and in 1960 left Auckland for Sydney, originally intending a six-month stopover on her way to London. She stayed for the rest of her life.
Bailey, who died on August 8 at the age of 89, was born in Auckland on October 3, 1935, and grew up in Whangarei, forsaking ballet for classical piano at the age of 10. A pioneer of women’s participation in Australian jazz, she was a lyrical, imaginative and swinging jazz pianist, a composer and arranger of note, and an educator with a profound influence on three generations of Sydney Conservatorium students.
Upon arriving in Sydney she was waylaid by a welcoming jazz scene (recording The Wind album with reeds player Errol Buddle in 1962) and by constant work as a pianist/arranger in the TV studios, firstly for Tommy Tycho’s resident orchestra at the Seven Network, and then at Nine and 10.
Her jazz work centred on Kings Cross’s El Rocco, the impossibly small crucible in which Sydney’s hip, modernist, 1960s jazz was forged, with the likes of artist John Olsen or writer/broadcaster Clive James listening on. You & the Night & the Music, her debut album, was recorded there (with bassist Lyn Christie and drummer John Sangster), and it sizzles with the energy of youth and adventure, while also being sensuous, playful, heartfelt, effortless and lithe. Her own Deep Night signalled the start of an august parallel career as a composer, and such LPs became collectors’ treasures in Japan, reportedly fetching four-figure sums.
By 1976 she was leading The Judy Bailey Quartet, with saxophonist Ken James, bassist Ron Philpott and drummer John Pochee, for which she swapped to electric piano, and made the timeless Colours album. Other highlights of the dozen releases under her own name include the double album Another Journey (2018), containing her compositions for the combined forces symphony orchestra and jazz orchestra, all under her direction. In 2011, the ABC released a four-disc retrospective as part of their Jazz Legends series.
Bailey began teaching and mentoring at Sydney Conservatorium with the inception of the Jazz Studies course in 1973, and stayed for nearly half a century, teaching piano, composition and ear-training. She also led the Sydney Youth Jazz Ensemble, which later metamorphosed into Judy Bailey’s Jazz Connection Big Band.
She continued to compose, perform and record (including for film and television), meanwhile receiving, among several awards, an OAM for services to music and education in 2004 and the prestigious Don Banks Music Award in 2022. She also composed music for film and television.
Bailey married a US bassist, Richard De Gray in 1967, and had two children: Lisette (born 1968) and Chris (1971) before she and De Gray separated in 1972. Lisette and Chris were by her side when she died at an aged care home in Willoughby, where she had resided for over four years.