PICKING UP THE PIECES
Paul Augustin, the founder/festival director of Penang Island Jazz Festival chats to Kathlyn D’souza about his upcoming show at Ilham Gallery and crate-digging adventures to find old vinyls
What led to the organisation of Jumpa Dalam Reban: On The Malaysian Vinyl Trail?
I received a phone call from Daryl Goh (journalist, deejay and music enthusiast) who was approached by Ilham to put together a vinyl listening session for old Malaysian music, and he asked me if we could do it together, because he knew that we had some interesting vinyls and recordings in our Penang House of Music Collection, and I agreed.
How did it all start?
It all began as a passion when we started putting together personality profiles of Penang musicians for the Penang Island Jazz Festival’s Jazz Gallery sometime in 2007; it came to the attention of the Penang State Museum which led to a collaboration between them with James Lochhead and I, to set up the first exhibition entitled ‘Penang’s Popular Music of the 1940s and 1950s’ in 2010. At the same time, James and I started with what we called the Penang Musical Heritage Project—it was more of just collating as much material as possible for the initial exhibition and then we were asked to do another decade: ‘Penang’s Popular Music in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s’ in 2013.
What happened next?
After the exhibitions, we were approached to put what we had into a book, which saw us doing more research and finally, was published in 2015. By the time the book came out, we had collected thousands of photographs, press articles and hundreds of recordings from our research. We intended to set up a Resource Centre in a public area, to share what we discovered— an intangible history of Malaysian music with a specific initial focus on Penang—and were shown a possible space and was asked to put a proposal together not only for the Resource Centre but also a Gallery. The Penang state government, through PBA Holdings Berhad, then allocated a budget for the Penang House of Music—this was when the crate digging went full swing and took us to several interesting places.
What about those interesting places?
I have seen documentaries on ‘hoarders’ and was quite surprised that they also exist among Malaysians. There was a house which I went into where things were stacked up to the ceiling and was told that there were two organs and a piano in one of the rooms which I couldn’t see unless I looked really, really hard! There was another place where a person had about 3,000 to 4,000 vinyls (78s, 45s, 33s). The owner was not interested in selling only a few pieces, it was all or nothing as he wanted to get rid of all of it; I found some gems within that pile!
What do you hope for people to take away from the show?
Since we started researching on ‘Penang’s Musical Heritage Project’ and with the setting up of the Penang House of Music, we realised how colourful and diversified Malaysian music is, and the importance of documenting all of this for posterity. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to find. We are hoping to share some knowledge on the music and musicians in Malaysia at that time and we also hope to show that Malaysian music had a sound of its own.