It’s not all relative

CHARLIE LEWIS ISN’T AS COOL AS HIS PARENTS.

It was sometime in 1993, when my sister and I were seven or eight and my family lived in a town called Halls Creek, that I first discovered jazz. Or so I believed.

Halls Creek sits on a stretch of highway in the Kimberley that doesn’t hit another town for hundreds of kilometres in either direction – though the Indigenous communities for whom it acts as a hub populate an area bigger than Greece. It was a tough place, and the fact that I’m sharing this via frankie probably tells you how well I fitted in.

I came to believe I loved jazz via the ABC. Halls Creek had two TV channels: the ABC did kids’ shows and music videos, and GWN (a mix of commercial networks) had sitcoms and movies. While I can’t be certain what it was that I heard, I now know it must have been early-’90s backpacker hip-hop – buttery smooth flow over midday-bright horns and tactile drums, a black and white music video set in some unimaginably huge city. I loved it. However when the announcer described it afterwards, he used the word “jazz” and, via the quirks of the eight-year-old mind, that was what I retained.

So I told my parents I loved jazz. They thought it was fucking hilarious. “Are you going to start smoking a pipe, too?” my mum asked. My dad asked if I liked how jazz songs went “skweeebabadala bwaaah-bwaaaaah”. This was the start of a dynamic that would continue until at least my late teens. My folks would disapprove of my interests – not because they were confronted or outraged by my taste for radical youth culture, but the opposite. My folks are born cool kids, and they could not understand how they had come to raise such a hopelessly old-fashioned square.

They were forged by punk, communal squats, debates about anarchy, and situationism. And somehow they had a son who loved ’50s pop music, Bond films and tasteful formal wear (I compiled my own “suit” to wear on my 12th birthday out of ill-fitting hand-me-downs). It was I who had to convince them about The Beatles, and the first gangsta rap played in our house was their copy of Warren G’s debut.

It’s hard to imagine from 2024, but living in a pre-internet remote community, where the local music store was three shelves in a shop where you also bought cutlery and tinned food, more than a year passed between my insistence that I loved jazz and actually hearing any. Playing the jazz compilation CD my family won at a quiz in 1995 was how I imagine it feels when someone you’ve sent a bunch of money via a dating app suddenly goes silent. That slow then sudden realisation you’ve made a terrible mistake. This was not a horn-led summer jam, but discordant and jarring to my young ears.

But I couldn’t back down now, and so on it went. Whenever my parents happened upon jazz while flicking channels on the car radio, they’d make a big show of leaving it on for my benefit, and I’d let them. Smiling and nodding and tapping along where I thought you were supposed to. This went on for like a year and a half.

Eventually, as my cultural horizons have expanded, I’ve discovered lots of stuff my parents like. Say, the profoundly stoned free associations of Madvillain or the full-throated humanism of Jeff Rosenstock. But the fact that I showed them, the fact I want you to know they liked it, says a lot. Thanks to my partner, I’ve even come full circle on appreciating jazz. But I’m still not sticking it on when Mum and Dad visit.