Managing Editor
extempore's editor Miriam Zolin is a writer who enjoys listening to jazz and can often be seen at venues around her home town of Melbourne, or on visits to Sydney. Since 2001 when she went to her first live jazz gig at the now-defunct Harbourside Brasserie in Sydney, she has carried a debt of gratitude to the music and the musicians who make it. It was jazz and improvised music that rekindled her writing energy at a time when it had flagged. Jazz, she found, was the perfect antidote to the tiredness that she felt after a day in the office; teaming the music with a good shiraz, she found her creative neurons firing up and she credits jazz as a major reason she was able to finish her first novel Tristessa & Lucido, published by UQP in 2005. Along with the music came membership of a community of musicians and enthusiasts to whom creativity is essential – in ways that often extend beyond music. Improvised music inspires artwork, prose and poetry and musicians draw inspiration from all these creative endeavours as well.
Gratitude has motivated Miriam to contribute to the scene in a variety of ways, initially via an online record shop, then by building websites for a small number of musicians and labels, support of the Jazz Australia website and an ongoing commitment to interviews and articles about local jazz and improvising musicians. In 2005, she launched the National Jazz Writing Competition and extempore is the next natural step - a forum in which to publish winning entries of the competition, as well as other writing, poetry, art and photography about, responding to or inspired by jazz and improvised music.
Say it like this: ex temp oray
extempore showcases writing that is about, inspired by or responding to jazz and improvised music...
extempore celebrates the music and the people who make it...
extempore promotes the idea that creativity in any artform will feed and be fed by creativity in any number of other artforms...
The support we can't do without
There's a list (as long a very long thing) of people who are making this project come together.
Enormous thanks are already due to Ian Robertson, Gerry Koster, Mike Nock, Geoff Page, Vyvyan Mishra, Penni Russon, Lena Gan and all our contributors for their support and enthusiasm. We're going to need a whole Thank-you page before we're done. For now, however, we'll just say Thanks! to everybody who's helping :-)
National Jazz Writing Competition
extempore publishes winning entries in the National Jazz Writing Competition each year. In its first three years the competition focused on jazz reviews, with entrants required to submit reviews of Australian jazz CDs and concerts.
In 2008, the competition takes a new turn, with a focus on Short Story. Each year from now on, the competition will celebrate a different type of jazz-related writing – essay, poetry, reviews and back to short story on a four year cycle.
