Loving Lloyd Adamson: a story from The Primitif Cafe

Loving Lloyd : A brief biography of Lloyd Adamson (b.1929 Bryon Bay, d.1975 Sydney)

This blog was written by 2022 Letty Katts Fellow, Dr Leah Cotterell with Merriel Hume.

I met Lloyd’s wife, Merriel Hume, when she came to the State Library of Queensland's Research Reveal event this year. Her husband, Trumpet player Lloyd Adamson, features in a series of live photos documenting the music scene at Peter Hackworth’s first business, The Primitif Coffee Lounge. Around 200 images were captured by photographer Kevin Anderson at the time, 1957 -1959. Scans of the photos are now in the State Library collection. The photos of Lloyd from The Primitif were taken before they met.

For me, as the Letty Katts Fellow writing about these photos, meeting Merriel was a lucky break. I was excited to reconnect with the past, and we talked about her experience in the jazz scene in Brisbane in the early 1960’s. She told me that Lloyd was regarded by his peers as a significant musician in the Australian scene, and at the height of the popularity of modern jazz, he was regarded by his peers as one of the finest trumpet players in Brisbane. In a later interview, Merriel talked about Lloyd’s early career and their fruitful married years working in Sydney. The stories she shared with me provide a long view of professional music practice in Brisbane, reaching back to the last time that jazz was the predominant pop style, the decade before the rock revolution.

Lloyd grew up in Byron Bay in the 1930s with music all around. His musician father, when young, would bicycle over 50 ks into Byron Bay to accompany silent movies on violin and saxophone and later, he ran dances where young Lloyd and his sister would fall asleep behind the piano. During the war years, as a budding trumpet player, it fell to Lloyd to play The Last Post when the dead came home. Merriel spoke also about his close friendship with drummer and tympanist Neil Wilkinson, which began in their early twenties when they were both members of the Tallebudgera Surf Life Savers. Neil told Merriel that Lloyd would strap his trumpet to the back of his motorbike before even checking the petrol when they were travelling to the coast at weekends. After Lloyd graduated from high school, his family moved to Brisbane where Lloyd trained with Percy Garner in South Brisbane as a musical instrument repairer, a trade that complimented music performance. This path would take him to the UK to work with premier instrument makers Boosey and Hawkes. Merriel said, “He was absolutely amazing with what he could do to straighten out the dents and bumps of the tubing inside a trombone slide. I used to sit in the workshop and watch him just work his magic.” While overseas, Lloyd also played in bands on ships cruising from London to Spain, eventually returning to Australia when his mother’s health was failing. She died with Polycystic Kidney Disease, a genetic disorder that Lloyd inherited, which would also go on to cause him serious illness.

Merriel was a versatile singing talent who started out at Brisbane’s Theatre Royal in her teens. She met Lloyd when she joined the resident band at Cloudland in 1962, a gig that lasted five years.

“I’d like to write a book about the influence that place had on the fortunes of the musicians and artists, as well as the people who met there” she said, “a popular saying in the day was that half the population of Brisbane was conceived in the car park!”.

When Merriel joined the band at Cloudland, she knew how highly Lloyd was regarded by his peers as a musician and a friend through her sister’s relationship with a musician in the QSO. “I was kind of half in love with this person that I'd never met”, she said. “But when I finally got to meet him at Cloudland, he became ill soon after, and the gossip in the band room was that his marriage was in trouble too – he was absent for nearly a year before returning to the Cloudland gig. He had survived cancer and severe kidney infection”.

In the face of a growing mutual attachment, Merriel chose to remove herself from his marital struggles by accepting an offer to manage the Wonderland Ballroom, a venue at Corrimal, just north of Wollongong NSW. A dynamic young woman, Merriel’s professional career as a singer took her all over Australia and South-East Asia including a tour with the Australian Forces Overseas Fund in 1968. By 1969 Lloyd was free to join her in Sydney and they married in 1970.

Merriel explained that in the late 1950’s (before television or discotheques) anyone who could play an instrument had a gig on Saturday nights. Dance bands played a repertoire of time-worn standards sprinkled with the latest pop tunes. But for musicians, Sunday was “No Fun Day”, as everything in Brisbane was shut down. So, Sundays were when musicians would gather to listen to new records, experiment and jam.

This was the background to Peter Hackworth booking bands on Sunday nights for The Primitif. On their nights off, against all regulations, the finest of Brisbane’s jazz musicians could come together and play as they wished to audiences who appreciated their talents. For performers and patrons alike, The Primitif provided lovers of jazz with a meeting place and a hip atmosphere. “It would have been heaven to actually have a place where they could play jazz music in the way they wanted to play it, and emulate the musicians they held in high esteem...” Many musicians on their nights off would flock to The Primitif to sit in with the band.

The picture below shows Lloyd with renowned jazz vocalist Paula Langlands. Paula talked about jumping in with comedian Red Moore and speeding up from the Gold Coast along the narrow Pacific Highway to sit in with Lloyd and the musicians. Encountering these photos for the first time, Merriel was startled to see him singing, something he never did during their time together. Influenced by jazz legends, Louis Armstrong, Dizzie Gillespie, and Miles Davis, et al, Lloyd looks pleased to be in good company.

Look closely at this photo of Lloyd leaning back, enjoying the playing of Stan Walker. Look at the glee in Stan’s face and the gentle amusement in Lloyd’s. As someone who knows the pleasures of group improvisation, what I see in this photo is spontaneous ease, effortless concentration, something we now call ‘flow’. Jazz has opened the door to this pleasure for musicians all around the world. A recent musicological field of study into the global aspects of jazz history focuses on the ‘jazz diaspora’. On this Sunday night sixty-five years ago, in a little basement room, in a small city known widely for its parochial culture, at the edge of the Western world, these two men had a joyful musical conversation – a beautiful moment, captured in black and white.