A tragic event stirred Sydney jazz mainstay Mark Harris to spread the good word, writes Lorne Johnson.

Mark4

In 2003, Sydney-based jazz musician Mark Harris lost his sister Celene to epilepsy. But despite his grief, Harris, who has played with everyone from James Morrison to Monsieur Camembert, turned the experience into something positive, the formation of a four-piece jazz ensemble MARK4; a group whose mission is to raise public awareness of epilepsy and those living with it. With the Epilepsy Association behind the release of the band’s debut album Entrée, five dollars of every record sold is being donated to the association’s research.

Dressed in black, with beer in hand and blue-lit sails of the Sydney Opera House behind him, 30-year-old Harris articulates his mission to me in a Circular Quay bar. “The idea of affiliating with the epilepsy movement within Australia was a joint idea of my wife and myself,” he explains.

“Our driving force was the fact that my sister passed away from an event called SUDEP (Sudden Unexplained Death in Epilepsy). It is very similar to what happens with SIDS in kids. There’s no seizure or violent process by which somebody dies; it’s literally like you flick a switch during sleep and the person doesn’t wake up. My sister was lucky to die that way. Statistically, most of us will die more painfully and more traumatically than that.”

“Our main focus was to promote awareness of SUDEP,” he continues. “To ignore or not give the facts about SUDEP seems like a dereliction of duty. People who are more intimately involved with epilepsy know about the seizures, and they also know that people often die from the result of seizures. Many of these people don’t realise that there is this thing called SUDEP out there. The statistics that I’ve read quote that as high as fifteen percent of deaths in epilepsy come from SUDEP.”

Helping Harris bring his mission to the public are Australian jazz scene luminaries Matt McMahon (piano), James Muller (guitar) and Evan Mannell (drums).

“They’re all great friends and incredible musicians,” says Harris. “They all have their own recording projects and are doing very well in terms of their careers. You can see it in the results on recordings and in competitions nationally and internationally, and the gigs that they do and who they work with.”

Harris says that Entrée is “a document of the time and the beginning of a future recording life.” The album is a buzzing, absorbing, resplendent recording that defines the current sound of Sydney jazz. Although at times brooding and intense, the record grounds itself in a lovely sense of light and beauty.

“There are transcriptions of a French opera aria to a completely standard thirty-two bar form swinging four-four tune,” he smiles. “There are odd metre Latin American things… It’s a real across the board look at what I do.”

“Three or four of the tracks were written in Japan. It was a time of writing a lot of sketches. I just kept a manuscript pad with me and I had some computer software to notate and to record live. I kept a lot of recordings, some of which were made into complete pieces there. Most of them were brought back to Australia and worked into tunes from there.”

Harris picked up the double bass in year eight at Sydney Grammar School after his music teacher suggested he have a go at it. The sparkling world of jazz arrived a few years later.

“The musical landscape in my household never included jazz. It was very much about classical music, opera, choral and flamenco, because my dad loved flamenco guitar, so we never got any jazz at all.”

When the director of the school’s big band happened to see Harris with his double bass at school one day, he invited him to play with them. This was the moment that he realised his bass could come alive in a vital, modern context, rather than being stuck in the repetitive cycle of rudimentary bass lines and orchestral music he’d been playing.

A school big band tour to the Monterey Jazz Festival in California was also a formative experience. “It was the first time I’d seen a large scale, high-profile jazz anything,” says Harris. ”To see a cross-section of the greatest jazz and blues and world musicians at this festival was impressive.”

And it has had a lasting impact on the way Harris chooses to do things. “I’ve never been one of those out there, hangin’ loose sort of jazz guys,” he says.

”I like to create goals and have a sense of direction with everything I do. Goal-setting has definitely been a part of my life in recent years,” he pauses. “When you have a family, you have to start thinking about how you will apportion your time to things.”