ABSTRACT
The golden periods of jazz occur when changes are made, when new music and styles are created to reflect a changing world. The problem is that demand tends to lag behind production. From the mid-1980s the Sydney scene saw, for the first time since the activities of Horst Liepolt, a sustained and concerted attempt to bring the modern scene together and present it in a cohesive way. Sydney Improvised Music Association's (SIMA) programming across the four ‘State of the Art’ concerts was astute in that it drew together three decades of ‘modern’ jazz-based artists and merged them within a single series in a way that went beyond the resources of other venues and organizations at the time. SIMA grew, in part, from the ground prepared by the keys music association, proving that not only were still young, highly original jazz-based groups continuing to be produced by the local scene, but also that there was an audience willing to support them.
