was no time to ask. Sigh. But this session, like Bourke's book, was not about the total dynamic shift that followed the introduction of rock n' roll to New Zealand. This was about what came before, which was not silent and not boring either. Bourke ascribes the common assumption that there was no fun had prior to Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock to two things: 1) the arrogance of rock era writers and 2) pure and simple generational distancing. No one wanted to admit to liking the stuff that came before. Bourke had a sense, however, that fun did occur prior to rock's upheaval of all things right and decent. His mother, he said, dropped a few hints alluding to a boisterous jazz scene in Wellington. Artie Shaw, for example, came in the early '40s to play. He stayed at the Midland Hotel on Lambton Quay because the boat sheds at Oriental Bay were not good enough for him, or maybe for his wife, who could have been some beautiful starlet like Lana Turner or Ava Gardner. Crowds queued outside the hotel waiting for a glimpse of him. It was The Beatles, with a little less mania. Bourke compiled the information in Blue Smoke from exhaustive research but all research has to start somewhere. He had a few anecdotes from musicology professors, stumbled into an acquaintance with a man who had a garage full of clippings on New Zealand jazz musicians and he had the Broadcast Library. When he