One giant leap for jazz : the life and work of Roger Frampton

One giant leap for jazz: the life and work of Roger Frampton is a practice-led research project comprising a treatment for a documentary film and an exegesis. The treatment explores the life of the musician, Roger Frampton (1948 – 2000), and his impact on Australian jazz. The exegesis examines the creative decision-making underlying this biographical process, given that I am Frampton’s daughter. Whilst complete in its current iteration as a Master of Research thesis, the study also lays the foundations for a doctorate, where the film will be produced and the exegesis expanded. Within Australian jazz history, there are few biographies of key contributors to the field. While many of his creative endeavours were documented throughout his lifetime, a complete biographical account of Frampton does not yet exist. The treatment traces Frampton’s life from his early years in Portsmouth to his tragic death from a brain tumour at age 51. Through interviews with family, friends, collaborators and former students, as well as references to archival footage and recordings of his music, the treatment communicates Frampton’s significant role in Australian jazz. It acknowledges his heading of the jazz course at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, his numerous compositions, industry awards and completion of a doctorate. The exegesis contains three fields of scholarly focus: a sub-field of life writing known as patriography (‘writing the father’), grief, and documentary film theory. It explores my relationship with Frampton and its impact on the biographical process, as influenced by my experience of having lost him. In doing so, the inextricable connection of grief to the process of making a film about my father is made clearly apparent. I consider a range of patriographies, creative texts which derive from grief, and the increasing prevalence of autoethnography in documentary film. I develop the term ‘aural-visual patriography’ to encapsulate my work