Jazzman James Morrison heeds call for a Last Post to remember

At dawn James Morrison will walk a few short metres to the bottom of his driveway and play The Last Post to a crowd of zero.

James Morrison practises at his Mount Gambier home for his driveway rendition of the Last Post. Picture: Morgan Sette

In an illustrious career spanning almost four decades, Australia’s greatest trumpeter James Morrison has been frequently honoured with invitations to perform The Last Post at the nation’s biggest dawn services.

At dawn this Anzac Day, he will walk a few short metres to the bottom of the driveway of his Mount Gambier home and play The Last Post to an assembled crowd of zero as the sun rises at 6.47am.

His solo performance will be one of hopefully thousands around the nation, inspired by Brisbane music teacher Alastair Tomkins, who created the Music for Mateship campaign for professional and amateur musicians to observe Anzac Day by playing the sacred bugle call at dawn in their front yards.

Picture: Morgan Sette

Morrison told The Weekend Australian the campaign’s slogan, “Isolated but United on Anzac Day 2020”, had resonated with him as he endured isolation in his adoptive home in the southeast of South Australia, where he has ­established the James Morrison Academy of Music teaching jazz to the next generation of musicians.

“It’s going to be the first time in all these years of playing The Last Post on Anzac Day that I have ­actually been at home,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of dawn services, but never at home. I’ve done them in Melbourne, in Sydney, but this will certainly be the oddest one.”

Morrison paid credit to Mr Tomkins for devising the idea, saying it would have been “a real shame if we let Anzac pass without doing something”.

“Obviously in the current circumstances we can’t all go to a dawn service, we can’t all go and congregate and commemorate, so to have all these people standing in their driveway is a way under lockdown of observing this special day,” he said.

Morrison was unaware of any official estimates of how many Australians played wind instruments but he said the sheet music offering different arrangements for The Last Post and its codas, Rouse and Reveille, had been downloaded “thousands of times” this week from the musicformateship.org website.

“It’s going to be quite haunting and quite moving to have this sound wafting over the suburbs and towns. There will be a lot of people doing it. It’s not just trumpets and bugles, either. People are playing it on saxophones, on flutes, violins, all sorts of things. It’s going to be amazing.”

His work in Mount Gambier has been affected by the pandemic with his jazz club, Morrison’s, being closed. However, his academy, which is an accredited course through the University of South Australia, has managed to shift its tuition online.