It’s 50 years since Scottish-Australian jazz singer-trumpeter-songwriter Vince Jones started out as a bebop trumpeter playing the club circuit in Melbourne and he’s celebrating in Canberra with a performance at The Street Theatre.

Jones, memorable for his virtuoso trumpet, his laid-back voice and his incisive words, will perform classics and some new songs with his regular quintet – pianist Matt McMahon, double bassist, Karl Dunnicliff and Canberrans John Mackey, tenor sax, and James Hauptmann, drums.

Known for his attraction to R&B music and even more for creating the biggest-selling Australian jazz album of all time, Come In Spinner, he grew up with jazz, soul and rock with a lot of horns, much of it on records owned by his dad, who had been a band conductor in Scotland. 

It was not horns but the trumpet that would inspire him, seen over a long career and a long line of Aria, APRA, Mo and Bell awards.

When I catch up with Jones by phone from his home in Bingie on the south coast, where he’s lived for around 30 years, he tells me that at age 71, he’s enjoyed a long life.

“I like writing original music,” Jones says. “Here in Australia I saw how heavily we were affected by British and American rock ‘n’ roll; I always felt the need to look in another direction away from the American influence and I thought I’d like to make music that is special to this country.”

But the music he’ll perform at the Street Theatre will include a couple of standards from the American Songbook, which he still loves, along with some past hits as Jones and his quintet work their way through a handpicked selection of songs.

With a new album being mastered to come out later this year, he’s been reflecting on the contemporary online music phenomenon.

“I like the concept of a CD or album and this one has got 10 or 12 tracks on it,” he says, arguing that platforms such as Spotify create very little room for new music, and even more importantly, discourage real listening, as they can be called up automatically.

It’s the same in the film industry, he suspects. He got talking to playwright David Williamson recently, of whom he’s been a fan since 1975 when he heard the Galapagos Duck soundtrack for the movie of The Removalists, and asked him whether he ever gets royalties from the old movies of his plays. Williamson told him: “Yes, but you have to hassle.”

“These platforms pay almost nothing to artists,” he says, adding, “but then again, I’m a dinosaur.”

Vince Jones, The Street Theatre, September 28.