The Freedman Fellowship 2004

As noted by Andrew Robson—last year’s Freedman Fellow and this year’s MC—the final, live performance stage of this excellent prize feels more like a little festival than a competition. A festival held in the superb environment of the Opera House Studio, which augurs well for the Jazz Now Festival to be held there from August 25.

The jury this year was Dale Barlow, Daryl Pratt and Miroslav Bukovsky. Their selection of four final ensembles was based on submitted recordings and statements of philosophy and intended utilisation of the $10,000 cash prize and $5,000 promotional and career building assistance package. This information can be obtained on the net, and the programme contained a precis of the finalists’ intentions, but at this point I intend to write mainly about what I heard.

Tenor and alto saxophonist/composer David Theak’s theak-tet led off with exhilirating late bop and post-bop playing that combined slashing saxophone sword-play, fire, and impressionist, airborne harmonies, alternating forward momentum and up-draft harmonic suspensions, immediately demonstrating the vivid and clean sound of the PA and the acoustic space. To hear Matt McMahon playing a fine Steinway in here was a wonderful thing. As he said afterward, an instrument like this makes you realise that the stylings of pianists like Herbie Hancock were substantially a new music that could only be fully realised on a very good piano. Theak’s sound on both alto and tenor was excitingly projected, full-toned but with a bright sharp leading edge. His zipping precise patterns and impassioned multiphonic cries were all of a piece, very accomplised and full of the player’s personality. Some new pieces as well as Gamla Stan from the theak tet’s Jazzhead CD showed a more solemn and atmospheric strain.

Drummer Craig Simon and bassist Phil Stack had collectively the perfect combination of flexible expressivity and carefree drive and dynamism for this band. I see the theak-tet continuing for some time as a popular and important band here and abroad. Theak’s plans include recording, mixing and mastering the band’s third CD at Rainbow Studios in Oslo with master engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug. Certainly a recording that I would eagerly await.

When Melbourne singer/composer Gian Slater began, with a folk-like cadenza replete with quarter tones, I must have been reading guitarist James Muller’s mind, or vice versa. He told me later that it sounded so beautiful he was pretty sure she’d win the prize. I thought something along those lines too. Elfin is the old fashioned word with which writers would once have rushed into print after scanning Slater’s somewhat fey/pretty looks. The fact that it is an old fashioned word obviously hasn’t stopped me. Of course it is sexist to introduce physical appearance only when the first female artist appears. That hasn’t stopped me either, mainly because the music and Slater’s appearance were so remarkably matched. What a sweet, beautifully controlled and delicate sound. It seemed a kind of fairy music. It spread a kind of perfume, a musk.

Bassist Steve Elphick and pianist Andrea Keller joined her with infinite tact. She stopped sounding like the winner when she began singing the words she had written. There were good lines in there, but too many lines in a row ending on the same rhyme, until it sounded like a parody, a joke test to see how long you could keep rhyming. Also, the odd line that sounded like the work of someone from the army of ad agency philosophers now plagueing our lives from billboards and screens. Gian is twenty. I know these are hurtful words, but great things lie ahead. Just to show that she knew other people’s good poetry when she heard it, she made a beautiful song from Shelley’s fragment on the moon: Art thou pale for weariness/Of climbing heaven and gazing on earth/Wandering companionless…? The break, the line that does not rhyme, is crucial. Note: Gazing on earth, not on the earth. Of climbing heaven and gazing on earth. Lovely Percey.

Another element asserted itself that was immensely impressive. As well as the wordless cadenza, Slater gave us some scatting that drew in places from Nina Simone’s Middle eastern keening (check I Put A Spell On You). Also there were phrases that seemed to recall Debussy, Bach, the Beach Boys, even at one point that Drip Drip Drop Little April Showers ditty from a Walt Disney cartoon. By and large I don’t like scat singing. This was magic. And despite the many conscious or unconscious sources, it was completely unified.

Just how much of Slater’s music was deliberately artless and how much was a bit of a meander was not always easy to tell at a first hearing. Here is a major talent forming itself.

Adam Simmonds is unlike any other musician in Melbourne. At the same time it is hard to imagine him emerging from anywhere else on this continent. When I lived in Melbourne in the 1950s, it was as determinidely suburban and ocker as any other Australian city, but there was a level beneath that in which the Sidney Nolans, the Albert Tuckers and Arthur Boyds had thrived. Good heavens, Helmut Newton did fashion shots for the Myer advertising department, where I worked as a teenage layout artist. Australia’s arguably most fiercely fundamentalist yet creative trad jazz musicians played there. Also some of the most determinidely modern exponents.

Adam Simmonds embodies the Melbourne that does not fear being called arty. To be more polite, we speak of the unashamedly artistic Melbourne. I must say that the name of his band, The Creative Orchestra, was more Sydney in its gormlessness. What about the Australian Art Orchestra? Ah, that is taken from the European Art Orchestra. It’s different, for reasons too complicated to go into here. Different in the way that John Singleton is different to John Elliott. Sydney/Melbourne—so different, so much the same. Whatever you might prefer to call them, the musicians were set up before Simmons came down from the gallery and across the floor, playing the tenor saxophone and dancing. Such an entrance is not new, but he did it his way.

A lesson that has been learned by only a few of the free players—and Simmons certainly draws from that area—is that the full panoply of saxophone roars and burbles and cries can be more effective and much easier to listen to when not played with the saxophone engulfing the microphone. Simmons released arcing notes at full volume, which may have been picked up by the micophones but semed to draw their resonance from the acoustic space—notes pushed until they thinned out into little more than leading edge: scimitars of sound—as well as tiny burblings, chortles, barely audible sobs, mock-angry congestions, until he reached the piano, where Andrew Ogburn joined him in a duet that reminded me of an interlude from a Sun Ra performance. At one point the tenor was lifted parallel to the ground a la Lester Young and played across the piano strings.

Pianist Ogburn, a very interesting player, was the only colleague Simmons had brought from Melbourne. The remaining eight were Sydneysiders and they did a remarkable job of interpreting Simmons’s arrangements, which broke into free, boisterous conversations and cut on the instant to smooth ensembles. Furthermore, the main Sydney soloist, trombonist James Greening, offered a counterpoint, dance-wise to the dancing Simmons, who also astonished with his baritone playing. Steve Elphick and Evan Mannel, the never-failing drummer for all seasons, must have given Simmons support beyond his expectations.

All in all, this was a wonderfully theatrical and musical experience. It is only in recent times that a dancing theatrical element has re-entered contemporary jazz (the influences of the avant garde and world music are obvious), and finally it has shaken jazz theatricality free from the dated, unconsciously racist, darkies in top hats and spats, y’all, or straight out circus aspects that still have the PR industry in their grip.

James Muller is a mountain of guitar virtuosty and invention. The only danger for someone with this amount of natural talent is that of sounding glib (like some of the sesson players who boast that they can play anything Hendrix ever played but in tune; then wonder why it doesn’t actually move anyone the way Hendrix did). Muller plays as if he doesn’t know nor care that he has all that. Rarely does he play straight jazz or straight rock these days, but a synthesis entirely naturally to someone of his age and background. All the things that are most effective in jazz, rock, blues and country guitar emerge naturally at the right time in the right place, and it can give the listener shivers.

Muller’s compositions are of a piece with his playing, and his trio fired with such drive and breathtaking virtuosity that many musicians must have soon decided: ‘He’s won it!’

And he did. His drummer is the immensely talented and exciting Felix Bloxom, his bassist in place of Brett Hirst who was abroad, was Phil Stack, who had played with equal commitment and drive with Theak.

While I also thought ‘he’s won it’ not far into Muller’s performance, I must say that I would have found it very hard as a judge to choose between Muller and Simmons, whose performance was very special and had other dimensions to it that are very hard to bring off. As it happened, the patrons made their own spontaneous award of $1,000 to Simmons. While some argued well into the next week about this departure from the strict form of the competition, no one was short-changed in any way, and to me it had a poetic rightness.