Remarkable! A four night forum for what’s happening in jazz now – or a cross section of it – that has increased its audience appreciably. The mystery is why this does not spill over, appreciably, into attendance of live performances of this music week by week. But is it a mystery?
Attendance at the weekly gigs goes up and down, mostly in direct proportion to the publicity the presenting organisations have been able to drum up. It is very hard to get publicity for jazz events these days. Jazz Now got very little publicity compared to Big Day Out and other events. Admittedly BDO is a much bigger, but JN’s publicity was still small for a four day event. But it was enough. While the emphasis was on what younger musicians are doing now, a fair few older listeners turned up. Being a senior citizen myself I can bear witness that surfing and diving, etc, in the daytime is much more compelling than going out more than once a week at night. I often enjoy it when I get there far more than I had anticipated. So you have to remind yourself each time how good it could be.
And of course people are more attracted to an event which promises to skim off the cream of a certain genre than they are to a one off gig which has got a tiny mention in the paper, if that.
Bassist Cameron Undy’s 20th Century Dog was first out after the hare. The very nervous Undy looked, back-lit, a bit like a young David Bowie. Sonically, the lights came on, with Simon Barker’s cymbals hissing brightly, a sensational guitar solo from Carl Dewhurst, which had a melismatic pattern at the peak of its arc, all over a throbbing pulse. This moved into a slow ballad feel, lulling us before Matt Keegan’s tenor saxophone rocketed, through a shower of cymbals, showing both rock and jazz saxophone influences. An Undy solo on double bass drew an exclamation from a woman sitting near me. Matt McMahon played some very funky, driving and creative electric piano. The set was a very attractive, sometimes pretty, sometimes aggressively exciting, opener.
Headlining guest, drummer Jim Black, followed with a quite stunning recital, full of sonic resource and invention, on drum kit, electrified drum pad and small electric keyboard, with percussive implements too numerous to mention. One item began at least with a Max Roach solo, named for the great drummer who bridged eras, Big Sid Catlett, although Black claimed it was for Sid Vicious. In another piece, the small and eagerly friendly Black (his arms seemed far too short for what he was executing) created a friction on the drum heads that made the whole kit sound like a motor bike revving. If anyone ever warned Black about long drum solos, that person was wrong! One sonic event flowed into another, orchestrally, logically, always entertainingly, and often with huge power and melodic and textural beauty. We could not wait to hear the man play with a band. That was coming.
Next night, Thursday 8, began with a Bernie McGann/Paul Grabowsky duet. Grabowsky pronounced McGann his favourite. In private he once told me that he had come to the conclusion that Bernie McGann was one of the great alto saxophonists of all time. I have heard the two playing together with a rhythm section, and strange as some may find it, they were brilliantly complementary. While this recital had many superb moments, it wasn’t quite what it might become if repeated a couple of times. In place of the fantastic interaction – sometimes quite abstract and spiky – that had occurred with a rhythm section, was a recital in which Grabowsky was at one and the same time too deferential and too unrelenting in his accompaniment. Nor was it a loud or showy accompaniment – rather one in which Grabowsky made reference to elements of the tradition, all at a discreet volume.
This was part of the problem. McGann also played within himself most of the time, volume-wise, and I think the sound people should have lifted it all a few whiskers within that space. It would have been great if Grabowsky had sat on his hands occasionally and, like Thelonious Monk, let McGann play a chorus or two unaccompanied. It would also have been great if he had stabbed at him in places and prodded him into some of the edgier playing of which he is a master. Still it had much beauty and towards the end began to fire in the way one knew was always more than possible. Two masters, without doubt, being mostly a little too polite.
After this the volume came up considerably as trumpeter Phil Slater, Carl Dewhurst and bassist Lloyd Swanton (requested by Black, who is a big fan of The Necks). This surged out in a series of slow pulses or swells that carried a cargo of bright, dissonant, angular, percussive debris. Dewhurst moved between two guitars, one played on his lap. The essence of this music was that every ping, pang and jangle from any musician was answered by one or more of the others. It moved in a series of trigger moments, unified by the groundswell, over which Slater’s trumpet ran, struck, screamed, or repeated barely audible little patterns, cells, at intervals. Swanton, joining in this with his customary resource, dropped nicely into one or two open spaces with some melodic flow, some lovely tone.
Slater’s tone also was beautiful, sometimes with a dry pith. It might have raised the temperature to move into a stronger motoric feel, with Slater taking just one longish, running solo. The sounds they were making, the many starts and pauses, like a cellular process, are things I love – but the task of keeping it all moving with purpose faltered. Overall it was very exciting.
Richard Nunns and Judy Bailey were given a little too long to sustain their duet. Judy told me she was terrified when she found how long they had to play. Nunns, a serious figure at once professorial and mystical, explores Maori instruments, of bone, stone, string and wood, that have fallen into disuse. There are long, thick flutes and tiny whistles and many loud and soft percussions. The biggest flute sounded at times like a shakuhachi, but on others he used the intervals and contours of birdsong to remarkable effect. I lived once in New Zealand for a year, and the calls of one flute started a vivid image in my mind of ferns – of which I saw many in the wet cold forested mountains – and of a bird singing hidden in the ferns. The fern is New Zealand’s emblem. It was a moment of remarkable, simultaneous associations.
Judy’s interaction with the array of often tiny sounds was more than impressive. There were times when she joined Nunns with such small, detailed figures that I had to look over at her to make sure it really was the piano. At the end Nunns spoke in Maori (he is a white New Zealander) with a strangely moving effect. Then he, presumably, translated, saying how wonderful it was to hear all these creative musicians in this field, and that when they spoke so individually on their instruments they were talking to the spirit world. At this point I noticed that one of his hands had begun to shake. It stopped as soon as he finished speaking. Let me say a wind went through me, off South Island snows. God willing, I might see those mountains and jade-coloured rivers again.
I believe that Nunns remarked of the Scott Tinkler Trio, which galvanised those who remained, that this was some testosterone-fuelled music. No doubt, but being past the age of high testosterone by many decades, this didn’t interest me much. What interested me greatly was the energy, power; the seemingly endless percussive patterns that blazed from Tinkler’s trumpet, the cohesion of a band that had not played together for at least a year. Not only percussive patterns, but an array of squeezed, talking, obstructed, wheezing sounds emerged in course from the trumpet. Plus wide open notes that swelled in size as they streamed through the place. I have tried to summon up some echo of Simon Barker’s drums. I give up. We know how great he is. The strength and intelligence of Brett Hirst’s bass lines was never more apparent. This was the highlight of the festival for me.
As Chris Abrahams began his piano recital my flu-infested throat began to tickle, and so did my nose. The pressure built up and I virtually ran on tip-toe, just making it out into the foyer before releasing a shower of viruses and bacteria in a huge coughing sneeze. Before long I crept back in, always ready to run, and looked down on the holes in the back of the scarcely poverty- stricken Abrahams’s T-shirt. Chris played mostly in staccato or in sustained tremolo, in order to keep the overtones ringing. These vibrations threatened to form a shape of their own, but from where I stood, never did, quite. At their most graphic, they became a sheet – glassy and ringing – in the treble. One device was to keep the air buzzing for a long stretch and then suddenly flower out along the keyboard pianistically. Melodies emerged from the thronging textures, slowly changed, and disappeared. And much more. Fantastic. But I was distracted by ghostly coughing sneezes that rose in my throat and were barely suppressed.
I think Ten Part Invention is onto a winning festival tour de force in its setting of the Kenneth Slessor poem Five Bells – but I think everybody would agree that it needs some trimming. And maybe it needs a brief introduction giving the audience some perfunctory idea of what the poem was about – since it is not read until near the end of the long piece. The ensemble music is by Miroslav Bukovsky and the effective electronic interludes – with their evocations of bell buoys, fog horns and tides – are by Andrew McGuiness. The visuals on an extremely distracting screen behind the players had a few moments of effectiveness, when pale abstract shapes did suggest a downward drift toward drowning. The five bells are five bottles of grog in the pockets of Slessor’s friend, who fell, drunk, from a ferry and drowned in the harbour. They also elude to the bells on shipping buoys that clanged in the swell, and church bells, possibly from Watsons Bay.
I’ll talk about this piece in detail in a future article. For now, let me say that Tony Barry’s reading of the poem, in the great setting provided by drummer John Pochee, pianist Paul McNamara and bassist Steve Elphick – was terrifically powerful. Maybe this was the highlight. This and Scott Tinkler. I never saw Barry credited anywhere in the publicity or the program. Really!