JAZZ:NOW Festival
Opera House Studio Sept 20-23
On the day of the first night of the third Jazz:Now festival Melbourne drummer Ted Vining rang to tell me that our friend Barry Buckley – important jazz bassist and innovative dental technician – had died at 68. I mention this because Barry and Stewart Speer, David Martin, Brian Brown, Keith Stirling and Keith Hounslow were the first modern jazz musicians I heard in person – on Sundays at the Jazz Centre 44 in St Kilda, near Luna Park. They were free spirits with an attitude that would be recognised by many on the JAZZ:NOW program. A longer memorial will soon appear on this site, in which the relevance of Barry’s dental patent will be apparent.
As Barry had also played for decades, right up to his death, with Ted Vining and Bob Sedergreen in one of our most distinctive piano trios, I thought of him as Aron Ottignon’s piano trio opened JAZZ:NOW. This superb trio began with a fantastic Pharoah Sanders tune, which still sounded modern: at once funky and airborne. Shivers went up my neck. Phew! How do you like that, Barry? I know he would have leant forward suddenly at the glorious sound of Cameron Undy’s bass. John Shand has observed the effect of pianist Ottignon’s light, flying touch over a powerful rhythmic surge.
I was aware, hearing snatches of conversation, that the people sitting around me had really come to hear Katie Noonan, but they applauded these three great musicians as loudly as I did. Like much of the festival’s music, Ottignon’s was touched by other contemporary idioms, giving it an immediate appeal to a broader audience, but it was full of the details and interplay that I love in the jazz tradition. A central drive from which polyrhythms rose, and in which chromatic intricacies sparkled. Rising rhythmic power was the main point of Ottignon’s The Booty, which he had written after a dance festival in Notting Hill had lifted him to a fever of excitement; but this too was full of invention.
These are remarkably flexible musicians. More than that, they are powerful and convincing, whatever they play. This was brought home when I saw drummer Felix Bloxsom playing on television with the band Sneaky Sound System. He nailed that very different feel as hard as he had Ottignon’s music.
You can’t expect me to agree with John Shand all the time, and I certainly couldn’t understand his view, expressed in The Sydney Morning Herald a couple of days later, that Katie Noonan’s performance with her Elixir Vitae trio had been emotionally one-dimensional. I don’t know which dimension that was, but it certainly took a hold on me and those sitting around me. I don’t know whether Noonan is getting better or whether I am hearing her better, but the past two performances of hers that I’ve experienced have overwhelmed any qualifications I may have harboured.
The ecstacy hit me as Noonan sent ravishing sweeps skyward, over triple metre, and as the rhythmic pendulum swung back down, started skittering soft runs like tiny fish scared upward through pond reeds. In remarkably successful settings of poems by Thomas Shapcott and Martin Challis, she often kept the words coming in a system of melodic fluttering and soaring, sometimes isolating a word, floating it and rolling it about in the air, evoking perhaps Sarah Vaughan. The lightness of so much of it, and the lightness of her drumless ensemble, made for startling moments when she turned on the power.
I looked again at some of Shapcott’s and Challis’s poetry later, and was surprised to find it still excellent without the music, so striking had the musical transformations been.
The rhythmic, melodic, colouristic play was not achieved by Noonan alone. Tenor saxophonist Isaac Hurren – husbandman of the most decidedly pregnant Noonan – at times recalled the sensual aspects of Stan Getz’s playing but also had access to dark hollow booming notes and slithery knotted complexes from the area of free jazz. His lines were both impressionistic and singing. Guitarist Steve Magnussen, in brief solos or in accompaniment, always injected the surprising and right colour, from remote dreaming sounds to more immediate pangs and spears. Again the influence of rock guitar was there, but in the surprise intervals and the ushering of broken time into the absolutely right direction there was much that was jazz. Sometimes his shapes seemed to be twisted in ductile gold wire. Like the frames for the dentures I now have at the back of my mouth; to reprise the dental motif. Shand made an inspired reference to Magnussen – so like Hamlet in his intense focus on matters of moment – and his unerring decisions as to when to play or not to play.
Not so unerring were the decisions of saxophonist and flautist Dale Barlow and guitarist Steve McKenna who opened the second night. Using tunes mostly known to most with any jazz involvement as a starting point, they improvised very freely. The accomplishments of these two, in Australia and internationally, need no expansion here. Unfortunately, accomplishment rather than effect was often at the fore. Or perhaps too many effects. This seemed a great shame, as their opening essay was very beautiful, reminding me that Here Comes That Rainy Day is indeed a beautiful tune. I hate to use the word beautiful yet again, but Barlow’s playing, his lovely tone and phrasing, and McKenna’s array of electric sounds and figures all expanded the theme beautifully.
It is most irksome when a reviewer “reads the minds” of the players – particularly irksome for the players – but the ensuing array seemed to me just that: a demonstration that we can do free improvisation too – with knobs on! The free improvisation that I will always return to is not a succession of novel sounds and ideas. Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, The Necks et al often stay in the one musical/textural place for quite a while, developing and expanding the force and feeling of that area. Enough criticism. I hope that, having shown us what they can do, Barlow and McKenna settle down and exploit the obvious potential of their duo.
The night was saved gloriously by Matt McMahon’s Paths and Streams project. The pianist and composer has used prizemoney from his Freedman Fellowship award last year to record settings of compositions by some of his colleagues, a tune by singer/songwriter Robyne Dunn, and material from Peter Sculthorpe’s Piano Concerto. The theme statements and improvisations by trumpeter Phil Slater (and on the album James Muller), McMahon, bassist Brett Hirst and drummer Simon Barker are framed by McMahon’s arrangements for a string quartet – who are Huy Nguyen and Michele O’Young, violins, Leah Zweck, viola, and Andrew Hines, cello.
Minus Muller, this was what we heard on the night. The string quartet writing is minimal rather than lush, and some might have wished to hear it developed a little further – including perhaps me – but having accepted it as a series of glittering punctation marks, place marks and elegant frames for the jazz quartet, I found it a most satisfying, often beautiful and sometimes fiercely exciting experience. Cellist Hines seemed to play with more confidence than his colleagues – or it could have been the sound balance – and his lines in the lower reaches of the instrument lent a gravity and dark force to some of the sections when the energy and excitement began to rise.
McMahon’s playing was also quite minimalist for the most part, and beautifully poised, so that he often functioned as the link between the strings and the jazz players. Sculthorpe’s music yielded I think the most powerful experience. A soulful, slow tranquil theme on the trumpet set everything in mesmerising motion, written and improvised lines intertwining most effectively, until the climacteric of Slater’s trumpet, spearing out, juddering and fluttering in trills that spilled into chromatic figures, all trailing down again to tranquility.
Another emphatic success for me was the title tune, a McMahon piece dedicated to the memory of trumpeter Keith Stirling, on which Slater did not play. This was like a concerto for Barker’s drums against the most intriguing string writing of the set. While Barker used some of his most delicate timbral effects, he also thundered out tremendously against a repeating line from the strings, obliterating them repeatedly. These explosions seemed at first random, but there was ample opportunity to become familiar with the string line, and the effect of that continuing unheard behind the drums and reappearing at different stages, was quite brilliant.
On many pieces the effect of the strings moving, drifting in free and strict time, with all the time fractures and polyrythms of Hirst and Barker rocking, bumping and rippling about them was superb. And then the transformation of space as Slater and Barker suddenly rocketed and thundered! Yes indeed.
I was ill on the third night and decided at the last moment to stay home. I am told that Aron Ottignon’s other ensemble (with percussion), namely Aronas, was powerful, and I have no doubt that Gerard Masters’ Finn Bros Project was a bit on the kiwi side. In the best possible way of course! Good God, it was all kiwi. Aron is also of that persuasion. What more can I say? I wasn’t there. But I was once in New Zealand for a year.
The final night was opened by Tim O’Dwyer’s trio, who played pieces from their excellent album Broken River. The title refers to a stream in the Castlemaine region of Victoria just below the 37th parallel and east of 37 degrees longtitude – or near Bendigo if you prefer – where O’Dwyer grew up. It’s not so far from Heathcote, where my brother-in-law Graham Austin died a few days ago. It can be very dry there.
There was a dry and even stark quality to the music, which took off with terrific energy, O’Dwyer’s intensely driven alto saxophone leading the trio through some rapid, precise rhythmic scrambles and hurtling releases. The three jammed the power on with such severity that I wondered how the broad audience would take it straight out of the gate. You know the feeling: phwoof! This is great; I wonder if everyone else can feel it. The response showed that they surely could.
I think people are more likely to be happy when in motion than standing still. The way music can give the feeling of motion even when you are just sitting there is uncanny. In this case: an urgent pulse, and accents on and across that pulse, which could be fence posts flying past or the random chaos of rushing trees. Also the heavy forward pressure of O’Dwyer’s playing. It can give the feeling of terrific speed, of acceleration even when the tempo has not moved, and of the strange hiatus on a bend as the landscape roves about on another tack. O’Dwyer, bassist Clayton Thomas and drummer Darren Moore can really get that happening.
And there was much more; textural play in which Thomas set off some beautiful high overtones on rods of metal pushed through the strings of his bass and Moore evoked for me at least the brittle intricacy of dry bush on his kit, while O’Dwyer made some cries and squarks and high thin squeels that seemed like harsh birdsong and stinging insects. All this sometimes leading into slow, powerfully deliberate stomp rhythms. And through it all a stringent lyricism and a kind of objectified nostalgia. A couple of pieces came, I think, from the direction of Anthony Braxton, Oliver Lake, Arthur Blythe.
Everything had a definite purpose and shape. The trio has a strong individual grip on its territory. They got a rousing ovation. It was wonderful to share this with, I am sure, many people who had never heard this kind of music in person.
Finally, the Japan Australia Jazz Orchestra, celebrating the 2006 Australia-Japan Year Of Exchange. This orchestra has been performing in Japan in big, packed halls. Nostalgia for Japan, Victoria and New Zealand was a strong underlying feeling for me throughout this festival. Japan specially. The orchestra is Makoto Kuriya, creative director/piano, Ken Ota, saxophones, Hiromitsu Agatsuma, shamisen, Cameron Deyell, creative director/guitar, Matt Keegan, tenor saxophone, Phil Slater, trumpet, Simon Barker, drums/percussion. The nostalgia was strongest, even somewhat painful, when Agatsuma was featured on the electric shamisan. The sound of this differs from the traditional shamisen somewhat in the way that a piano differs from a harpsichord. The traditional instrument, triangular in shape, rather like a prototype heavy metal guitar, and played with a huge plectrum like a paint scraper, has a much drier sound with little sustain – an acquired taste that I acquired in no uncertain terms in Japan – but the oriental quality of the electric instrument as played by Agatsuma seemed just as potent.
The prevalence of the pentatonic scale in Japanese music gives a strong relationship to the blues, making these influences less incongruous in jazz than you might imagine. The opening piece presented a slow stepping, somewhat exotic line; ringing, measured and rather pretty, against much bright detail from piano, percussion, shamisen and bass. It reminded me a little of some Euro-American collaborations – Don Cherry with a European improvising orchestra, for instance. This is very much my stuff, and the audience seemed to feel the same way. Slater had also arranged an Indonesian melody which yielded a wonderful horn unison somewhat like exotic bebop.
Ota’s alto saxophone and Slater’s trumpet were wildly exciting, exultant solo voices, each inspiring the other. But everyone had involving statements to make. So much territory was covered – free collective improvisation, brilliant solos, big, big ensembles, a dance/party piece from Kuriya as a closer – and it was all resoundingly cheered, not just by the Japanese in the audience – of whom there were quite a few, which was great to see.
This joyful creativity goes on of course pretty much beyond the notice of Arts people, but I think we should all take some perverse pleasure in that. I saw the Picasso/Dora Mar exhibition in Melbourne. They did not hear this. I am ahead. Thanks to Jazzgroove and Sima for these nights.