The judges for the Freedmans this year were James Greening, a trombonist/composer/bandleader; Mark Isaacs a pianist/bandleader/composer, and virtuoso singer Kerrie Biddell. This was the first time a vocalist had served on the panel, and that was because this was the first time a vocalist had made it to the finals. Obviously it was the first time a vocalist won. For she did. It was the second time the Freedman Fellow was not a fellow or chap. Pianist Andrea Keller was the first winner, in 2001.
Jazz singing is a singular and difficult art. Many good singers, and some indifferent ones, work with jazz musicians, but few Australians within the age limit for the Freedmans have been able to combine good singing with the improvisational ability that jazz fans prize: the art of spontaneous composition, or creative variation of the composed melody. I personally do not believe that scat singing, or wordless improvised vocalising, is a necessary element. It can be an empty display. Billie Holiday never sang much or any scat as far as I can remember. Likewise Helen Humes and Helen Merrill. Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae and Nancy Wilson scatted rarely.
Kristin Berardi, this year’s Freedman Fellow, did scat on most tunes, making it a natural extension of the material, which she sang beautifully. She was in fact mesmerising.
Singing is in some degree acting, be it opera or rock and roll. Berardi used her attractive presence to draw the listener into a supremely musical, expressive world. Gifted (which can so easily be cursed) with the look of a movie star from Bill Collins’s Golden Years Of Hollywood – not the full-on femme fatale but the gal with glamour and a comic bent – she indulged in no vamping, coyness or overweening projection of `poisonality’. She used movement and facial expression almost as minimally as her accompanist, the superb guitarist James Sherlock, who had the attentive self-effacement of Bertie Wooster’s manservant Jeeves, and was as attuned to Berardi’s musical needs as Jeeves to his master’s.
Berardi began her first song, I’ve Grown Accustomed To His Face, unaccompanied, and you knew this was right on chosen key even before the first guitar chord. Matthew Westwood in The Australian described her voice as `butterscotch’. I’ve heard few who could hold a note and temper it so beautifully, nor modulate their voice so evocatively, establishing intimate presence and sudden haunting distance.
Berardi’s set was predominantly of standards, against which her originals suffered. Not melodically but in the lyrics, which were fine, sincere, but almost straightforward. Many of the great lyrics, from Broadway to rock pop/ balance clever and even tricky touches with depth of feeling. Berardi’s lyrics sometimes sounded like something you might write in your diary – nice descriptions, quiet musings – rather than something fully crafted into a song. Berardi won because her singing was outstanding and her improvising compositional and involving. At one point she introduced deliberately a little harried, flustered effect, as if a wind had struck her; an exciting ruffled moment set against the lovely tone she most often employed.
Of course Berardi also won on the strength of recorded material submitted to the judges and her statement of intent. One thing she intends to do is to perform and record with musicians in New York. Also to commission big band settings for her voice.
The concert – for that’s what the Freedman finals always feel like – had begun with tenor saxophonist/composer Matt Keegan with bassist Cameron Undy and drummer Dave Goodman making up his trio. These considerable virtuosi presented three engaging Keegan compositions in an accessible, highly pleasing set that was rocky and funky in overall feel but reflected not only current trends in those areas but contemporary jazz approaches to contemporary rhythms – all of which they have long developed into a language of their own.
Undy is one of the few bassists who can play the electric bass (as here) with as much authority in rockier areas as he does the double bass in an acoustic jazz context. It was a delight to follow his buoyant lines with their neat funky little catches.
Keegan has worked with many rock bands, and that influence is apparent in a certain rock blues-iness that often emerges – coloured with free jazz influences – in his passionate, high energy peaks. For all the rock influence there, Keegan’s lovely tone could perhaps remind you of jazz players of the West Coast cool school, with some hint of subtle hard bop tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley. It had a singing quality; a crooning effect at low volume, which could be sustained up into a beautiful alto register. He also expanded his sound effectively at times with a remote microphone and foot pedal.
A full exposition of Keegan’s compositional gift can be heard on his disc Roadscape (Jazzgroove), a suite with the same musicians.
I could imagine the trio of Scott Tinkler on trumpet, drummer Ken Eadie and pianist Marc Hannaford (the finalist) being the greatest source of confusion and dissent among the judges. Where would you play this? There are places, but they are not abundant.
This went against most trends in contemporary jazz – or any other contemporary music for that matter – delving back even to the Viennese school. Unlikely as it might seem, some of my favourite jazz has tapped this source. It is a subterranean stream within the Third Stream.
Hannaford gave a brief explanation. They would be playing freely but using a rhythmic and harmonic language that they were developing. Harmony would be based on intervalic relations drawn from the 12 semitones. This means of course that the hierarchic tempered scale – tonic, dominant, sub dominant etc – would be abandoned. No ‘stardust melody’ would be likely to emerge. In fact it would be atonal in at least one sense.
Tinkler proposed three descending tones which were picked up an octave above, then continued downward, inverted, played in retrograde inversion, and so on. Then it began to open out: piano, trumpet, drums interjecting, conversing, deliberately tangling, all hard and clean; the trumpet large, clear and bright, piano icy with pinging treble dissonances and big bottom chords. It moved in starts and stopped as suddenly over the hidden pulse. That was certainly there, and was subjected to metric modulation, displacement, sudden jumps. A fierce momentum accumulated suddenly and was as suddenly gone.
Tinkler stacked up a bright, hard staccato pattern in a glittering mosaic, a cadenza of sorts, and suddenly trailed off on a soft sound curving into stillness and silence. For a moment. Then crash! Such touches of sensuality appeared unexpectedly amid severity and what one could call spontaneous deliberation. I loved it, but the way I heard it was also coloured by the suspicion that I might have been the only one there apart from the players, who liked it at all.
The Opera House Studio, where all the Freedman finals have been held, was actually perfect for this music.
Listening back over Scott Tinkler records (for there is nothing of Hannaford playing like this) with his trio or with the quartet with Ken Edie, Phillip Rex and Paul Grabowsky, I heard also much metric modulation and abrupt vaulting, but also tons more momentum. Tons and tons of momentum: a road train of it. I couldn’t help but think that if they’d played like that they might have been the most wildly applauded of the night.
Nevertheless, this was the concept they were working on, and they presented it resolutely, with courage you might say, or perhaps contrariness. Such interludes, testing as they might be, are what lift the Freedmans, the Wangaratta Festival of Jazz and the Jazz Now festival (which like the Freedmans is held in the Opera House Studio) above all other large jazz events in the country.
The applause was solid but contained.
It lifted to previous levels of exuberance for saxophonist Carl Mackey’s band, which was closest to the `modern jazz’ mainstream, even though only the final piece was played in four/four swing. Paradoxically, this was the piece on which Mackey, on alto, sounded most modern. His clear, flying lines would have been at home in Dave Holland’s band. But he was more than ably supported by bassist Phil Stack, drummer Daniel Susnjar and pianist Tom O’Halloran.
The last two are from Perth, as is Mackey, but O’Halloran is now resident in Sydney. They played superbly together, with drive and lift, and the particular sparkling excitement that the best of this kind of jazz can generate. O’Halloran has really flowered since I last heard him.
As with all Freedmans so far, we heard four quite different candidates. Some might be tempted to see this as a cross section of current Australian jazz. No, that is too various to be summarised in a night. It was a series of brilliant snapshots, one of them particularly bracing, or testing, depending on you perspective. I had a very heavy flu, but had long forgotten I had it by the time I walked out into the cold harbourside air.