Fifth Jazz:Now Festival
September 10 – 13
The Studio, Sydney Opera House
In each of its four years to date the Jazz:Now Festival, under the artistic directorship of SIMA and the Jazzgroove Association and presented by the Opera House, has presented a revelatory slice of Australian contemporary jazz in this era, with an outstanding international guest. The same can be said of the Freedman Jazz Fellowships which share the same superb, gloriously situated venue. At the great Wangaratta festival you can walk out from the music into the bush of North Eastern Victoria, which is fascinating in wet or dry conditions. Here you can walk out into a sublime urbanity. In either case it is easy to find visual parallels with the music.
This year’s festival was opened by the combination of trumpet, bass and drums, which can be a stark event, though it has never been less than exciting in my experience. Few attempt the idiom, and those who do must feel the shadow of Scott Tinkler’s powerhouse trios. Trumpeter Andy Fiddes even apologised for not being able to play like Tinkler, while presenting a tune he had written for the same virtuoso. It is our good fortune that he has taken that obvious influence in a highly personal direction, playing fewer notes than Tinkler, sounding rougher and looser, but creating shapes and streams of fire and momentum that are all his own.
As with Tinkler’s trios, bass and drums interact with the trumpet and with each other with invention and dynamism. Fiddes, like not a few jazz musicians is a rather naive presence. It seems he had a cold, and you could hear him sniffing on the mike as he announced his compositions. His announcements were boyish and enthusiastic as the bounding and panting of a young dog. It would have been a shame if anyone had transferred impressions of amateurishness to the music. It actually used raw and loose elements in a knowing way. It used space and attack dramatically, and Fiddes’s tunes – while drawing from traditional sources – were quite original.
Bassist Ben Waples set up propulsive patterns that were echoed by his limber stance and often prancing feet. Fiddes’s sound was both raw and rich. His sustained tones were sometimes filled with a kind of primitive tremolo that began with the note – unlike the more sophisticated norm of playing the note straight at first and then introducing a smooth vibrato. The great Kenny Dorham uses a few throbbing notes like that on his Blue Note masterpiece Trompetta Tocatta. Like Dorham, Fiddes then flared and struck at fierce, startling and highly sophisticated angles. Dave Goodman’s drums heightened the tension with tight patterns. While Fiddes stayed on the initial pulse, though playing it very loosely, bass and drums broke into a racing multiple. At times the three went in different directions and snapped back together.
On a slow atmospheric piece, Goodman produced beautiful resonances and textures from his drum kit, and on the most furious offering he thundered beneath the trumpet, bringing shouts from those who were hip. Not everyone was. I apologise for the lofty attitude – and the use of the archaic “hip” – but the set deserved a more enthusiastic reception.
Mark Isaacs then advanced on the magnificent Steinway with the air of a man who was about to give a Steinway a workout. And he did. There was a good deal of late classical and Romantic thunder with brilliant running treble figures and cascades (how marvelous to be able to call all that up spontaneously) and some lovely, delicate moments when the strings and single notes on the keyboard were manipulated simultaneously. Toward the end were some passages in the general area of Debussy and Ravel. Wonderful.
Sam Keevers’s band was somewhat disappointing until near the end. Or perhaps it was just because I had anticipated something else, after listening many times to the pair of Keevers nonet discs recorded at Bennett’s Lane in Melbourne, which used some of the same players plus trumpeter Scott Tinkler and electric guitarist Steve Magnussen. Those are bright instruments and I missed them. Tim Firth, in place of Simon Barker, was not quite the right drummer here, though he is undoubtedly outstanding.
Of course there were highlights. Keevers’s piano was beautiful, as always, Jamie Oehlers’s tenor saxophone was brilliantly projected and engaging and, when he finally became satisfyingly audible, Bernie McGann played a couple of magic alto solos. Sam has not had the best luck at this venue. It would be fantastic to have the complete nonet at the next Jazz:Now.
Jackson Harrison’s trio played exquisitely on the second night. Ben and James Waples were on bass and drums respectively and Ben revealed another side of his now quite masterful playing. Some of his bowed contributions at the edge of audibility were practically smelled as perfumes rather than heard. The brothers make an exceptional team. And yet, by the third or fourth tune I wished they would all smash up the ice on the lake a bit. As Michael Fitzjames remarked, it began to sound too decorous. Contrast was missing. Something to shake or startle you and re-sensitise your receptors to the undeniable beauty. I heard this trio at the Sound Lounge and was thrilled. It is hard to put your finger on what is missing sometimes.
American pianist Marilyn Crispell changed all that with one short improvisation, then a long one that began with huge reverberating steps at the bottom end of the magnificent Steinway, sometimes in two handed unisons that were like ledges cut in granite, sometimes with massive chords in either hand revolving about each other. This improvisation moved through different sections of distinct character, in each of which quite different melodic material – or simply just melodic cells – were reprieved and further developed. One section was filled with echoes of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, Copeland, Steven Foster, and Duke Ellington a la Black, Brown & Biege. In other words, evocations of what were known as Negro Spirituals as distinct from black gospel. In another section a beautiful baroque setting (composed on the spot presumably) of a kind of New Hebridian folk melody recurred. Thrillingly.
Now these sections were not strictly demarked, but rolled into one another, and the whole expanded in a vast, billowing grandeur. The audience responded in kind, but afterward I ran into a few musicians who were somewhat indifferent. Sure it was perhaps over the top. I record that there was a contrary view, but am paid to give my honest opinion. I was absorbed in it and exhilarated.
The Alcohotlicks – two guitars (Ben Hauptman and Aaron Flower) and the drums of Evan Mannell – opened the Friday night with an exhilarating set in which corny/catchy motoric surf rock vamps played with the confidence of a happy machine, fast virtuosic jazz rock lines and metal power chords set up brilliant and contrasting guitar solos. Some of the material had the joy of loving near parody. The catchiness and seductive spirit of their influences were played against the unpredictability and adventure of great jazz and rock.
The following duet between alto saxophonist Andrew Robson and drummer John Pochee took a little while to achieve the impact of the louder band, particularly as Robson began well back from the microphone. He was perfectly audible however against Pochee’s dense polyrhythmic power and when he move in closer the duo’s acoustic music became as exciting as the Alcohotlick’s electricity. Robson danced as he played and his lines vaulted and soared. And of course his alto sound was thrilling.
Some of Robson’s tunes showed the influence of **Ornette Coleman’s** recent concert in the Opera House proper, and while Pochee’s unique style has evolved from other modern and avant-garde traditions, there was a long-established rapport. The two are recording. If there is no atmospheric piece using Pochee’s distinctive hand drumming I will be surprised and disappointed.
Now came the most powerful performance to this point: a continuous suite played by the Stu Hunter Experiment. Hunter directed from the piano and looked as if he belonged there: the composer and his chosen musicians. The horns were tenor saxophonists Matt Keegan and Melbourne’s Julien Wilson (who played so beautifully with Kurt Elling and the Sydney Symph recently), plus James Greening on trombone and pocket trumpet. The rhythm section was Hunter of course, with bassist Cameron Undy and drummer Simon Barker.
What unfolded would not have been shamed by a Charles Mingus work. From the first punching and gliding ensemble Keegan’s tenor rose, weaving and angling with fire and soul. You knew at that moment that this was on. Among the many intriguing configurations of the horns were long chanting figures and stretches where they repeated one gently pushed note in unison across the beat, against which the rhythm section interacted with complexity and with mesmerising pure time. Beautiful solos rose, Greening’s talking mute trombone being specially compelling. Wilson and Keenan both in their different ways used the tenor’s murmuring, crooning subtones and sang in the high register and broke the sound up with raunchy overblown exclamations and cries. Soon the ensemble rose with powerful grandeur, Greening’s pocket trumpet blazing on top. Ructions broke out – brief collective improvisations and written patterns. Bluesy ensembles of singular richness swelled and glided, and after much intrigue, much use of space and contrast, the whole thing began to roar at threatening volume. It locked into a pattern and there was a point where you thought there was no way this could ever stop. It could not be resolved.
It was hypnotic, slightly nightmarish and actually funny. Then the impossible cataclysmic climax arrived, and the crowd roared. I stood to applaud and so did many others. I heard myself shouting “Bravo! Bravo!” in an Italian accent. I didn’t care. For the moment I was Italian. It was transfiguring. Bravo! Bravo! Bravo once more. Everybody had played beautifully. Cameron Undy produced a bowed passage of eerie sonic manipulation and dark soulful melody. I will not forget it.
On the final night Informal Troupe – Matt Ottignonn, tenor sax, David Symes, electric bass, and Hamish Stuart, drums – presented a selection from their album Urban Parkland. Electronic effects gave some of the music a sweet dreaming quality that was apposite to the title of what was in effect a suite. It was easy to feel yourself cruising at night with neon sliding up the windshield and along the side windows. The electric bass was an effective part of this. Though Symes’s role was often an expert and distinctive funky one, He also contributed colour splashes and industrial accidents of electric sound. For not all the music was restrained. When it rocked and funked out, Stuart’s drums were a joy, recalling his years with the great Jackie Orszaczky.
Ottignon’s saxophone was exemplary in every mood. At times he produced a barking Pharoah Sanders trill to great effect and some of his arcing complex lines were quite original. One of the most beautiful tunes unconsciously used fragments from Duke Ellington’s In A Sentimental Mood and Matt Dennis’s Everything Happens To Me. Significantly, the host tune held its own around these lovely phrases.
The set was one tune too long. The euphoric threatened to become soporific, but the trio had made its mark.
Next, and finally for the festival, Marilyn Crispell played with bassist Lloyd Swanton and drummer Simon Barker (you knew the home side would not let us down here!) This was quite different in character to Crispell’s earlier solo. This was free jazz of relentless and overwhelming intensity, but for a couple of interludes that dropped to a palpable near silence in which the marvelous textural resources of Swanton and Barker cast their spell. For the most part a fierce and complex free rhythmic momentum was sustained. Crispell’s teeming piano advanced like a hundred thousand leafcutter ants. Treble lightnings flashed through it and thunder claps shook it. Barker sustained a tremendous complex of energy which was startlingly redoubled at times in sudden outbursts and banging tumbles down through the drum kit’s sonorities. Here is a drummer who does not wave his sticks in the air. Where does all the power come from? It is summoned with a technique like a great concert pianist’s
The festival ended not with a whimper but a sustained bang that was also full of ghostly overtones and harmonic ringing. And while it was a little long for about six or seven people who sneaked out just before the end, the applause was ecstatic. Something was happening, and while some may not have known what it was, they certainly felt it. This had everything one has come to expect from Jazz:Now. For me a walk back toward the city’s towers – some of which defined themselves against those behind them by their patterns of light rather than density or volume (which was invisible) – by black water on which coloured light rocked, and finally to the Quay and a gigantic gelato.