The Basement,
28 October 2009
One of the things I love about listening to live jazz and improvised music is the sense of kinship among like-minded musicians when they are being pushed to do their best work. Last week at The Basement, acknowledging one brilliant solo after another, trumpeter/composer Charles Tolliver couldn’t remember the names of the Jazzgroove Mothership Orchestra’s musicians, but it wasn’t necessary: they understood each other in a way that made individual names redundant.
The Jazzgroove Mothership Orchestra (JMO) is a rich example of the strength and range of contemporary composer-performer ensembles in Australia. From the Catholics and Ten Part Invention to the Australian Art Orchestra and the large ensembles of Mike Nock, there is an audience for contemporary big band music in Australia which the JMO exists to foster.
At the Basement, where the JMO and Tolliver were playing prior to their joint appearances at the Wangaratta Jazz Festival, the orchestra warmed up with two pieces that sparked immediately thanks to its rhythm section. Hugh Barrett’s piano solo on the first, and Evan Mannell’s creativity at the drums on the second, “Mr Do Do”, were standouts. Brendan Clarke’s bass was relatively high in the mix and this helped weld the horns together so they soared with security. The arrangements took advantage of the great collective musicianship on stage, and JMO leader David Theak managed to keep control over the roiling multi-layered music with hand gestures remarkable for their economy.
Charles Tolliver then arrived on stage to play and to direct the band in a series of his own compositions, starting with “On the Now” from his new CD. How exciting it was to watch the bandleader perform his own complex orchestral music. From the first notes Tolliver used the orchestra as a painter might with a range of brushes; varying pace and texture, juxtaposing staccato and legato passages, and surprising our ears with an explosion of the whole band in full bloom out of a spare orchestral sketch that began with only a few musicians and melodic lines. His trumpet solo flew over the top of the orchestra’s playing like a yacht sailing down the east coast to Hobart after Christmas.
The figure of the composer-performer is one powerful difference between contemporary classical and improvised music. Tolliver, Theak and the JMO’s other composers are firmly in the tradition of 19th-century instrumental virtuosi – Liszt, Paganini, Rachmaninov – who were all composer-performers. It was not until the 20th century, which steadily separated composers and performers into specialist and mutually exclusive categories, that audiences forgot that accomplished musicians had also been composers. Happily the ranks of contemporary jazz and improvised music remain full of composer-performers, a situation that seems unlikely to change.
The first set ended with Tolliver’s homage to a documentary he saw a few years back about the Emperor Penguin, a bird which endures the most extraordinary hardship and weather in order to do what it is born to do. What a brilliant inspiration for a composition (“Emperor March”), what an interesting metaphor for a jazz musician’s life.
I was in awe of the standard of playing and professionalism displayed by Tolliver and the JMO. There is no way the band could have been paid enough to cover their costs in time and effort to rehearse to the level they performed at, let alone David Theak’s time in coordinating the band, composers and arrangements. I can only imagine the column inches and pixels that would be devoted to expressing outrage at the prospect of a state orchestra, or even Paul Grabowsky’s Art Orchestra, being asked to rehearse for next to nothing, but this is not even queried when it comes to most jazz music.
Elsewhere in the jazz world big bands feature women musicians or music by women composers. They were absent tonight in everything but the name of the band. Is the Mothership Orchestra’s name simply a motherhood statement? I would hope that supportive funding bodies seek to provide opportunities for the likes of Sandy Evans and Andrea Keller to write music for such fine ensembles.
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Virginia Lloyd is the author of The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement. She is a former Vice-President of SIMA and is currently working on a book about women musicians.
Note: Read a review of Andrea Keller’s performance with Ten Part Invention.