“I started singing ‘You Gotta Have Freedom’ with my first jazz band and when I went to London in 1986 I was actually invited by Pharoah Sanders to sing it with him at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz club. It was an incredible experience and an exciting improvisational one, too. I was so inspired by my first sojourn away from home that I started my own original jazz-funk band, YOYO, after returning to Melbourne in 1989.”
“I think a lot about balancing opposing elements in my pieces: planning/spontaneity, complexity/simplicity, density/openness, intellect/emotion. Music has a lot of scope for self-expression (emotions) and experimentation with ideas (intellect). This might be especially true of creative jazz. I think the dilemma over how much weight to give these potentially competing tendencies is an interesting aspect of writing and playing music. For me the ideal is both: music involving sophisticated ideas and a high level of craft that moves me.”
“I don’t wait to be asked to join a band that plays a style that I am interested in – I just put one together myself. It’s extremely hard work keeping it all going but very rewarding at the same time.”
“Music comes and goes,” Leo Genovese says. “[It] is not property, it doesn’t have an owner. It is air moving. It is magic, it is medicine. Even if you compose something, it is not yours, it is patrimony of every human. I know the law works different, but the cosmic law is another thing.”
“The gig is packed every week and people watching across the street. They say you can hear the band along the whole strip of the cross.”
“The music on this [‘Without Within’] should be very accessible to uninitiated jazz audiences, as well as hopefully having something there of deeper musical interest. I tried to use mood and emotion as a guide for the compositions, just like a pop song writer might,” says saxophonist Richard Pavlidis.
“We are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Art Ensemble of Chicago; 1969 to 2019 and beyond,” says the restless percussionist, promising that today, as always, the band stays true to its motto – and legacy:GREAT BLACK MUSIC / ANCIENT TO THE FUTURE.
Two interviews with Marc Hannaford who is currently touring Australia with his New York Trio. In the first one, the brilliant pianist talks about his life in New York, and his current musical pursuit. In the second, he remembers his trio with Allan Browne and Sam Pankhust, documented in the album Monday Dates.
“We’re trying to convey the heart of Australia with dream-like sequences alongside landscape depictions and animal mimicry, and echoes of tribal lores, drawing on a myriad musical influences and aiming to create a unique and authentic soundscape.”
“Often songs disappeared from theatrical shows for bizarre reasons, or shows closed because they were eclipsed by another show on Broadway that had the ‘it’ girl in it. Life is often completely random and beautiful songs often fall into obscurity. I like to find them.”
