Allan Browne, poet that he is, holds the art of space: not just knowing what to say and when to say it but knowing what not to say and when not to say it.
Category: Reviews
Katz has come up with an appealing, thoughtful and lyrical take on jazz-rock, ‘Mistral’ and ‘Working Title’ being especially strong.
Nikolsky has tackled the difficult task of giving a representative sample of Australian jazz composition and the size of the book is testimony to the explosion of interest in this field in recent years.
This is the musical equivalent of slow food, and will amply repay the patient. Eleven years on and this Melbourne/Sydney collective restores itself to its rightful place near the pinnacle of Australian jazz.
Sean Coffin’s tenor tone and approach fits the music perfectly. In his sound there are distinct echoes and cries from jazz history – the blues is prominent if abstracted – yet the same imagination that elevates his arrangements carries through to surprise us in his solos. Funky as fuck in ‘Booga Dunny’ (get it? ‘I’m a funny cat’, says SC), a soul-jazz boogaloo, he also plays a ballad such as ‘Quiet Thoughts’ with great depth – the coda cadenza was a composition in itself. His horn can bite but it can also kiss.
The maker-or-breaker of course is in writing for the small ensemble. With such a limited musical palette of timbres and instrument capabilities, every decision has to count. Done badly, it can be turgid or insipid. To hit the sweet spot that is the intersection of composition, knowledge and vision, it helps to be a hell of a player, listener and thinker.
If an index of the ‘success’ of any art is its capacity to make an audience question what they have previously taken for granted, their own habitual modes, then on this measure Chameleons of the White Shadow, the 10th album from Joseph Tawadros in as many years, succeeds admirably…
In the goldfish bowl of the Australian jazz scene this might be the sort of calculated risk that we need to see more of. All evolution needs diversity and the occasional short sharp shock to the status quo.
Is this a new genre? Pub jazz-rock? I remember that hearing the Subterraneans for the first time was a hallelujah moment. Finally here was a band combining rock’s visceral energy with jazz’s lithe spontaneity without compromising either.
Before we run out of space it must be emphasised that this is unusually beautiful music. But even in the most euphoric music you can, in a certain mood, feel a touch of melancholy. Surely it is just the realisation that no golden age lasts forever, nor any life…