“For many many years I worked long hours and studied and did not participate in any of the creative activities I often heard the call to begin. Call of the Wild is about the call that never leaves you, a constant gentle reminder of better ways to spend your time.
Many of the songs from this album were written in the car on the way to my day job; one was written while I was folding the washing, another while I was cleaning the house. The melodies came to me when I was stuck in domestics or the inescapable necessities of daily life.”
Tag: Paris Cat Jazz Club
The Bowie Project is not a tribute – it’s a thesis; it’s a product of research and analysis. Rudegeair dived deep in the Bowie universe, took the songs, stripped them down to the bare essentials, analysed their components and took each element and presented it under new light.
AustralianJazz.net and the Paris Cat Jazz Club join forces to celebrate International Jazz Day 2018. Melbourne’s longest-standing jazz club and Australia’s premier jazz website team up to co-curate a jam session, inviting members of Melbourne’s jazz community to join in and play together. Firebrand pianist Adam Rudegeair will lead a house band of luminaries, featuring bassist Claire Cross and drummer Adam Donaldson, with a series of guests sitting in – everyone is welcome!
– If your life was to become a movie, which tune would be on the end credits?
– Five Days In Hermosa, by this Canadian jazz musician named Mike Field. It’s another fun tune, and it’s instrumental so it would work really well for end credits. I wrote this tune because every time I’d travel on tour from Canada to New Zealand and Australia, I’d stop through Los Angeles and would play at The Lighthouse Cafe in Hermosa Beach. It’s such an iconic club with so much jazz history, and even though there’s a lot of karaoke and reggae bands playing there these days, there’s still jazz three days a week. Each time I was there, it would take me about five days to rehearse with the band and play the show, so after doing that a bunch of times, it inspired this tune, which I ended up recording on my third album.
“For me singing is catharsis. I really believe a vocalist’s one and only job is to be a great storyteller, that’s more important than hitting the right notes, more important than being able to read or write music. So when I’m on stage, I’m just 100% immersed in the song”.
There are not many singers around whose name is always mentioned alongside Aretha Franklin’s and this is pretty much all anyone needs to know about Ann Vriend’s timbre, but you may know all that, already.
“I had no desire to have a band under my name,that has only emerged with the CD, with permission from the other members. I firmly believe in the collective spirit and contribution of all in which music can be performed and I think that in this instance that is a good part of resultant album.”
Nancy Ruth combines different elements – her classical training, her dramatic flair, her adventurous spirit, her sense of ‘duende’ – to create a sound where genres such as pop, jazz, flamenco and latin co-exist and dissolve into each other.
– What makes a torch song?
– Truth. The lyric is poetic truth, and the music frames the words and creates the mood.
“Mingus’ music is very deep on so many levels. It delves into human feelings, political oppression, issues of inequality in society, intimate relationships… all of which is still significant today. I find his compositions, playing and life in general to be a massive outpouring of emotions that were possibly his only way of dealing with the world he found himself living in. A world that in a lot of regards has changed very little today.”