extempore and the Wangaratta Festival of Jazz and Blues have collaborated with National Jazz Award winners from every year of the festival since it began. The result is this eclectic set of souvenir postcards from some of our most creative musicians.
His sound is dark and it has a grain and an edge, except when he plays in a soft burble or croon. It can bark and crack with a brittle edge, yet all of it is done with tone, with timbre. His lines are full of invention, expressed in melody and in abstract shapes.
On the strength of his eponymous debut album, Steve Barry, I get the feeling we will have to do as we did with the Finn brothers and Rusty Crowe (and any other frighteningly talented Kiwi) and willingly refer to him as the Australian pianist and composer Steve Barry. The album really is that good.
That Galaxstare are capable of creating this huge, deep, wide, bottomless universe of music in a room on Cleveland Street using only bass clarinet, voice, accordion, bass and drums is astounding and humbling.
