My first teacher was a passionate jazz pianist and the only teacher in the phonebook willing to take on such a young pupil. He taught me the language of jazz from my very first lesson.
Month: October 2013
on ‘Brother Sykes’ – The band play around each other here, as if conversing, exchanging their grief – the feeling is one of a wake, funereal and puffed-out. It is a nod to the complete musicianship of Alex Boneham that the bass dominates here, expressing so much in answer to the gray-blues and watery mauves thrown at him by Rose and Garbett. All seems to happen underwater, beneath a heavy lid of mortality.
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I was always a fairly unconventional student. I wasn’t interested in reading the dots as a kid, and would learn everything by ear, make arrangements and compose my own pieces. I wondered why in Art class you were encouraged to make your own paintings, but in Music class you were only encouraged to learn other people’s creations.
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This is Williamson’s eighth album since 2001’s wonderfully-named Non-Consensual Head Compression and, as well as being an obvious evolutionary step, it is a beautiful thing.
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Josh is attracted to music that comes from the heart and says that all the tunes he’s chosen have the kind of investment that he believes matters in music. ‘The harmonic structure also has to catch my attention when I’m listening to songs with lyrics in mind. The thing I found is that all these songs sing really well. They are all very melodic.’
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Early on I was really into Brad Mehldau and Kurt Rosenwinkel. Rosenwinkel for his tone and compositional sense and Mehldau for his standard playing, which I always found fresh, exploratory and exciting. I never checked either artist out on a technical level, but I did listen prolifically.
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I was lucky enough to have very inspiring teachers in high school and beyond – I distinctly remember one teacher in particular recommending that I buy Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and a live Oscar Peterson disc while we were on a school band trip to ‘the big smoke’ (Melbourne) – these records opened the door for me…
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I’m most looking forward to seeing the other pianists play in the competition. They are all exceptional players and are extremely varied in their approaches, which should make for interesting listening.
