My Mess into Melody: Fem Belling on The Hormesis Project

Look, I’ll be honest — I’ve spent most of my career trying to sound perfectly extraordinary.

I’ve made a comfortable living singing other people’s words. Wrapping my voice around melodies that have already proven themselves for decades. There’s a particular type of ‘jazz muso’ smugness that comes from nailing an Ella riff or making ‘Autumn Leaves’ sound effortlessly sophisticated for the zillionth time. We’re very good at this, us jazz folk. We’ve perfected the art of sounding like we just casually wandered into musical excellence while thinking about our next washing load.

But here’s the thing that we sometimes hate to realise: performing other people’s tunes may be the musical equivalent of living in your parents’ house forever. And I love my parents as you know. It’s familiar, comfortable. The foundations are solid. Gershwin already fixed the plumbing. Hoagy always has a hug at the ready. And I never wanted to move out.

Writing your own music? That’s buying a fixer-upper and realising you have no idea how plumbing actually works.

Enter The Hormesis Project. Hormesis is this brilliant scientific concept of ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. Peer reviewed, of course. It’s about small (and large) doses of stress that make organisms more resilient.

Radiation in tiny amounts? Good for you, apparently.
Poison in microscopic doses? Builds immunity.
Voluntarily writing your own jazz compositions after years of hiding behind Cole Porter‘s genius? Come hear for yourself.

Think strings, groove, and vocal improvisation, “all the feels” lyrics, and pizzicato. I’ve assembled a deliberately masochistic lineup too: voice, three violins, cello, and double bass. All single melody instruments. No piano or guitar to fill in the harmonic gaps when things get awkward.

Here’s the part where I’m supposed to get vulnerable: I’ve survived an eating disorder, navigated consent in the music biz, beaten cancer with a trial drug that’s literally the only reason I’m alive to write this, and spent decades untangling my self-worth from society’s increasingly creative ways of telling women they’re not enough (or “too much” in my case). These aren’t abstract themes I’m exploring for artistic credibility — they’re the actual architecture of my life. They’re the uncomfortable truths I’ve been carrying through years of performing in spaces that weren’t always built for women like me.

And I’ve done the math: I can either spend a million dollars lying on a therapist’s couch trying to process it all, or I can write it into this music and possibly break even.

My years in theatre taught me that someone else always does the heavy lifting. The writer – the plot; the lyricist – the rhymes; the composer – harmonic structure; I just show up and try not to bump into the furniture. A brilliant system. Highly recommend it for anyone who enjoys sleeping at night.

But apparently I’ve reached that age where you start doing inadvisably ambitious things. Like thinking: “you know what my career needs? More vulnerability and significantly less harmonic safety net.”

The string players I share the stage with are magic. There’s something beautifully exposing about an all-string ensemble. We can’t hide behind density or volume. When someone plays a clunker, we all hear it. We can’t even blame anything on the brass section. It’s just us, having melodic conversations, arguments, and therapy sessions through music.

Singing about all the hard stuff is easy when it’s wrapped in someone else’s clever lyrics. Turns out it’s significantly harder than letting Lorenz Hart do it for you.

The South African in me knows that growth doesn’t happen in the comfortable spaces. I’m exploring my new territory. Not hiding behind my established vocabulary.

Is it terrifying? Absolutely.

Does it keep me up at night? You bet.

Would it be easier to just keep singing standards and collecting steady gigs? Without question.

But where’s the hormesis in that?

The Melbourne International Jazz Festival 2025 has a deliciously large number of improvisation violinists in this year’s line-up, with Xani and Tamil Rogeon among the acts. How bloody cool. So come check out my project, it really is so musically beautiful for the ear and the heart.

The Hormesis Project: because sometimes what you need isn’t another pretty interpretation of ‘All The things You Are.’ Sometimes you need to get in amongst the dirt and see what happens.

Spoiler: I still have no idea how plumbing works, but the music is starting to make sense.