Of course, it’s wrong to call The Cloud Maker ‘Aviva Endean’s project’ — it misses so many marks. First and foremost, this is a collective project, featuring four unique female artists, each with her own trajectory. More importantly, this is quite literally a case of divine inspiration.
Kim Myhr: “For me, when I approach the piece and the composition it is important that the audience doesn’t have a feeling that the musicians are just reading through a big score, but they are actually really present and making music. The score is just a score but the music happens in the room and in the space.”
The Creative Music Intensive residency, established in 2014, is a groundbreaking cross-cultural residency created by the Australian Art Orchestra, aiming to provide a unique professional development program for musicians from across Australia and Asia, fostering collaboration and dialogue in a meeting of cultures and practice
Terri Lyne Carrington, Christian McBride and Branford Marsalis share some common traits. They are all adept at both ‘straight jazz’ styles and the urban r’n’b-infused sub-genres, easily stepping in and out of these worlds, blending elements, mixing things, creating new music. By doing so, they all helped redefine jazz and keep it relevant.
20Up sees the AAO return to the place of its first concert: the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne. A total of twenty-five musicians will perform a range of works from Ringing the Bell Backwards, the first work written for the AAO by Founding AD Paul Grabowsky which premiered at Malthouse in 1994; Passion, which is the AAO’s take on Bach’s St Matthew Passion; Testimony, Sandy Evans’ extraordinary tribute to Charlie Parker; Struttin’, Eugene Ball’s impressionistic take on Louis Armstrong, and a brand new commission from young composer, Austin Buckett called Virtuoso Pause.
I’ve been listening to improvised music for over a decade and I still don’t ‘get it’. Musical friends say I don’t need to ‘understand’. They say I just need to listen. Over the years, that’s exactly what I’ve learned to do. I’m always learning to do it again!
Concepts aside, one of Grabowsky’s most significant contributions to creative music has been to popularise the pooling of players from different Australian states. Common enough in the 1960s, the practice had waned until Grabowsky did it with the Wizards of Oz, the band he co-formed with saxophonist Dale Barlow in 1986.
