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.
Tag: AAO
The Art Music Awards were announced tonight at the Plaza Ballroom in Melbourne, and included a number of fine Australian jazz musicians.
I leave them alone in the set break and write in my notebook ‘They make more of their own collective and individual history every time they do this.’ When I read it back the next day I wonder what the hell I was thinking.
The Wilfreds’ singing seems all the more urgent when it is riding atop a band that is in this state of what we might call restrained agitation. And it is this interplay that breeds that sense of mystery, where both parties are enriching the other’s tradition; when the Dreaming of the Yolngu people intermingles with Western flights of imagination; where any demarcation line between ritual and creativity is blown away in a sand-storm of sound.
In an Arts scene that’s eternally struggling with funding constraints and the drudgery of applications to funding bodies, the idea is seductive: take control of your own funding and free yourself from that disempowering application / rejection cycle you’re forced into via the more traditional funding rounds.
Hear Scott Tinkler talk about his musical journey, improvisation and the Australian Art Orchestra. Oh, and the panda is explained as well.
‘…we might fall on our arses once or twice, but it’s often when you’re searching that the best things happen…’