The 2025 Melbourne International Jazz Festival again left the jazz audience spoilt for choice, leaving them with some hard choices to make between so many international and local acts.
Tag: melbourne international jazz festival
Gregory Porter’s performance at the the Melbourne International Jazz Festival once again demonstrated that he is such a consummate musician. From the moment he sang the first note, that deep mellifluous baritone voice of his drew the listener in.
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But make no mistake; Liv Andrea Haugue has a voice of her own, her influences — be it jazz, pop, contemporary, everything — seamlessly blended in her compositions, and perfectly displayed through her nuanced, perfectly balanced playing, and her interactions with her trio.
It’s a setting that suits her, and she makes great use of it, combining elements from the classic piano trio jazz albums of the ’50s legacy, to the modern Scandinavian/ Nordic jazz tradition — spacey, serene, classical-music-infused — and more than passing references to Keith Jarrett.
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The show was loud, celebratory, deliberate — it was the kind that reminds you what live music does to the human system. Ibrahim Maalouf made everyone in the club dance, sweat, jump and sing. “Sorry to those who came to listen to jazz,” he grinned near the end.
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A vocalist whose singing is like a warm embrace, a flutist weaving long, winding pathways of sound, and a groove champion who uses sampling as if it’s a jazz instrument on its own merit, Melanie Charles looks up at the star map of jazz and black music, identifies planets and galaxies, and travels from one place to another, her trajectory connecting the dots spread over 6-7 decades of music and culture — all through the lens of what she calls her ‘personal diaspora’.
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Few musicians in Naarm/ Melbourne are as unpredictable as Solune. Now she’s back with Mad Vantage, a mind-blowing, take-no-prisoners blend of groove-centric nu-jazz and prog metal.
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Halfway into this interview, Allana Goldsmith stopped talking; she welled up, and had to take a breath. She was talking about her effort to reclaim her language, being the first one in her family after generations to learn Maori. A magnificent vocalist, she is using her powerful instrument as a form of activism. Along with pianist Mark Baynes, they have created a hauntingly beautiful collection of songs, exploring the ways jazz — in all its iterations — can blend with Maori culture.
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Samara Joy is that ray of sunshine, crowned Best New Artist at the 2023 Grammys, armed with nothing but her natural talent, a voice that flows like honey, a repertoire championing the legacy of the Great American Songbook, a work ethic that puts many to shame, a team of great musicians who see her as their peer, and what is certainly and unmistakably an old soul. (Okay, all that is certainly not ‘nothing’.)
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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”
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” I was really working on the things that I wasn’t good at, but now I am going into another period of lots of practice over summer, when I’m not teaching and I’m going to be focusing on things that think I am good at and trying to make them better.”
