‘Rehearsing as we did in Belgium prior to the recording was a lot more interesting and unusual than doing so in Melbourne, but the opposite may be true for Janos. Maybe we were fresher approaching our instruments, because there was no opportunity to practise immediately before the recording.’
For the band to work the chemistry needs to have, first of all, the purest form of democracy, then empathy then of course enjoying each others’ playing or singing. Mix it all together with one last ingredient—LOVE—then you get stoichiometry.
‘The challenge when singing standards, I think, is to be respectful to the original tune and then do your own thing with it.’
We may not be used to seeing Tortoni ‘front and centre’ at the MIJF but he’s played a role consistently for over a decade now. At the festival launch, he revealed what drives him, saying (twice) that he’s interested in the ‘pairing of jazz royalty with the voices of a rising generation’.
“I guess I consider myself an ‘intuitive’ composer in that everything I’ve written so far seems to have been written in a slightly different way. I don’t have one method – one approach of sitting down and writing in a particular way.”
