Spoilt for Choice: MIJF 2025 Highlights

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.

Solune: ‘There’s a lot of overlap between Jazz and Metal’

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.

Loz Irwin-Ray invites you to “giggle, squirm and sing along” to nostalgic tunes from the ’40s

“The show serves for a moment of escapism, where we get to dress up and play a person that would otherwise no longer exist. The interesting twist though, which makes me realise how far we’ve come since the 1940s, is that an all-female band would never have been dreamed of in that era.”

Jennifer Salisbury: “If I am contemplating the experience of another and I feel deeply about it, I can have a tune pop up”

I have always loved horns and a big band sound so I wanted to inject that into the project. I also had to have piano because of the colour it provides. I was looking for a slightly theatric bent as well.

Selene Messinis: “Each ISM tune can be a journey in many different worlds all at once”

We all composed three tunes each for the album, having the other members in mind. There are a lot of different moods because we have different compositional styles. Maddie writes a lot of quirky, frantic compositions, still heavily rhythmically driven, with lots of space for free improvisation and Isaac would write more traditional jazz tunes with beautiful melodies. I care so much about rhythm and keeping time and groove, that in my compositions theres usually a lot of business in rhythmic patterns and ideas with very simple melodies.