The Alex Stuart Quintet (Alex Stuart guitar and compositions; Julien Wilson sax; Miroslav Bukovsky trumpet; Jonathan Zwartz double-bass; and Tim Firth drums) played for us at the Windsong Pavilion on 26 October 2015. It was a sell out performance. Again, a highly appreciative audience responded warmly to the performance of this band of great musicians in this acoustically lively and intimate venue.

The ABC’s Bill Brown filmed the concert and afterwards interviewed Alex about his music (see the ABC website here). That interview provides a good starting point for an account of the event.

As Bill reports, in each of his compositions Alex ‘tells a story that can’t be told in words’. He does so by drawing on not only the jazz tradition, but also on the musical vocabularies of a wide range of other musical traditions such as African, Indian, Latin American and rock and funk music, selecting what best conveys the meaning and emotion of the particular composition and blurring the lines between the genres. The outcome, Bill notes, is Alex’s identifiable rhythmic style – one that ‘provides platforms for improvisation’.