20 October 2019
Sandy Evans | Andrea Keller
‘Women Do Jazz’
The Windsong Pavilion
20 October 2019
The Sandy Evans/Andrea Keller Duo
Sandy Evans and Andrea Keller are two of Australia’s finest, most original and most awarded jazz musicians. They demonstrated to our enthusiastic and near-capacity audience just why that is so. They and their first class musicians gave us a full Sunday afternoon of wonderful and varied music in three sets: first as the Sandy Evans/Andrea Keller Duo; then Andrea with her Transients Trio 1, with Julien Wilson (sax) and Sam Anning (double bass); and finally, Sandy with her Trio + Bobby Singh, with Brett Hirst (double bass) and Toby Hall (drums) and Bobby Singh on tabla.
Andrea Keller Transients Trio
Sandy Evans Trio + Bobby Singh
Another highlight was the surprise presentation to Sandy Evans of the trophy for her having been inducted into the prestigious ‘Graeme Bell Hall of Fame’ for her ‘outstanding artistic achievement and contribution to Australian jazz’. She had been given the award earlier but had not been able to travel to Melbourne for the presentation ceremony. Unknown to Sandy and the audience, Julien Wilson had brought the trophy with him to present it to her at her Zephyrs Jazz concert!
Sandy Evans receives ‘Graeme Bell Hall of Fame’ trophy
Jazz radio presenter Gerry Koster, (Melbourne’s PBS 106.7FM and ABC Jazz), who joined us again, later observed that ‘the musicians revelled in their on-stage interactions, like-wise shared by the enthusiastic audience. A spontaneous standing ovation after their sublime performances … an unforgettable day!’
The ABC YouTubes were recorded by Bill Brown (video) and Ian Battersby (sound), working with sound engineer John McVeity.
28 October 2018
‘Bringing their music back home’
Kade Brown | Carl Morgan | Alex Stuart
The Windsong Pavilion
28 October 2018
Jam sesssion ovation
That our ‘Bringing their music back home’ international mini-festival was a great success can be seen from the above photo of the combined musicians enjoying a standing ovation at the end of the concluding ‘Jam Session’.
Kade Brown, Carl Morgan and Alex Stuart returned from Melbourne, Sydney and Paris with their eight first-class Australian and French bands to present their original music (some of it inspired by our region) to a home audience in our partner Four Winds’ Windsong Pavilion.
The event sold out in advance, the bands gave standout performances, the audience responded with rapt attention and enthusiastic applause and the venue’s intimacy and acoustics also helped bring the musicians and audience together. Bands shared musicians, and all the musicians came together in the final Jam Session to improvise their way brilliantly through three jazz standards and to another standing ovation.
Our audience included jazz industry professionals Gerry Koster (Melbourne’s PBS 106.7FM jazz program host and former ABC Jazz presenter), local jazz maestro Ken Vatcher (who also generously lent us the drum kit) and jazz photographer Brian Stewart of CyberHalides Jazz. The photos are Brian’s and the following observations are Gerry’s and Ken’s.
Gerry: ‘I took in an afternoon of music in one of the most beautiful parts of Australia. It featured three regional sons returning to their roots with their bands, giving inspiring and exhilarating performances to a full house. With food and wine in between in the sunny surrounds! A perfect warm up for me for the Wangaratta Festival of Jazz.’
Ken: ‘Three exceptional sets of original jazz (including one cover) were brilliantly presented. Kade Brown, Carl Morgan and Alex Stuart took the audience on a wonderful journey of superbly crafted compositions. Eleven amazingly talented musicians delighted a packed house. A wonderful day.’
Brian’s photos below are in the sequence of the event’s four sets. To see his complete collection for each set click on the following links:
The Kade Brown Sextet
Kade Brown
The Kade Brown Sextet
See Concert video – ‘Soul to Soul’
The Karl Morgan Sextet
Carl Morgan
The Carl Morgan Sextet
The Alex Stuart Quintet
Alex Stuart and Antoine Banville
The Alex Stuart Quintet
See concert video – ‘An Afternoon with Kiefer’
The Jam Session
Eight of the musicians
Matilda Abraham | Sam Anning | Arno de Casanove
Antoine Banville
Alex Hirlian at Zephyrs
15 October 2017
Barney McAll’s ‘ASIO’ Quintet
15 October, 2017
The Windsong Pavilion
We are reproducing below a review article by notable jazz critic and author, Geoff Page, who attended our Barney McAll Quintet concert.
But first, here are some links to 2 excellent videos of the concert’s songs that exemplify the subject matter of the review:
click here and here.
They were filmed and produced by ABC South East NSW’s Bill Brown with the assistance of expert music recorder Ian Battersby and our regular sound engineer, John McVeity.
Review for The Triangle, Nov 2017
Magnificent music, full house, standing ovation
The Barney McAll Quintet concert on Sunday 15 October at Bermagui’s Four Winds Windsong Pavilion was extraordinary by any measure. A first-rate grand piano in a purpose-built concert hall with a full-house of about 180 listeners was just the beginning.
The concert was arranged by Zephyrs Jazz, who commissioned Barney McAll’s Quintet comprising five of the country’s most accomplished musicians. The leader, Barney McAll (piano), has worked in New York for two decades and has recently moved back to Australia. Mike Rivett (tenor sax) won the 2016 National Jazz Award; Carl Morgan (guitar) won it in 2014. Both are outstanding young musicians with distinctive approaches to their instrument. Jonathan Zwartz (bass) and Hamish Stuart (drums) have both been at the heart of jazz in Sydney since the 1980s.
The performance featured the compositions on the group’s recently released CD, Hearing the Blood (Extra Celestial Arts). The music was both highly integrated and satisfyingly various. The solos seemed to emerge organically from (and return into) the composition rather than being merely an opportunity for virtuosity (which was often present nevertheless).
There were also significant shifts in dynamics and mood – a few pieces with the delicacy of French impressionism, others building to remarkably climactic solos by either Rivett or Morgan. The seamless unison playing of these two in the written sections seemed almost to generate a third front-line instrument that hadn’t been advertised. All five players were given solo space but the focus always remained on the composition as a whole.
McAll’s piano playing is by now convincingly personal but still with important traces of J.S.Bach, Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett and maybe even Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel – leavened, at times, with not a little humour, as in the almost raucous “Dogface Now!”.
For an audience which clearly contained quite a few jazz aficionados but also had many listeners for whom contemporary jazz was almost certainly not their first love, the quintet presented a program which all found hard to resist and which culminated in a rare (if almost un-Australian) standing ovation.
It’s a sign of the strength of Australian jazz at the moment that Zephyrs Jazz should not have too much trouble finding a group of comparable excellence for another full-house event next year. If only this sort of thing were done more widely around the country we’d all be a lot more blessed.
Geoff Page
Geoff Page is organiser since 2003 of the monthly concert series, Jazz at the Village (previously Jazz at the Gods), in Canberra.
Also author of A Sudden Sentence in the Air: Jazz Poems and Aficionado: A Jazz Memoir and approximately thirty other books, predominantly poetry.
11 October 2015
The Vampires
11 October 2015
The Windsong Pavilion
The Vampires’ Zephyrs Jazz performance confirmed the judgement of Lloyd Swanton (The Necks) that The Vampires are ‘an absolute must-have for festivals anywhere in the world’. We were also impressed by the band’s ability to attract an enthusiastic contingent of young people to our concert in the Windsong Pavilion.
The band featured: Jeremy Rose on saxophone and Nick Garbett on trumpet and responsible for the compositions; veteran Jonathan Zwartz on double bass, filling in for Alex Boneham; and Alex Masso on drums/percussion. From their opening number, Nick Garbett’s ‘Tiro’ (an Italian word that means here ‘to play with plenty of drive’) to their concluding piece ‘Mothers Dance’, Jeremy’s New Orleans blues style homage to his mother) the band presented a wonderful combination of virtuosic and uncannily tight duo sax playing in the front line and sustained close dialogue with the drums and double bass rhythm section.
Jeremy and Nick were already familiar to some in the audience through their periodic appearances by another of their bands, the highly popular reggae group The Strides, at the nearby Murrah Hall.
The Vampires’ music is a highly successful and unique integration of an eclectic mix of musical traditions, such as jazz, old-school reggae, romantic Afro-Peruvian, danceable Afro-Cuban, exotic Balkan and funk-laden Afrobeat. The jazz component draws, in turn, on composers and players from Ornette Coleman to Dave Douglas. At our concert they played pieces from across their many albums, together with some new ones, and they gave it all they had. Their skill, soul and commitment were rewarded by a strong audience response, including an enthusiastic standing ovation at the end.
Photos: Brian Stewart, CyberHalides Jazz Images
For more information: www.thevampires.com.au
26 October 2014
The Alex Stuart Quintet
26 October 2014
The Windsong Pavilion
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’.
Here are some of the ‘stories’ that we heard at the Quintet’s October concert. The band started with a piece that conveyed the wonder and beauty of snow falling onto the crests of waves during a winter surfing experience in France (‘Snow Falling on the Crests of the Waves’). Another tune was sparked by a dream involving a pursuit through several musical cultures by a sinister ‘Little Black Lion’. Then there was a song dedicated to two friends who had been through a sequence of intense pain followed by joy (‘Pour Vous’). Another was a remembering of youthful times spent surfing and fishing on the far south coast (‘Wapengo, Cuttagee’). And the title piece was inspired by Alex’s discovery of the delights of living in his culturally diverse new neighbourhood in Paris (‘Place to Be’).
See Concert YouTube – ‘Pour Vous’
29 June 2014
The Alister Spence Trio
29 June 2014
The Windsong Pavilion
29 June 2014 was a day of firsts. It was: Zephyrs Jazz’s first performance in the Four Winds Windsong Pavilion; The Alister Spence Trio’s first performance on the NSW Far South Coast; and the first public performance in Four Winds new indoor performance space. The audience enthusiasm level was first rate too.
Alister, Lloyd and Toby showed us just why they are among Australia’s most acclaimed jazz musicians. They took us on a musical adventure, starting with a simple drone-backed two-finger piano meditation in ‘Arc’, then charging straight into a crazy, impossible chase in ‘Flight Plan’, then back to a meditative start on ‘Felt’, which in turn morphed into a phase of lyrical, almost classic piano trio playing, but with eerily tinkling glockenspiel, then on to a catchy, driving groove on ‘Brave Ghost’. And so on, through five more pieces until we came to a sort of energetic rest, under a swimming pool in Rajasthan, in the concluding ‘Sleep Under Water’. It was ‘jazz’, but much more besides. The audience also appreciated Alister’s introduction to each piece.
So the Trio was an ideal band to provide the first full ‘test’ of Four Winds’ brilliant new performance space. The music was only lightly amplified, but it filled the room effortlessly; and the Pavilion allowed us to hear perfectly all of the rich and varied sounds created by this highly acoustic group of musicians. The Trio, too, was impressed by the venue. In Alister’s words, ‘it was a joy to play in the beautiful Windsong Pavilion. This is one of those rare spaces: an excellent recital hall for un-amplified music that can also cope with audio reinforced sound and a drum kit, while still retaining clarity and an ‘acoustic’ feel.’
After the concert our audience enjoyed Zephyrs’ traditional chat with the musicians and each other over drinks and fine, locally prepared finger foods, while some who had arrived early had already enjoyed picnic lunches on the lawns at Four Winds’ beautiful site.
For more information: www.alisterspence.com/thetrio.php