“What keeps jazz going is the way this tune affects me this night, this moment,” says Oscar Peterson, discussing the future of jazz in a 2004 interview on American National Public Radio.
His insight captures the essence of Jazz:Now, an annual festival run by SIMA and the Jazzgroove Association that is committed to the promotion of innovative Australian improvised music. That is, music that resists the mainstream in its valuing of impulsive creation, idiosyncratic voices and restless questioning (despite often elusive answers) and challenges conventional boundaries in its fusing of eclectic genres. Music devoted to the “spontaneous individual acts” that, according to Keith Jarrett, are the only “repertory” of the personal freedom that is the “spirit of jazz.”
When bassist Cameron Undy takes to the stage with his 20th Century Dog to launch Jazz:Now 2005, it is made clear that this spirit is, indeed, alive and well in the Australian jazz scene. Undy emerges, takes in the sold out concert room with one sweeping glance, and, with child-like honesty, announces, “Now, I really am nervous.” But once the music starts, his engaging uncertainty is belied by the fierce sound that leaps from his bass.
The set opens with a driving motif powered by the rhythm section. As it gains momentum, the listeners relish the bittersweet tension, awaiting what Nat Hentoff has so aptly described as the ‘sounds of surprise.’ This comes in the form of a solo from Carl Dewhurst that seems to spring from the guitar as though it has been waiting in hiding. Dewhurst has recently relocated to Byron Bay, and, though this association may be merely the product of my imagination, there is something about the sparkling clarity of his lines that seems to breath out of the space created by an absence from the city.
This freshness meets with his savage, funky edge in a ripping solo. When he’s said his piece, he reencounters the rest of the band in a jagged, swinging groove that falls away to a whispered drum and bass conversation. Then, a brief but carefully placed silence. Enter the ever-soulful Matt Keegan on saxophone. The angst subsides and now we are in a Latin dream, the solos brief and lyrical, Matt McMahon’s acutely sensitive, Bill Evans-ish touch filling the room with longing and possibilities.
And so the music continues: twentieth century jazz harmonies applied to primordial Afro-beats. Odd time signatures and complex rhythmic interplay between melodies that melt in and out of one another. Loud, frenetic moments of swaggering saxophone and rocky drumming calmed by Debussy-like impressionistic piano fragments. Energy building up and releasing.
This is the music of anxious city streets, of cultures clashing in strange places and looking for ways to re-harmonise, of contemporary society’s rapid change…But beneath it all lies the commonality of humanity, the infinite search for self-expression and the unifying power of a good groove.
This is music that, above all, affects people. If Peterson is right, and if this concert is evidence, jazz will be keeping on for a very long time to come.
