Perhaps jazz is dead. Not the music, but the usefulness of the term. The annual Jazz:Now festival aims to present a range of the music’s developments.
The first two nights of the festival, now in its fourth year, certainly did that.
They also emphasised the breadth of music sheltering under the term’s umbrella.
In one direction it interbreeds with free improvisation, exemplified by Divine Dialects, a sextet of some of the new generation’s most exciting players, led by the bassist Mike Majkowski.
They played an hour-long spontaneous composition, in which textural templates seemed to exist for different sections.
The players divested themselves of preconceptions and submerged themselves in the collective sound: a constant shimmer amid which trumpet, saxophone, vibraphone, piano, bass or drums might suddenly seem to catch the light and briefly flare.
The debut of Low Fidelity, a double bass quartet, showed how close jazz comes to the “new-music” end of the classical spectrum.
The richness of the total sonority created by Cameron Undy, Steve Elphick, Lloyd Swanton and Abel Cross was a joy, as was the clarity with which the musical personalities emerged, especially Undy’s penchant for mischievousness.
Showa 44 – the guitarist Carl Dewhurst and drummer Simon Barker – applied a rock aesthetic within their improvisations, but then just as liberally made music that was trembling or meditative.
Read the full review on The Sydney Morning Herald website.
