A warm climate has returned to Australian improvised music that reminds me of the heady era in which Mark Simmonds, Chris Abrahams, Miroslav Bukovsky, Sandy Evans, Roger Frampton, Paul Grabowsky, Ian Chaplin and many others bloomed.
They bloomed exotically and in hard, spined and thorned avant-garde directions. The music went everywhere.
They were inspired by large underground movements in American and European jazz and improvised music generally to expand the vocabularies, colours and textures of the music that had drawn them and which many of them studied in institutional courses that did not exist for previous generations of jazz musicians. While imparting much knowledge and discipline, those courses also presented an established order to be reacted against.
When we are tempted to call Ornete Coleman the last of the great jazz innovators, we forget that not only Sonny Rolllins but also Cecil Taylor and Pharoah Sanders are still playing. They were not part of jazz course canons.
Without throwing the term great innovator about too freely, we should also include such significant and intriguing figures as Oliver Lake, Anthony Braxton, Archie Shepp, and indeed Wadada Leo Smith, who will be here for a series of concerts from March 25-30. He will lead a band of internationals and young locals, and it is a very good time to do so.
Today we have many young musicians of brilliance who are steeped in the jazz traditions but also reach into areas that are related to jazz only through a complex of cross influences.
New Music has dropped much of its haughty upper middle class attitude to jazz, and jazz exclusivity is confined to factions we can afford to view with indulgence. So vital and various is the movement to which I have alluded that we can easily forget some its intriguing figures. Sometimes young musicians rediscover them for us. Wadada is one such. That is the climate.
I write, having heard over the past few weeks Ornette Coleman; a beautifully weighted trio (Roil: Chris Abrahams, Mike Majkowski and James Waples), full of delicacy, mesmerising accumulations of detail and engulfing power, an overwhelming performance at the Sydney Opera House Studio by Simon Barker, Carl Dewhurst, Phil Slater and Matt McMahon played with Korean Pansori singer Bae il Tong and drummer Kim Dong-Wan, and most recently a performance at the Sound Lounge by Gest8, in which the soundscape was expanded by Satsuki Odamura’s koto and Greg White’s electronics. Playing behind me is a Leo Smith ECM album.
Read the full article on the SIMA website.
