Jazz breaking news: Australian Art Orchestra’s outback beats heat up LJF 2012
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Although billed as the AAO’s gig, the stage belongs as much to the Young Wagilak Group, a trio of Aboriginal musicians (Benjamin, Daniel and Roy Wilfred), whose first two members sing and third plays yiddaki (dijiredu).
In fact, they are the defining element of both the sound canvas and the cultural framework of one of the most original concerts in the 2012 London Jazz Festival programme. The album that the collaboration has produced, Crossing Roper Bar, is based on ‘manikay’ song cycles that have been handed down through countless generations of Australia’s ‘first nation’ and jointly arranged by both the Wilfreds and AAO, led by pianist Paul Grabowsky, to create music that appears both from the ‘dawn of time’ and of days yet to pass. The former quality does not refer to the Wagilak and the latter orchestra, but it is rather the mesh of vocals, yiddaki, keys, drums, double bass and reeds that plays boldly with perceptions and accepted notions of ancient and modern timbres.
The western instruments often use hypnotic modal figures while the indigenous singing is awash with throaty overtones and fluttering harmonics that are like electronica freed from the rigidity of fixed keys and pre-set loops. Furthermore the bilma – clapstick – has a percussive sharpness that progressive dance music producers would die for. Often deployed as two beats to mark the end of a lengthy phrase or in cycles of straight fours, these potently resonant staves could be seen as a kind of Aboriginal clave but they are used with greater metric looseness, underscoring high, impassioned declamations from the vocalists. Grabowsky’s piano and Tony Hicks’ tenor, clarinet and bass flute raise the intensity of the overall sound by way of concise but expressive solos, which, in the latter case, have a cottony, woozy quality that cushions the hard edge of the vocals. The musical union is inspired. One hopes it translates into real life for a first nation still battling second-class citizenship.
– Kevin Le Gendre