Paul Grabowsky & Vince Jones | Adelaide Festival 2021 review

Two giants of Australian jazz joined forces for a brief but diverse set at the Adelaide Festival’s new open-air Summerhouse venue.

Paul Grabowsky and Vince Jones

Paul Grabowsky & Vince Jones

Contemporary Music / AUS

FESTIVAL

Adelaide Festival Summerhouse

March 5

Jazz giants Vince Jones and Paul Grabowsky went whichever way the wind blew them – quite literally – for this brief but diverse set.

Vocalist and trumpeter Jones introduced their interpretation of Gil Scott Heron’s classic Winter in America, only to turn and find Grabowsky scurrying about the stage and even underneath his piano to retrieve all the sheet music that had been scattered by a sudden gust.

Much to our disappointment, he couldn’t find the aforementioned score, so the duo moved on to a different song which was actually in hand, being comically waved about by the pianist.

It’s an original called Wonderworld, that falls toward the more pop end of Jones’s catalogue with its jaunty, stabbing rhythm, which Grabowsky builds into a frenzied fervour.

The set started with Budgie, Jones’s ode to his first apartment and its coinhabitant, his voice ringing through as strong as ever, the epitome of cool, while Grabowsky’s piano punctuation builds into its own boogie.

Jones drops back to a more mellow croon for the romantic standard This is Always and finally gets his trumpet blowing for an equally smooth solo, while Grabowsky’s keys twinkle like the stars overhead in the open-air venue.

Grabowsky then provides a pounding groove for Jones’s big 1987 hit Jettison and builds it into some truly beautiful piano embellishments, before finding his way back to the tune’s distinctive chords.

Childhood memories of Jones’s aunt and uncle lead into Rainbow Cake, its sweet, soaring melody tempered with a melancholy, almost forlorn trumpet break.

A song introduced as being about “fluoride and chlorine” is more like an educational jingle advocating natural foods.

The Carpenters classic We’ve Only Just Begun is given a fairly conventional reading, until Jones goes all gospel with his vocals on the final refrains, and Grabowsky takes his piano to church in pursuit.

Having earlier covered Iris DeMent’s Our Town, on which Grabowsky seemed to channel an entire orchestra including Irish pipes, the duo returned to Celtic themes for an apt farewell, The Parting Glass.

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