Don Burrows tribute gives jazz great swinging send-off
A joyful and swinging send-off for Australia’s father of jazz Don Burrows marked the reopening of Sydney Opera House to public live performances after eight months of lockdown.
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A joyful and swinging send-off for Australia’s father of jazz Don Burrows marked the reopening of Sydney Opera House to public live performances after eight months of lockdown silence.
The concert, hosted by Ray Martin and streamed live to the SOH digital concert season, was the brainchild of Burrows’ best mate and most famous protege, trumpeter and multi-instrumentalist James Morrison, who first joined forces with the old master at the age of 16. Burrows died in March aged 91.
The 90-minute tribute opened with William Barton’s evocative didgeridoo and Morrison’s trumpet, with brother John on drums, marking Burrows’s love and promotion of indigenous culture, before Paul Furniss’s clarinet with Morrison’s tenor horn and Craig Scott’s double bass summoned up the 1930s Swing era with The One I Love (Belongs to Somebody Else), a song recorded by Frank Sinatra and the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.
Emma Pask, who in turn was mentored by Morrison as a youngster, sang one of Burrows’s Brazilian compositions, Whenever, a bossa nova she put to words for her first album 18 years ago. Paul McNamara, of Ten Part Invention, slotted in a languid piano solo, complemented by some subtle guitar from James’s son William.
ANECDOTES
Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone – a trio of Morrison’s trombone, Andy Firth on clarinet and bassist Phil Stack, who recorded with Morrison on Burrows’s last album – brought the house down with a dazzling solo from Firth.
The live music was intercut by Ray Martin’s fond anecdotes and some well-chosen extracts from TV interviews and documentaries. Burrows’s generous spirit and keen sense of fun shone through as he told how he first started playing a comb and paper, graduating to a wooden B flat flute at school which was handed round from child to child to see if any of them could get a note out of it. Burrows was the only one who could and a career was launched by that single note.
He made sure that he played that flute, bought by his mum from the school for 18 shillings and sixpence, when he appeared at Carnegie Hall in New York, “to show her that it was money well spent”.
Other footage showed Martin introducing Burrows and Morrison performing Count Basie’s Shiny Stockings on the Midday daytime show in the 1980s. Morrison’s trombone solo segued seamlessly into a live performance with Firth on tenor sax.
Memories of You featured Furniss and pianist Kevin Hunt, who has taken over the jazz seat established by Burrows at the Sydney Conservatorium, and for Benny’s Bugle, a tribute to Burrows’s childhood hero Benny Goodman, clarinet duties were swapped with Firth doing a good job of emulating the jazz legend.
Basin Street Blues, made famous by Louis Armstrong, allowed everyone to blow up a storm before the concert came full circle with Barton and James Morrison performing Amazing Grace as a moving send off.
See the concert online at https://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/digital.html
DETAILS
● CONCERT Don Burrows: A Celebration of Life Through Jazz
● WHERE Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House
● WHEN Sunday November 1