Sydney Con Jazz Festival provides hearty winter feast

Fans got a winter feast of 26 concerts featuring 140 musicians when the sixth Sydney Con Jazz Festival rolled into town.

Katie Noonan and Elixir performed songs from their latest album of Michael Leunig poerms.

• A music era ends on a vividly explosive note
• Looking at Bach from both sides now
• Gems from two giants of jazz
• Vibes of hope for our times

Fans of bebop and beyond got a hearty winter feast of 26 concerts featuring 140 musicians, ranging in age from music students to the 88-year-old Kiwi piano wizard Mike Nock, when the sixth Sydney Con Jazz Festival rolled into town at Sydney Conservatorium on a cold Sunday.

The nine-hour marathon of swing came to a triumphant climax with a superb 80-minute gala concert featuring four times Grammy-nominated New York composer and alto saxophonist Remy Le Boeuf and a crack quartet drawn from local musicians.

Along the way students from the Con paid tribute with a concert dedicated to Australian jazz greats Don Burrows and Judy Bailey, legendary band Ten Part Invention had a reunion and fans were treated to a set of gorgeous songs from the new album by Elixir, featuring Katie Noonan’s peerless vocals.

With so many gigs happening in so many places music-lovers had to make some tough decisions, but this reviewer was more than happy with his seven choices.

It all got off to a bright swinging start with the Verbrugghen Hall stage packed with the Sydney Conservatorium Jazz Orchestra 1 and The CONchords Jazz Choir, directed by Andrew Robertson, performing arrangements of Burrows’s Babinda and Bailey’s Colour Of My Dreams, as well as a world premiere of Robertson’s newly minted Journeyman’s Suite Part V which, incredibly, they’d only had a couple of days to learn and run through.

Top-rate soloing and tight ensemble work left the audience confident that the future of Australian jazz was in safe hands.

Next came my first chance to hear Brisbane composer, singer and guitarist Laneous (aka Lachlan Mitchell) whose cross-genre bands Kafka and “mutant soul/punk/crooner” outfit The Family Wah have been causing a stir.

Playing a set of new, old and borrowed songs – including an impressive version of Johnny Mandel’s Suicide Is Painless, made famous as the theme tune of the M*A*S*H TV series – Laneous combined a haunting smooth high voice with some cool and tasteful guitar, backed by jazz stalwarts pianist Barnesy McAll, bassist Jonathan Zwartz and drummer Hamish Stuart.

Tar maestro Hamed Sadeghi led a world music ensemble.

Perth pianist Harry Mitchell and his collective Quiet Country paid homage to iconic singer-songwriters including David Bowie, Billy Joel and Paul Simon in its set featuring the folk-inflected jazz vocals of Allira Wilson. Mitchell’s solos and intelligent arrangements complemented Wilson’s impressive takes on classics like Is There Life On Mars, America and Vienna, as well as a soulful self-penned song she co-wrote with her husband during lockdown.

My fascination for US guitar maestro Bill Frisell got the better of me and I missed the reunion of Ten Part Invention in favour of a fascinating fly-on-the-wall documentary about the “musicians’ musician” who has shifted the shape of jazz over the past four decades. All was not lost, however, as I was able to catch TPI luminaries Sandy Evans and Paul Cutlan later on in a wonderful world music set Empty Voices led by Hamed Sadeghi, a master of the tar – a double bowl shaped lute with three pairs of strings tuned in unison and a single bass string.

Mike Nock played a gemlike short set before the gala concert. Picture: Cheryl Browne

In between those sets was a highlight of the day when Noonan with her husband Zac Hurran, doubling piano and alto sax, and acoustic guitarist Ben Hauptmann performed songs from their new album A Small Shy Truth, the second collection of Elixir’s exquisite settings of poems by national treasure Michael Leunig, cartoonist extraordinaire and burster of pretentious bubbles.

The festival was rounded off triumphantly with a bijou 20-minute piano bracket by Nock, who has just released Hearing, his first solo studio album in 30 years, setting the scene for the headliner, four times Grammy nominated Le Boeuf, joined by top-notch Aussies pianist Steve Barry, bassist Sam Anning and drummer Tim Firth.

DETAILS

• EVENT Sydney Con Jazz Festival

• WHERE Sydney Conservatorium

• WHEN June 2, 2024