Paul Kelly takes flight in Vivid concert about ways of birds
Songwriter Paul Kelly and Perth-based composer James Ledger wrote the song cycle Thirteen Ways To Look At Birds and the show took flight as part of Vivid.
“Hope is the thing with feathers — that perches in the soul” wrote American poet Emily Dickinson in one of her 1800 poems, only 12 of which were published in her lifetime, which is used in the song cycle featuring folk rock luminary Kelly.
Kelly and Ledger got together for Thirteen Ways To Look At Birds after Anna Goldsworthy, pianist of the Seraphim Trio, suggested they work together on a song project.
They settled on birds “actual, mythical and metaphysical” that had inspired poets from Australia, Europe and America with Kelly choosing verses by Judith Wright, John Keats, W.B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy and Gwen Harwood, among others.
The 13 songs — 14 if you include Hawkesbury poet Robert Adamson’s Eurydice and the Tawny Frogmouth given as an encore in this one-off Vivid event — range over a broad spectrum of emotions and ideas. A barn owl that is killed by a boy or the carolling magpie, the god Zeus of Greek legend who, disguised as a swan, rapes Leda or the science of migration and how birds fly in mass formations.
Kelly is the front man, either reading or singing the words, while Ledger uses a Fender Telecaster and an array of pedals and effects and a synthesiser to etch a sonic landscape.
SATISFYING
Goldsworthy and violinist Helen Ayres and cellist Tim Nankervis bring to the arrangements the more “classical” elements and it is all topped off by multi-instrumentalist Alice Keath, providing vocal harmonies, banjo, glockenspiel, autoharp, synthesiser and bass drum.
The cycle was premiered at the Adelaide Festival earlier in the year and the six musicians have recorded it for release soon.
Kelly and Ledger worked together before on Conversations With Ghosts and this collaboration manages to cross the borders of their two natural genres to meet in a satisfying middle.
The Yeats poem Leda And The Swan is particularly powerful, starting with a hazy lazy feel before Zeus arrives and ravishes her, with Keath banging a drum and vocalising Leda’s screams over Ledger’s malevolent guitar chords.
Another of the “big” pieces is Keats’s Ode To A Nightingale which Kelly memorised as a schoolboy.
But there is humour as well, as in the rambunctious fly that feeds on the corpses at the Battle of Crecy in the One Hundred Years War only to be gobbled up by a swift, and of course the remarkable song of the magpie “quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle” in Denis Glover’s poem.
DETAILS
● CONCERT: Thirteen Ways To Look At Birds
● STARRING: Paul Kelly, James Ledger, Seraphim Trio and Alice Keath
● WHERE: City Recital Hall
● WHEN: Saturday, June 1
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