Sparks fly when Baroque and jazz collide

Baroque and jazz worlds collide in the nicest possible way on an unusual album launched this week featuring, among other things, an electric viola da gamba.

Australian Jazz/Baroque group Elysian Fields has released its debut album What Should I Say.

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The Baroque and jazz worlds collide in the nicest possible way on an unusual album, featuring among other things Australia’s only known electric viola da gamba, which is being launched this week.

Elysian Fields is an experimental dual project of Marais Project founder, viola da gamba specialist Jennifer Eriksson, and top Sydney jazz musicians saxophonist Matt Keegan and pianist Matt McMahon.

A highlight of the recording, What should I say, on the Move Records classical label, is the contribution from classically trained vocalist and violinist Susie Bishop. Hers is a limpid soprano, with razor sharp diction, essential for the first five-piece suite that opens the collection, four poems of Tudor courtier Thomas Wyatt which gives the album its title.

Her voice sits ideally between the classical and jazz worlds — lovely phrasing and expression, as you would expect from someone who has studied opera, but without the restraints that formal training often imposes. Her fiddle playing is also impressive, tasteful and refined in this instance, and a far cry from the wild Irish jigs you can hear her shredding in a pub in the Rocks most weekends.

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She also features in the other major work on the recording — Elysium, a 17-minute suite by Keegan.

Eriksson is well known in early music circles for her work with the Marais Project, an ensemble set up in honour of the 17th century French viol player and composer Marin Marais who featured famously some years back in a French biopic starring Gerard Depardieu. She is also noted for recordings featuring folk music from her native Sweden.

Elysian Fields debut album What Should I Say is out now.

All these influences make for an eclectic and fertile soundscape where genres shift smoothly between hints of Baroque, world music and of course jazz.

McMahon and Keegan are both forces to be reckoned with both as composers and performers, backed by a strong rhythm section of bassist Siebe Pogson — Eriksson’s son — and drummer Finn Ryan. McMahon set the Wyatt verses. The poet was a member of Henry VIII’s court, a hazardous job at the best of times, who not only divorced his wife for adultery but may have been one of Anne Boleyn’s alleged lovers.

Either way he served time in the Tower of London (and may have witnessed her beheading from his cell window). The poems are suitably melancholic, mainly about being two timed in love.

Eriksson’s mellow and lush viola lends a dreamy, other-worldly atmosphere throughout, but the both McMahon and Keegan use their forces cannily with arrangements sometimes flowing out to straight jazz quartet passages.

Pogson features heavily on his own composition Dark Dreaming, making for a nice change of pace. Swedish jazz guitarist Mats Norrefalk’s Southern Cross is a gentle jazz ballad and this richly entertaining album closes with McMahon’s At Carna, a lovely duet between Eriksson and the pianist.

● The album launches at Foundry 616 in Ultimo on Thursday, March 14. You can buy a copy of What should I say at Fish Fine Music for $24.99 or buy it online through Buywell Just Classical or the Australian Music Centre, or download it from iTunes.