Sound Lounge, February 19

This was the first of SIMA's Artists In Transition series, which "aims to support professional jazz musicians beyond emerging stage to further develop their careers to professional practising artists."

In 2007 Singer Jo Fabro launched, an impressive debut album of originals and classics in the soul idiom, called Save My Soul (Birdland Records). Her soul-inclined Jo Fabro Band has performed in Tokyo, the Wangaratta Festival Of Jazz and many venues in Australia. The night under review was the first public appearance of her jazz band, which is certainly a brilliant one, comprising Greg Coffin (piano), Ben Hauptmann (guitar), Brendan Clarke (bass) and drummer Cameron Reid.

Fabro towers over her musicians - except Reid, who is seated anyway. She is quite a beauty, but an unusual one. Amazon Warrior Queen suggests itself, but this is at odds with her disarming casualness and dry humour.

"As you know," she announced, "most musicians are philosophers." A certain scepticism hovered in the air. "They're always broke," she explained. Ah, there is a logic there. It is her music which should concern us, but all singers have to at least try to present themselves in an engaging manner, whether they want to or not. Fabro doesn't really have to try. She is a natural.

And a natural, often gripping singer. Her first song, an original called Circles, was sung with dramatic power over a rock shuffle that was held back like a coiled spring and punctuated by bluesy, funky chords and accents. It all vibrated ominously. Greg Coffin's piano solo sprang from this bluesy bed in a dance of combined intensity and bright joy.

Fabro's words were very sophisticated - by which I mean intelligent rather than chic. As on several subsequent songs, including the standard You Don't Know What Love Is, Fabro held power in reserve, hunting out the emotions with dynamic shifts that relied on timing more than sheer volume. Her voice on this material was full and smooth - plush. When volume was released the voice seemed capable of infinite expansion, and you could almost feel the night air parting around it as it soared. And sometimes it contracted to a track of light that slithered about like a star's reflection on a black pond.
Variations circled and returned to hit a kind of nerve of pleasure; hitting it repeatedly, leaving it and returning. Phew. This was genuinely charismatic and even a little unnerving.

If there was any doubt that Fabro could sing virtuosic jazz, those went out the window as she flew at breakneck pace on Once I had A Secret Love.

At the end of the first set, Fabro let it rip on a blues of her own devising. Her volume was now pushed up until the rafters rang, so to speak, and her voice took on a certain torrid, raking glare such as some soul and funk singers are employing today. Ben Hauptmann did not change his posture as he began to sprint on his guitar solo, but sonically he stood up on the pedals and the landscape streamed by like a river. Everyone in fact played at a very high level indeed but I have to say that each one of Brendan Clarke's bass solos was a remarkable spontaneous composition.
Now, in the second set some laziness of intonation was evident, and if one is to quibble, on Love Is there was here and there a tendency to add a dramatic extention to the line where none was needed. But...I'm a reviewer.

I have to quibble occasionally.
Fabro's songs were exceptionally good. Roadside Assistance was a classic tale of urban daffy distress - waking everyone up in a shared house early in the morning in order to get the keys she had left locked inside, rather that paying the NRMA to come out and start the car. Touches of phoney bathos - eg "Oh, come to my aid!" were fantastic.

Here is a full blown talent.


22nd Wangaratta International Jazz Festival - REVIEWED by JOHN CLARE
To begin at the beginning: that is to say a little before the events listed on the program. In the Wangaratta Library just beyond the Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral, where Barre Phillips and Peter Apfelbaum would later give solo recitals, Geoff Page launched his volume of jazz poems, A Sudden Sentence In The Air, for Extempore. His readings from the book were accompanied by superb young bassist Alex Boneham, who mightily impressed the great Melbourne drummer Ted Vining . I doubt that there are many jazz festivals that begin in this fashion.

READ MORE HERE: FULL REVIEW

BERNIE MCGANN / PAUL GRABOWSKY REVIEW by John Clare


Paul Grabowsky & Bernie McGann Quartet at The Sound Lounge
November 18 &19
 
It has been said that alto saxophonist Bernie McGann - certainly one of the most distinctive voices in Australian jazz - is at his very best when there is no piano in the band. By and large I would agree, but there is a certain class and kind of pianist who can also bring out McGann's best. American Kirk Lightsey is one, and SIMA has presented those two twice - both great occasions, though separated by decades. Paul Grabowsky is another, and many years ago the pair combined at the old Harbourside Brasserie. The late Jackie Orszazky, who was, on occasion, quite obsessively anti-jazz (though he hired a number of jazz musicians), turned to me and said, "This is great! They suit each other." And they certainly do, though given their backgrounds and temperaments it might seem unlikely. It has been years since they played together with a rhythm section in Sydney (I've not found their duo-performances so successful). The last Sydney occasion was at the Sound Lounge on November 18 &19, 2011. Jonathan Zwartz was on bass, and Tim Firth, this year's National Jazz Award winner at Wangaratta, was on drums. The SIMA program was printed well ahead of Firth's victory, which gave the event an added frisson.