Botanic Park. Foundation Stage. 10 Mar 2018
Eight years after first appearing at WOMADelaide, the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble return to remind us why they are still the coolest brass band in the history of music.
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble is largely a family affair, led by seven brothers who grew up playing and touring with their father, jazz great Kelan Phil Cohran. As adults, they stepped out to forge their own music journey with great success. The band's sound includes drums, guitar and bass, but the focus, unsurprisingly is the brass. Featuring, trumpets, trombones and sousaphone, they mix their modern jazz soul roots with a raw hip hop edge. Their music is a beautiful marriage of the two, fresh, sultry and in-your-face.
Recording and performing independent albums, with the likes of Damon Albarn and the Gorillaz, De La Soul, Snoop Dogg and Prince, they have taken brass to a whole new audience and earned their own musical stripes.
Their super high energy live performance, which differs significantly from their more laid back albums, has driven their notoriety and for very good reason. On stage, the group are brassy, charismatic and cool-as-hell in spite of the 35 degree heat. Easy on the eye and the ear, the often bare chested band members take it in turns to man the microphone on the vocal numbers. Their rhyming overtures are a live-only extra and take the music up a notch.
The self-proclaimed "Bad Boys of Jazz" know how to entertain on so many levels; they tease the audience and get them involved from the moment the set starts. Unlike other brass bands, who are largely behind their sizable instruments during song, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble are always engaged with the audience and feed off crowd interaction and response; they get plenty of it too! The audience laps up the cheeky repertoire and calls back on cue whenever required.
These boys can come back to our fair shores any time they like.
Nicole Russo
Botanic Park. Stage 2. 10 Mar 2018
In a performance that stays with you, JoJo Abot is a blast of cool style and back-stiffening attitude.
Originally from Ghana and now living in New York, Abot spends her time contributing to creative communities across the globe and expressing her art music, film, photography, literature and performance. She recently emerged from a stint in New York as part of the New Museum's incubator program, NEW INC.
On her first trip to Australia, Abot is brightly and elaborately dressed with gold face and hand paint which glitters in the setting sun that bathes Stage 2. Her striking stage presence has you transfixed with all eye on her.
Abot's music is as intense, hypnotic and varied as she is; a wall of experimental sound that moves your body and mind. She is joined on stage by drums, keyboard and two dancers as she performs songs from her album Fyfya Woto. Singing in English and Ewe (spoken in southeastern Ghana), Abot's sound is a mix of electronica, reggae and Afrobeat, but can be much better described by how it feels rather than its musical styling.
Abot's songs are imbued with her passion, it's intense, earthly, sensual and sorrowful. Her vocal range is impressive, and she moves between soaring highs and guttural growls with ease.
In a set that is much more than a music concert, Abot talks to us, mentors us, empowers us with her words, dance and music. In her own words, Abot wants to "share this moment" with her audience, and she urges her audience to stand up to injustice and say "To Li" (rhymes with bulls**t) when we see it.
Her voice is a defining example of modern Africa; worldly, influential and ready to change minds. May we all go forth as brave as she.
Nicole Russo
Botanic Park. Foundation Stage. 9 Mar 2018
On the opening night of WOMADelaide 2018, Anoushka Shankar sits comfortably upon the Foundation Stage. Diminutive and softly spoken, she cuts a tiny figure on the huge stage, but as she starts to play her presence resonates out to the audience. She is a picture of strength and peace as her fingers dance across the sitar.
Shankar last appeared at Womadelaide in 2010, when she joined her father on the main stage for a magical performance that sadly, will not be seen again. Since then she has released four albums, received three more Grammy nominations and defined herself as an artist and activist in her own right. She has taken the sitar and classical Indian music to new levels and new audiences with artistic collaborations as diverse as Sting, Herbie Hancock, Karsh Kale, Rodrigo y Gabriela, and Joshua Bell.
In her return performance, Shankar performs instrumental pieces from her latest album, Land of Gold, co-written by Manu Delago and featuring extraordinary works with MIA, Vanessa Redgrave and German-Turkish singer/songwriter Alev Lenz.
Shankar brings the complex music to a live stage brilliantly armed with her sitar and an accompaniment of supporting musicians on double bass, keyboards, Indian shehnai and percussion. The more traditional pieces are raw and emotive, the soaring shehnai combined with the sitar evoke a deeply primal and meditative response. These sit surprisingly well next to Shankar's experimental works, which are edgy, electronic tracks with sharp beats and high-pitched strings. The latter matched with equally intense light shows that maximise the impact of the music.
It is a spellbinding set that showcases Shankar's talent as a composer, musician and thinker; more than an artist, she will be a mark of her generation for a long time to come.
Nicole Russo
Selby & Friends. Elder Hall. 11 Mar 2018
Beethoven by Ballot is the first in Kathryn Selby’s chamber music series, Selby & Friends, in 2018. Last year’s subscribers voted as to what they would like to hear in today’s all-Beethoven concert, and they chose Allegretto for Piano Trio in B-flat, WoO. 39, the joyful and melodic Violin Sonata No.5 in F Spring, Op.24, the passionate Cello Sonata in A, Op.69, and the ever-popular Piano Trio in B flat Archduke, Op.97. (Actually, Selby chose the Allegretto, not the subscribers, because she wanted to start the concert with something for the entire trio.)
Kathryn Selby is a consummate musician, and her right hand is pure gold. In the Allegretto she extracts clarion-clear bell sounds from the Steinway with almost imperceptible effort, and this exquisite delicateness is echoed by Grace Clifford on violin. All the while Clancy Newman keeps sentinel-like watch over the performance space with a sideways glance towards Clifford while keeping Selby in his peripheral vision. The communication between the three is palpable.
Clancy retires temporarily from the stage leaving Selby and Clifford to play the Spring Sonata. Again, Selby’s command over the gentle right hand melody line is almost transcendent and Clifford responds with beguiling refinement that radiates youthful innocence. Clifford’s phrasing is exquisite, with gently singing melodic lines almost rising out of nothing.
The Cello Sonata, to my ear, is one of the high points of the chamber repertoire, and today’s performance is world class. Newman is aggressive in the first movement and he circles the second as a wrangler does a spirited horse in the process of breaking it in. His body language is fiery and poetic and his cello sings with articulated passion. Selby controls the pace and the syncopation and works with Newman, hand in glove, with each having their turn in the limelight in a true partnership. Their performance is as much an outstanding visual experience as it is aural.
The concert rounds out with a fine performance of the famed Archduke trio. The relative tempos of the four movements need to be well controlled, and when they are the contrasting moods and rhythmic and tonal complexities come to the fore. Selby establishes a well-considered allegro tempo from the outset that allows the violin and cello in the second movement to be well articulated and have a lightness that sometimes is missed.
“Chamber music at its best” says the advertising promo, and that is not far from the truth. This is an outstanding concert at every level, but for my taste the bravura performance of the Cello Sonata is the standout.
Kym Clayton
When: 11 Mar
Where: Elder Hall
Bookings: Closed
Australian String Quartet. Adelaide Town Hall. 15 Feb 2018
Glass, Dean and Mendelssohn. Interesting bed partners, and without them being placed into context, the programme could easily have failed. It didn’t, and the concert was an outstanding success, on a number of levels.
In her opening remarks to the audience, cellist Sharon Grigoryan remarked that Brett Dean’s String Quartet no 1 Eclipse was “difficult to play and difficult to listen to”, and she was right. The piece was Dean’s deeply personal response to the so-called Tampa crisis of 2001 which saw the captain of MV Tampa rescue a boatload of refugees in the Indian ocean and his subsequent showdown with the Australian Government. How does one respond musically to such an event? How does one respond to hearing such a piece of music? One thing is for certain, Dean’s response is complex and not pretty, and knowing the composition’s provenance makes it compelling to the listener.
The near ‘eclipsing’ of the humanity of the refugees by the Australian Government is made evident through the strident and eerie music, and the members of the ASQ brought their misery and dire predicament to life again.
Dean’s quartet was preceded by a near hypnotic reading of Philip Glass’s String Quartet No 3 Mishima. This quartet is also a programmatic composition, but knowing ‘the story’ makes little difference to one’s enjoyment of it. Glass is Glass. His music is minimalist, it is beguiling, it is melodic, it barely has a narrative, and it can be anything you want. The ASQ played it on a pale blue dimly lit stage, and they seemed to float before our eyes. It was a perfect prelude to the story of the Tampa that followed without a break.
Following the interval, Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in D op 44 no 1 returned us to normality. The lush melodies and obvious classical structures allowed us to push Tampa aside, and all with the world became good again. But after we had left the auditorium the doubts came creeping back into one’s mind: the lilting but incessant melodies and rhythms of Philip Glass were pushed aside by the jarring and stabbing sonorities of Brett Dean, and Mendelssohn was unable to give us traditional comfort.
What a remarkable concert from a truly outstanding ensemble of beautifully matched musicians.
Kym Clayton
When: 15 Feb
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed