JAZZ ALBUM REVIEWS IN THE AUSTRALIAN
In September, 2017 Eric Myers commenced reviewing jazz albums in the Review supplement of The Weekend Australian. All reviews in this folder are written by Myers.
JAZZ
ANY NEWS
SATOKO FUJII & ALISTER SPENCE
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Alister Spence Music
Three-and-a-half stars
Published in the Weekend Australian, December 11, 2021
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Any News features two pianists, Japan’s Satoko Fujii and Australia’s Alister Spence, following up their 2018 piano and Fender Rhodes album Intelsat. Their piano duets are the result of a collaboration over the internet during Covid-19, and three recording sessions in September 2021. An interesting example of what is now possible with new technologies, it’s highly adventurous, but has built-in difficulties for the listener. A conversation between the two protagonists is difficult to delineate, perhaps because the two voices sound so much alike, and when for example one pianist is prominent, it’s always unclear which musician it is. The music is highly abstract and enigmatic but at the same time sound-rich. Four hands on two grand pianos is a hard ask. Much of it sounds like free improvisation and reflects the strengths of that particular genre. Inevitably moments of great beauty sit alongside episodes of slight interest, at least to my ears. Still, here are two brilliant jazz pianists involved in a fascinating sound experiment.
Eric Myers
JAZZ
DIVIDE AND CONQUER
JOHANNES LUEBBERS DECTET
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Earshift Music
Four-and-a-half stars
Published in the Weekend Australian, December 24, 2021
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To hear this outstanding album is to realise immediately that something good is happening. It features beautifully written compositions from Melbourne-based Johannes Luebbers, completing his suite, the first half of which appeared on Luebbers’ 2019 album Other Worlds. Luebbers’ approach as a composer/arranger is unusually distinctive. Deeply consultative, he has written exceedingly sympathetic platforms for five musicians in his ten-piece ensemble, enabling them to express at length their brilliant improvisational talents: saxophonists Michael Wallace and Angela Davis, trumpeter Paul Williamson, bassist Hiroki Hoshino and pianist Andrea Keller. The result is an unmitigated triumph: five tracks, each a tour de force. I can remember what was termed the “Australian jazz explosion” in the late 1970s to early 80s, centred on Sydney, which provided jazz with its momentum to the end of the millennium. A comparable explosion has occurred in Melbourne in the past 20 years, and there is perhaps no better exemplar to illustrate that extraordinary phenomenon than this superb album.
Eric Myers
JAZZ
LOST IN PLACE
I HOLD THE LION’S PAW
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Earshift Music
Four stars
Published in the Weekend Australian, January 1, 2022
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Melbourne musician Reuben Lewis has evolved considerably since his 2018 album Abstract Playgrounds. There were glimpses then of the studio manipulation of sound which he had begun to favour, but he’s now taken that approach much further. Lewis recorded music by a cavalcade of musicians – from Melbourne, Hobart and Sydney, too numerous to list here – and according to some interesting liner notes, “isolated and sampled them, then filtered them through a maze of electronics, before re-assembling them, creating a sum distinct from its parts”. Some of the resultant music sounds like orthodox free jazz or collective improvisation, but such old terminologies don’t quite fit. Lewis’s music is perhaps beyond category. Music which initially appears to be incomprehensible makes sense to me only if an organising principle can be identified. Here that principle is the vision of Lewis himself. As for the music I like it very much. I detect in it fun and irony, and a gleeful challenge to the conventional.
Eric Myers