Des Cowley
It was never going to be a normal Melbourne International Jazz Festival. After all, there was nothing normal about the past two years. Having been forced to cancel in 2020, the festival made the decision to shift the 2021 event from its usual June timeslot to mid-October, perhaps hoping the extra few months might make a difference. The program was duly issued, tickets both offered and sold. Clearly, there would be nothing international about it, though it featured a strong interstate contingent. But in the end, lockdowns ensued, and October came and went. That might well have been the end of it. But, with tenacious resolve, MIJF re-grouped and scheduled a heavily stripped-down program for early December, this time playing it safe by sticking nearly exclusively to local musicians. There were few complaints. Advance bookings were strong in a city long deprived of live music, with some performances selling out within hours of the program’s launch.
... (read more)The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry edited by Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington
To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, television, music, operas, dance, and exhibitions, we invited a number of arts professionals and critics to nominate their favourites.
... (read more)
This year the Australian Art Orchestra (AAO) celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary. Originally conceived as a jazz ensemble, it has developed – first under the visionary leadership of founder Paul Grabowsky, and now under artistic director Peter Knight – into one of the country’s leading new music ensembles ...
... (read more)
Sarah Holland-Batt is the author of three volumes of poetry, most recently
In 1959, Miles Davis entered Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in New York, with his sextet, and recorded what many consider to be the greatest jazz album of all time: Kind of Blue. It was an inspired idea to program a performance of this music, in celebration of the album’s sixtieth anniversary, at the twenty-second Melbourne International Jazz Festival ...
... (read more)
It was a bold move by Stonnington Jazz to program an all-female/non-binary performance for the Festival’s opening concert: War Cry. Jazz, like much else, has come in for its fair share of criticism in the #MeToo era, its historical icons – bar a few exceptions – made up mostly of male musicians ...
... (read more)
Now in its twenty-ninth year, the Wangaratta Festival of Jazz and Blues continues to deliver programming that is innovative, ambitious, and far-reaching. That a long-running Festival of this scale and significance takes place annually in a regional Victorian city says much about the tenacity and dedication of the Festival’s artistic team ...
... (read more)