Gospel meets disco with family band Annie & the Caldwells, and Tenzin Choegyal and Matt Corby team up
The Music Show is live at Canberra International Music Festival on 3 May - come join our audience!Annie & the Caldwells make music that could equally be at home in the church or at the club. The family band from West Point, Mississippi, fuse gospel with soul and disco. Their debut album Can’t Lose My (Soul) was released last month to critical acclaim and features Annie Caldwell out front, her husband of fifty years on guitar, her daughters singing, and her sons holding down the rhythm section. Andrew speaks to Annie and daughter Anjessica about making music as a family, holding onto their day jobs, and how God is helping them deal with their new-found fame.Tibetan multi-instrumentalist Tenzin Choegyal is one of Australia’s most open-minded and in-demand collaborators, working with the likes of Phillip Glass, Patti Smith and now Matt Corby. Matt and Tenzin join Andrew to talk about Snow Flower, their meditative new album that fuses Tenzin’s dranyen lute, Matt’s Moog One synth and lyrics and mantras from the key tenets of Tibetan Buddhism.Plus, a cello and mezzo-soprano duet, and a track to remember Amadou Bagayoko, the Malian musician who died this week aged 70.Annie & the Caldwells are performing at City Recital Hall in Sydney on June 5 and at RISING Festival in Melbourne on June 7.The Music Show is live at Canberra International Music Festival on 3 May - come join our audience!
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In rehearsal with Zubin Kanga's cyborg piano, and at the art gallery with Julius Eastman's Femenine
The Music Show is live at Canberra International Music Festival on 3 May - come join our audience!Zubin Kanga is known as the ‘cyborg pianist’, because throughout his career he’s been using technology to expand the idea of what the piano is and what it can do. As part of his major research project, Cyborg Soloists, he has commissioned dozens of experimental works, including one by composer Tristan Coelho. Andy drops in on them both at rehearsal for Ensemble Offspring’s Lumen Machine, where they demonstrate the honeycomb-like Lumatone keyboard and a small but powerful motion-sensor ring that responds to Zubin’s hands on and off the piano.And as the Earshift Orchestra prepares to perform Julius Eastman’s expansive, ‘organic’ work Femenine, saxophonist and bandleader Jeremy Rose and percussionist Niki Johnson meet Andy in front of Femenine in Nine, a series of paintings by the American artist Julie Mehretu, inspired by Eastman’s work.Ensemble Offspring’s Lumen Machine is at ACO on the Pier in Sydney on Saturday 12 April and Newcastle Conservatorium of Music on Sunday 13 April. The Earshift Orchestra perform Femenine at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney on Thursday 17 April as part of Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory. The Music Show is live at Canberra International Music Festival on 3 May - come join our audience!
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Marlon Williams' te reo Māori album, and canons in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Who hasn't sung a canon or round at some point in their life? 'Frère Jacques', 'Row, Row, Row Your Boat' and 'Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree' are among the best-known children's songs and they're all meant to be sung as rounds. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, composers loved playing with canons in both sacred and profane music (some of it very profane indeed). The University of Queensland Chamber Singers has just made an album of music from the 14th to the 16th centuries, and Denis Collins of UQ's School of Music joins us to talk about it.Aotearoa singer songwriter Marlon Williams has just released Te Whare Tīwekaweka, his first album sung entirely in te reo Māori. Collaboration is at the heart of the record, with Marlon crediting his friend and Māori language teacher Kommi Tamati-Elliffe, as well as long-term band the Yarra Benders and singer Lorde, for creating this record ‘by committee’. Taking five years to write and record, Marlon opens up to Andrew Ford about his experience of reconnecting with language and culture, and how it felt having a film crew follow him around for much of that time. The documentary Marlon Williams: Ngā Ao E Rua - Between Two Worlds is out next month.
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Genre-defining strings with Abel Selaocoe and Aaron Wyatt
Almost every description of South African singer, cellist and composer Abel Selaocoe starts with a phrase like “genre-defying”, but Abel refers to himself as genre defining. He’s here to perform with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and he brings with him a lifetime of musical influences ranging from his childhood in Sebokeng, a township outside Johannesburg, to adolescence at Soweto’s African Cultural Organisation of South Africa, to study at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. His classical cello chops, his Xhosa throat singing, his improvisational spirit and his storytelling combine in an open, blossoming sound on his new album Hymns of Bantu.Noongar composer, conductor, musician, academic and programmer Aaron Wyatt returns to The Music Show to catch up with Andy on his multifaceted career. With his first string quartet, subtitled ‘Under the Canopy’, set to be premiered across two concerts in Melbourne and Shepparton, he reflects on new ways of describing the landscape through old forms of music.
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Stasis, flux and stamina: saxophonist Adam Page can improvise for 24-hours non-stop
Saxophonist, composer, improviser and master looper, Adam Page, has brought a bunch of looping pedals and instruments into our Adelaide studio to show us how he builds layers of music on the fly. Adam's just finished a run performing a live improvised score for Australian Dance Theatre’s A Quiet Language, which sampled percussive sounds captured by the dancers' bodies in rehearsal. He’s also working on a PhD exploring new techniques for improvisational looping, and occasionally undertakes ‘durational performances’, like the 24-hour non-stop solo improvisation he did in front of a live audience a few years back.Adam Page performs a 12-hour show on 16 August at The Lab in Adelaide. Sign up for details here.Solomon Islands singer, songwriter, and panpipe player Chris Kamu’ana Rohoimae is the latest winner of the ABC’s Pacific Break competition. Ce Benedict sat down with him after his WOMADelaide set to talk about how he is honouring his late father, a pipe master himself, through his music.Chris Kamu’ana Rohoimae is releasing a new EP soon. Keep up to date with him here.
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