Gregory Porter on his jazz foundations and Michael Collins on the clarinettist-composer relationship
Gregory Porter is becoming a harder and harder singer to pigeonhole. His voice is at home in gospel, blues, soul, and R&B, but the foundation of it all, he tells Andrew Ford, is jazz. Gregory and his band are returning to Australia soon and he joins The Music Show (from vacation in Mexico!) to talk about bringing strings and a choir into his music, maintaining optimism, and his tribute album to musical hero Nat King Cole.Andy finds a moment at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music to speak with British clarinettist Michael Collins. After reaching the finals of the inaugural BBC Young Musician at the age of 16 he's had a formidable career on the concert platform. He's staying in Australia a little longer as he prepares to premiere Graeme Koehne's double clarinet concerto with Omega Ensemble in Melbourne.
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Jerrah Patston's world in songs, and the music of outback fences and pied butcherbirds
Jerrah Patston is a singer and songwriter who’s part of Club Weld—a Parramatta-based studio for neurodiverse musicians run by the Arts & Cultural Exchange. Jerrah’s music contains observations about his everyday life - from local construction sites, events being cancelled due to weather, and the time he went to a Paul McCartney concert and didn't hear Mull of Kintyre. Jerrah’s just released his third full-length album Abandoned Cricket Games and we’ll meet him, as well as one of his Club Weld mentors and songwriting collaborators, Sam Worrad.Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor have been named as recipients of this year's Richard Gill Award for Distinguished Services to Australian Music, which will be conferred at the APRA AMCOS Art Music Awards in a couple of weeks. They join Andy to talk about their life together, bringing their violin skills to duets with pied butcherbirds and playing the fences of remote Australia like string instruments.
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Legacies and laughs: Tom Lehrer and Dame Cleo Laine
Two legendary singers and favourite guests of The Music Show passed away this week at 97 years old: Tom Lehrer and Dame Cleo Laine. Dame Cleo Laine was one of England’s most acclaimed jazz singers, with a distinctive smoky contralto voice and four octave vocal range. She was also an actor, initially confined to Caribbean characters and expanding to major roles in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Into the Woods, and even as the voice of God in Noye’s Fludde. In this candid 2004 interview, Andrew Ford sat down with Cleo in Rochester Castle to speak about Damehood, her love of Shakespeare and jazz, and passing on music education to the next generations.Armed with a piano and microphone, Tom Lehrer took on many social and political issues of the Cold War era. His pastiche satirical songs remain startlingly relevant today. In 2000, decades after he retired from touring and became an academic, he spoke to Andrew Ford on The Music Show. He reminisced fondly about his 1960 tour of Australia which saw him threatened with jail time in South Australia if he was to perform five of his songs.
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Storytelling, beats and soundscapes on Warlpiri Country, and Gordon Kerry's new Requiem
Lajamanu is one of the most remote places in Central Australia, and it’s where we meet Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu, his father Jerry Jangala Patrick OAM, and the music producer Marc ‘Monkey’ Peckham. Crown & Country is a new album and film that’s come out of more than a decade of friendship and collaboration between Wanta, Jerry and Monkey. Blending Warlpiri Jukurrpa (Dreaming) songs, cultural stories, soundscapes from the desert, and electronic beats, it’s a compelling and immersive way of sharing Warlpiri culture with new audiences.Gordon Kerry is one of Australia's most frequently commissioned composers with works in every musical genre. From his home on a hill in north-east Victoria, he has recently completed a new work for clarinet, cello and piano and a Requiem for a cappella choir. He discusses both these pieces and the traditions to which they belong on today's show.
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Ozzy Osbourne - the melodic voice of Black Sabbath, and announcing poetry and lyric competition Middle of the Air
Nicole Smede is a proud Warrimay woman with Irish ancestry, whose bio includes poet, musician, singer and composer. She’s on The Music Show to talk about how all of these things have come to intersect in her work, and about the joy and strength she's found in writing across forms and languages. Nicole is a current participant of the Ngarra Burria First Peoples Composers Program, and is also the First Nations Artistic Director at Red Room Poetry. As part of this interview we announce an exciting partnership between ABC Radio National and Red Room Poetry. It's a poetry competition called Middle of the Air, where two lucky poets will have their winning poems set to music and recorded by DOBBY and Leah Senior. Entries open 1 August. Find more details here. You can register for a free lyric writing workshop with Leah Senior and DOBBY on 6 August here.And we remember Black Sabbath's enigmatic frontman Ozzy Osbourne, who died this week at the age of 76. Joel Silbersher is our guide - he’s a Melbourne-based guitarist and a songwriter, playing across a bunch of different bands since the 1980s including GOD, Hoss and with Tex Perkins. Joel explains, while not a great lyric writer, Ozzy was a "genius melodist", and Black Sabbath's influence on rock, metal and alternative music cannot be overstated.
Australia