What’s happening here is that I’m dredging back a whopping eighteen years into the recesses of my collection, to a performance given on October 23, 1995. This was my twenty-fourth birthday, and the occasion of my first year Masters recital. 1995 was, as I’ve said elsewhere, the first year the VCA Masters was running and the recital demands were considerable.

The second half of my concert was solo performance, and the first (after the solo introduction, Swift and James’s standard tune ‘Can’t we be friends’) was a big piece for trio entitled Spinning towards daylight. This piece had but a single performance, and this was it. I can’t even remember how any of it goes. I don’t know where the score is, either. And it doesn’t matter. I think there were some metrical modulations along the way and I worked hard on making them tick but that’s the extent of my recollection. I honestly don’t care to find out any more than that.

The front cover of the program bore the following poem:

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what?–: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out,–
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.

Rainer Maria Rilke, An die Musik

The program for the second half went like this:

Improvisation I
Ears for civil engines
Improvisation II
No obligation quote
Improvisation III
Golden earrings (Young, Livingstone, Evans)

‘Ears’ and ‘Obligation’ are original tunes, recorded by Browne – Haywood – Stevens, but see, there was a time when I did play standards; BHS usually opened with one on our Monday night gigs at Bennetts. (BHS performed Spinning towards daylight in this recital, too.) An original recital book-ended by standards. They were days.

Here‘s the second of the improvisations. I was pleased with it. It differed from the first, and seemed to have some kind of form. During second year, I transcribed it, and presented a paper on it. I’m not going to reprint the paper here because to be perfectly honest I can’t bear the thought of reading it again. But if you want to see the chart I made, it is below. There are no dynamics or anything like that; only a bare minimum of performance directions betrays either that I privilege the notes above all else or, perhaps, that I treasure a freedom of interpretation and the possibility of variation. *coughs*

Improvisation 23 October 1995

I bring it up now because of the church thing I’m going in for at present. Although it’s not church music, I think you can hear the traces in there. The drift towards tonal centres, often plagally (if that’s a word), certain melodic gestures (for example the rising figure beginning at 1:57) and certainly the final move to resolution at 5:22. I don’t think I thought about this at the time, in fact I’m certain I didn’t.

But the thing about it all is that I’m realising some things I’ve wilfully ignored as I went along. I think, fool that I am, I was always more interested in following up stuff I felt I didn’t know or understand, and the corollary of this was a tendency to dispose of the stuff I thought I had in the bag. And I couldn’t just dispose of stuff, I had to persuade myself that it was actually crap, even when it wasn’t. Now it’s one thing to think one’s own prior work is less than one’s current, and to want to see some juvenilia suppressed. But it’s unreasonable to imagine that just because one feels oneself to have outgrown something of someone else’s that that thing is actually no good.

Recently I’ve been listening again (after decades, literally) to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Te Deum. It’s an astonishing piece of music. It knows exactly what it’s doing and it does it so damn’ well. Now I heard this a great deal when I was young; it was perhaps over-familiar from a vast number of runs on the tape player in the family car. So when I hear it now it’s shockingly close although it’s so long since I heard it. And the appeal is not purely sentimental; I think there’s a difference between just that and registering a connection that lies very deeply but that has been obscured or disregarded.

And there I was banging on about all that who you are crap and be original and do your stuff. There I was.

5/ii/2014

The standard repertoire in jazz is something I’ve resisted engaging with as a performer for some years now. Largely because of the debilitating effects of the example set by Keith Jarrett, but also on account of my own predilection for original composition, I resolved long ago to make my trio a forum for my (our! its!) own creative endeavours. It seemed the best way to make a distinctive statement, and I felt happier playing my tunes anyway. At the very least there was a difference in how I felt; standards did not have the same sense of ownership – dare I say, authenticity. And I have been very fortunate in the company I have kept there, since Dave and Ben are generous and thoughtful interpreters who have never spoken against, much less turned down, anything I’ve presented at rehearsal.

My solo performance also has tended towards the spontaneous; although my first solo recording was a fifty/fifty split between original tunes and free pieces, the second was entirely free. I don’t think I’ll ever play a standard tune that says as much about the nature of my musical thought as does ‘So even though’ or ‘Freehand I’.

Jazz scholars, particularly non-American ones, talk about a jazz diaspora. This is a curious thought, but the word might be slightly misplaced; although jazz has spread this is not on account of the dissemination of any population. It is indeed the music itself that has spread, but the people who have adopted it bring their own disparate backgrounds to bear on its interpretation.

Jazz musicians have been known at times to talk of going back to basics with the investigation of standard repertoire. But whose basics?

On May 16 I shall be performing, for the first time, in the Salon at the Melbourne Recital Centre. To say I am excited about this is a rather shameful understatement. The concert is to be a solo recital, just myself and the piano. Except that I have so much work to do, I can’t wait.

I’ve done a few of these solo things now, and the two most recent ones – at the South Melbourne Town Hall and at the Wangaratta Jazz Festival – were entirely improvised. When pitching this concert to the MRC I suggested another completely free concert, but said also that if they preferred I could mix it up with some original compositions, or even, at a pinch, play a couple of standards.

It is a mystery to me why I said this, except that I expect I was trying to make myself as palatable as possible. I don’t, as I’ve said, play standards in public these days and it would be most unusual if suddenly I did. But do you know what happened? They went for the standards idea.

Okay, no worries. But then I thought about it some more.

When I was in London over Christmas with my family, we went to Westminster Abbey for choral evensong on December 27, the feast of St John the Evangelist. I have never knowingly celebrated the feast of St John the Evangelist before, and despite my upbringing in the Anglican church it’s taken me this long to find that he is the John who is supposed to have written the fourth gospel. In any case, the canticles were by John Amner, and the versicles and responses by Richard Shephard, and the chant for psalm 97 was by Richard Latham. (It was a really good one, too.) John Rutter’s arrangement of the Wexford Carol was the anthem, and it was all most affecting. Even the Rutter. But at the end, there was a congregational hymn; words I’d not known before (concerning St John the Evangelist: ‘We sing of that disciple, beloved of the Lord, who, telling all he witnessed, proclaimed the Father’s Word’ (etc.)). The tune was Ralph Vaughan Williams’s ‘King’s Lynn’.

My brother Michael is a known mover and shaker, and back in 2002 he and a mate founded the Choir of London. This choir was in Australia in December, to perform Bach’s Weihnachtsoratorium with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and that’s in fact how my fam and I came to be in London. Michael was interviewed by Mairi Nicholson for ‘Music Makers’ on ABC Classic FM shortly before the concerts (I’d love to give you a link but the interview’s gone now) and as well as speaking he selected some music, one piece of which was my ‘Synapse’. Touched I was, young Skywalker. He talked a little about me too, and said lovely things! (again: no link, sorry) noting just after ‘Synapse’ had been played a certain presence of the hymn book in my musical language. He’s not the first person to have said this, but he’s the first person to have made it go national. (In fact international: I heard it in London.)

Actually that doesn’t really flow, because the interview (and my hearing it) predated the trip to Westminster Abbey. But either way, to hear ‘King’s Lynn’ in Westminster Abbey, and to be roaring it out even to unfamiliar words, was very powerful, and some time later I put two and two together, as you do, and thought I might go somewhere with it.

So I wrote back to the MRC: no worries about the standards, but don’t be too surprised if they come from the English Hymnal rather than the Real Book.

Then a couple of days later I was running, and it struck me just how much sacred music is fixed in my mind and ears from the earliest years of my musical awareness, and how I might demonstrate its influential and continuing effect on my thinking. And so that’s what I’m planning to do. It seems to me that this concert will probably be the most personal playing I have ever done since I am in a way accounting for elements in my musical language to which I have not yet paid sufficiently close attention. Anyone who had taken an interest in my playing or composition up until now might have something revealed, in a way. I feel that the early things that set the tone, or give one bearings, constitute a different and indeed a very personal variety of standard repertoire, and that’s what I’ll be exploring in the Salon in May.

Hello, and happy new year!

30/i/2014