At long last I’ve gone into the studio and recorded the program of music I performed at the Salon last May under the title ‘Reimagining the Sacred’. I chose Pughouse Studios in Thornbury because I’d been there before to rehearse and found the space sympathetic – not too large, not too small, and with a grand piano that boasted family history and has a character to match – and because I find Niko Schauble great company, and he’s in charge. I spent a day there, and recorded and mixed (which is to say had recorded and had mixed) the program before nightfall.

Recording used to be terrifying. In about 1992 I remember going to La Trobe University (which had a music department then, believe it or not) in the middle of the night* to put down tracks for an audition tape for the National Jazz Awards at the Wangaratta Festival. Sam Keevers was there too, and the engineers fixed those flat square microphones to the windows in the drum booth saying that if their lecturers had been there they’d have never been permitted to get away with it. I suppose those tapes still exist, somewhere; probably not in the Wangaratta repository, but more likely in a box somewhere in my own fragmented archive. I don’t think this was my first experience recording – very possibly there was something in the studio at VCA before that – but it was scary. The tapes roll, and you think ‘I have to get it right. It must be stunning. Someone is going to hear this.’

Silly, because whenever you play someone tends to hear it, even if it’s the neighbours, trying to get their kid to sleep and saying ‘not the fucking C-sharp minor again. He’s never going to crack that. Why the hell is he still trying?’

We move on. Now I’ve made a few albums, done radio work, accompanied others on their sessions and so forth, and even taped a few things at home. To record is simply to enable witness. While I can’t quite believe I went into the ABC studios and chatted with Andrew Ford before improvising freely,** or performed live to air with Kendra Shank after having known her for less than an hour, these things did happen, and I survived them.

The sacred program was intended, as I suggested before, to be something in the manner of a working backwards to first impulses. Free improvisations progressed to a point where music from my earliest memory was reproduced, and it was hoped that a relationship between the two might be inferred. The improvisations were not meant necessarily to resemble the written music, but it was hoped a certain variety of continuity might be apparent as ideas were worked through.

Before the recording I got into the habit of playing the hour’s music through in a single take, one end to the other with only brief breaks between the movements. Before the concert I had done the same thing, and I even recorded a few of the iterations. In playing, and in listening back, I was pleased that the hour could start from anywhere and negotiate its way towards ‘King’s Lynn’, before setting off from somewhere completely different in search of the music of Charles Wood, and so on.

The recording from Pughouse resembled the concert in its program: the landmarks are the same as were outlined in the post that followed the concert. But the improvisations inevitably differed, and this is the life in the music. The continual drawing from the known, towards the not-yet known.

I’m thinking about releasing this recent recording somehow. Are CDs still viable? Should I do a digital-only edition? Advise me, if you will. Here’s an excerpt for while you think it over.

*Literally. It was the middle of the night. Sam will attest to this.

**It may be that the improvisation came first. I don’t remember.

20/i/2015

Dear reader,

I wrote these notes for the Origin re-release of Browne, Costello & Grabowsky’s landmark album 6×3. I submitted them and asked to see the proofs before they were printed, but for some reason that didn’t happen so the copy that you read on the CD cover is blighted with embarrassing gaffes and, well, I’m a bit cross. Here, then, are the notes as they were supposed to appear. The footnotes actually go to notes, the sentences are all complete, and the paragraphing makes greater sense. I regret the need to do this but it’s in the manner of clearing my name. [Exit stage right.]

Six by three, the CD-only release from the trio of Browne, Costello and Grabowsky, was launched at City Gallery in Melbourne, on Sunday 1 October 1989. The following year it won the ARIA Award for best jazz album. It was the first of two recordings released by this trio, the other one being When Words Fail (Origin, 1995).

My perspective on this music can only be personal, and I met it when I was much in need of it. Hearing this trio play in the Lounge at Mietta’s during 1990 – my first acquaintance with it – was an experience with consequences I feel to this day. The example of a small group playing original music – with titles that related to Australia! – at the time when I had just begun to read Patrick White for the first time and to think about what I might do as an improvising musician, here in Melbourne, was astonishing.

Six by three, purchased very shortly after the performance I heard, remains one of my handful of absolutely essential records. The playing is such that even now, after having heard it for over twenty years, I am still surprised and delighted by the integration within the trio, and the assured and energetic creativity – the personality – of the individual voices. This band’s sound is so much its own; the tunes, complicated though they often are, are handled with such dexterity and freedom as to stun repeatedly. It is an album that has influenced me far more profoundly than the more predictable American models to whom contemporary piano players are expected to look.

The three are peerless, each an individual, and together – well, talk about synergy. And the six – these compositions are from the top drawer. ‘Three myths’, with its ‘employ[ment] of two extremes of instrumental style: free associative improvisation and structured improvisation built on a fixed harmonic structure’,[1] is a most arresting journey with which to kick things off. The impact of the passage with regular time, when it arrives, is extraordinarily powerful, and its relatedness to what has surrounded it, its reframing of the musical argument mounted so far, is a triumph of imagination and invention. ‘Colonial sketch no. 1’, described elsewhere by its composer as ‘a tribute to folk music. (That’s a pretty vague kind of description of what it is, but it’s a pretty vague sort of piece. It will be given dramatic substance by the playing, I’m sure. I hope. Thanks.)’[2] demonstrated to me a capacity to reimagine things familiar. ‘Vague’ is not really the word for music worked so consciously and creatively. I have, in my own compositions, sought to work along similar lines: the known melodic fragment reharmonised, rephrased, re-placed rhythmically; an associative approach to harmony that observes voice-leading principles but needn’t cleave to strictly functional relationships, and so on. ‘Colonial sketch no. 1’ is an object lesson in taking things further. Grabowsky’s phenomenal harmonic imagination demonstrated in ‘Happy go lucky country’, where (for example) both of the first two cadences resolve to B, and yet resist any feeling that no movement has been made – such flexibility is truly remarkable. The compositional resourcefulness that inhabits these six pieces is of a quite exceptional character, and the maintenance of musical identity and personality amidst the variety they demonstrate is breathtaking.

The ensemble’s capacity to rise to the challenges of the tunes constitutes a stunning musical endeavour. The melodic invention of Gary Costello is something that repays repeated listening and continued focus; his lithe sense of time and his ability to play in the midst of the chords when appropriate keep the musical texture constantly alive, forever surprising. Allan Browne’s signature sound and absolute commitment to the forms is, together with his historical association with Gary, the bedrock of an extraordinary rhythm section. And Grabowsky’s own contribution, his subtle sense of pulse and rhythm, his endlessly adaptable approach to chord voicing, and his melodic ingeniousness, make this a truly classic session.

I am delighted that Six by three is coming back into print; it belongs in the collection of any serious student of Australian music, it is of immense importance to the development of jazz in Melbourne, it sounds absolutely splendid, and it is right that it should be accessible once again.

[1] Paul Grabowsky, ‘Improvisation as celebration,’ Sounds Australian 17 (Autumn 1988): 20.

[2] In performance at the Wangaratta Festival of Jazz, 1992.

19/i/2015