Chris Lawson said, ‘I thought the session was really good! But when you left the studio, you looked a bit down.’ He was probably right; I wasn’t sure as I departed the ABC Studios that we’d really got all I’d hoped we might get from the stuff I’d taken in. Recording is curious like that; things that you thought rocked the house can appear rather drear on later audition, and things that seemed flat can later reveal themselves as quite glorious. I can’t count the number of times I thought I’d totally rogered something only to find later that there was nothing to worry about, and I even actually liked what had happened.

Chris’s words were in reference to our recording session on December 16, 2019. Sounds like an age ago now, because, well, we’ve had a pandemic! And music had its own hospital stay for the duration, narrowly avoiding a ‘not for resus’ order.

My journal entry from that day follows:

Days to which you look forward, and then about which you wonder. The wondering is epic, the feeling of lost hope, of work put to no effect, all that. The nagging sense that all the energy spent is wasted. On the bike to the ABC Centre to record again with Ben & Dave. My dearest musical colleagues, the sharers of what I feel is mine to give. And beautiful Chris, who gave the first day of his leave to have us in the studio. And why do we make records? What earthly reward is there in being creative? I’m fu-u-ucked if I know. But the session seemed to go well enough and although I’ll wait to listen Chris seemed to think it was good and I hope we’ve got an album out of it. Came home after [non-alcoholic] drinks with Jenni – who also liked what she heard – to Vesper martinis. It’s been 15 days and today was huge. I know what I have to do. Very soon I’ll start doing it again.

The ’15 days’ refers to a brief period of sobriety. Currently I’m not drinking at all because I visited a GP just before Christmas who was shocked at how much I’ve been putting away and emphasised its deleterious effects on my health, mental as well as physical. This time it actually feels good, achievable, and today is my twenty-eighth consecutive sober day. This period has included both Christmas and my brother’s wedding, so I’m feeling little short of heroic. All that however is by the bye.

Between 20 December 2019 and 13 January 2020 my family and I were in Spain, travelling between cities and having the most marvellous time. I cannot describe the feeling of standing in front of Picasso’s Guernica and thinking, he stood here. Or being atop Gaudi’s Casa Mila, or inside the Sagrada Familia. As a creative, and all that. It was incredible, and what we’ve said ever since we got back has been, ‘thank God we did it when we could.’ Because we returned to Australia and covid got going and everything shut down. While we were there, though, on the lengthy train and bus trips between the towns we visited, I checked out what Ben and Dave and I had recorded. And despite whatever misgivings I may initially have had, I found myself coming to be very pleased with what we’d achieved. I thought, this has variety. This is, in fact, original. There are things here we haven’t done before, and things I haven’t heard anyone else doing either. I think I can make an order here – all the tunes came from the 366 I’d written in 2016 – with January 1 kicking off and December 31 winding things up. I came to listen with great pleasure to the things we’d made, and to feel a rather special gratitude that we’d managed to get into the studio and have the mics switched on.

The editing and mastering of the recording were done remotely, once I was back in town, since I was not permitted to go to the studio. Chris and I sent emails back and forth, assessing order, spaces between tracks, volume, everything. Because Cheryl Orsini, who designs the covers for my albums, is in Sydney, that work is always done remotely so there was no change there. But gradually it all came together and was pressed and released on 20 May 2020. Which kind of sounds quick, all things considered. (Probably I put the digital files on Bandcamp before I actually had the CDs, but it would only have been a week or so’s difference.)

Obviously with live performance in a temporary grave, the album was never launched. I sent it to every radio station in Australia that I could find, and the response there was really lovely, with a great number of them actually playing selections from it. This was the first time I had totally self-produced an album so all the publicity and everything was entirely down to me; I thought I did an okay job of it. The record got a couple of reviews, and people bought copies, physical as well as digital, and generally speaking I was pretty happy with the whole thing.

The last date I can find in my diary that I performed with Ben and Dave is 7 March 2016. Could it really be that long? We did do some double trio performances that year, although when the time came to record with whom you can be who you are neither Ben nor Dave was available so the session was undertaken with a different rhythm section. The recording of There’ll be some changes played was preceded by rehearsal, but I think they are the last times until now that we played together, and they were not live.

So it gives me enormous pleasure to announce that on Sunday, February 12, at 2pm, the three of us are finally reconvening at St John’s Anglican Church, Camberwell, to give a now very rare live performance. It will be in the manner of a CD launch, because most if not all of what’s on the album will be included, but it will also have something of the character of a retrospective, since this is our fifth album, and there’ll be some even newer stuff thrown in as well. The church is at 552 Burke Rd, Camberwell, and has a fabulous Mason and Hamlin piano that I really enjoy playing; it is going to be wonderful to be together again and to offer some of our original music.

This link leads you to the ticket-buying department, so please if you’re disposed give it a click. We’d love to see as many of you as are able and interested to be there, as we can.

https://events.humanitix.com/tim-stevens-trio

Wishing everyone who reads this a very happy new year. May it be a pearler.

18.i.2023

The heading for this post was the title I was going to give an album of standards I planned with my trio. We were going to play ‘No-one can like the drummer man’ and ‘Slap that bass’ and all sorts of wildly inappropriate stuff like that. We never did. We stuck with original music because a) we prefer it, and b) it’s what we do best, and c) because to record at all is a blessing so why waste it on such nonsense. High-minded only begins to describe what we are.

Other posts have covered my efforts in 2020 to help people feel not so isolated or lonely, by putting a bit of solo piano music around to help them along. Because I was working almost daily I drew on the standard repertoire, towards which again other posts have described my previous antipathy. I thought, as I put these pieces out there, actually I know this stuff. I was obliged to engage with it as a student, and I’ve figured out how to play solo piano, and in truth some of these tunes are really damn’ good.

The thing about jazz, I think, is that everyone is an individual and has a contribution to make. Certainly you can learn all the scales and trot them out at a million miles an hour and convince the non-attentive festival audiences that you’re all over your instrument and worth the ridiculous amount of money they paid to hear you. But the best jazz is made by folks who have done the hard yards figuring out just how they want things to sound, and then honing their craft to make that sound, dependably.

Sounds like I’m giving myself a huge rap here as a wildly original creator. That’s not really what I mean. But I have been at this for a number of years now and I’m proud when people say, ‘This piece came on the radio and I thought, “That’s Tim Stevens! And it was!”‘ In those glorious days as an undergraduate at what was then the Victorian College of the Arts the whole vibe was about ‘who are you? What do you want to do? How are you going to do it? Listen, we encourage, we oblige you to find your thing and pursue it. To death, comrades, to death.’ That’s part of the reason that I became so devoted to original music, to finding my thing, what I wanted most of all to play, and then to playing it.

But standards were, as I say, always in there, and I think that at the ripe old age of fifty I’ve figured that my own personal voice, such as it is, can be brought to bear on standard repertoire, to make it personal.

I have just recorded a set of ten standard tunes at Pughouse Studios, in Thornbury, where I made my church records. The piano there is a Pfeiffer, the only one I’ve ever played, and I really like it. Perhaps I’ve also already said how I reckon the piano player’s mission is to find their relationship with the instrument with which they find themself working; maybe I haven’t but it’s an article of faith for me. You never know what you’re going to get; you show up for the gig and it’s a baby grand (oh, yay!) or it’s a bigger grand that hasn’t been tuned for a few months, or it’s a clapped-out upright where the C-sharp doesn’t work and you’re due to play the Moonlight. Whevs, you have to get the job done. Some people I have heard object to the Pfeiffer but I think it has tremendous character and I reckon I know how to make it sound okay. (So does Niko Schauble, its owner and the engineer at Pughouse.)

For this session I thought long and hard about what I actually wanted to play. I have a manner of dealing with ‘All the things you are’ that I don’t think anyone else has thought of; it’s in two keys. When you hear the record you’ll be astonished. (He said.) ‘All the things’ was one of the first standards I learnt, because it was obligatory at the VCA. Standard repertoire is important for students and still I give mine a bunch of pieces I feel they need to know. They teach you about harmony and about structure, and these are essential lessons. I am an enormous fan of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and one of their finest pictures in my opinion is Top Hat. Irving Berlin’s music for that picture is superb, and I selected two tunes from it: ‘Isn’t it a lovely day’ and ‘The Piccolino’. You could say ‘The Piccolino’ is not actually a standard since no-one plays it. But I’m taking its age, and its genesis at the hands of Irving Berlin, as an indicator of standard-ism and I shan’t be told otherwise. ‘I’m gonna laugh you right out of my life’ is one of my favourite songs in the history of the world, alongside ‘Mondnacht’ and ‘Erlkönig’, and it breaks my heart every time I play or hear it. No-one seems to perform it, but I had to put it in the set because it’s such an incredible tune. The words! ‘And if I find you and I really meant that last goodbye, then I’m gonna laugh so hard, I’ll cry’. I mean fuck.

The record is to be dedicated to my brother and his fiancée, so ‘Taking a chance on love’ is in there, as well as ‘My funny valentine’ (selected by Sall). ‘Last night when we were young’ and ‘Oh, lady be good!’ are further crackers and take the ballad count to three. I love Billie Holiday’s version of ‘Miss Brown to you’ so I popped that in, and the list is completed with ‘When you wish upon a star’. This piece I’d had no intention of playing; I haven’t thought of it for years and although I played it with Al and Nick way back in the day it’s not a piece with which I’ve really stayed connected. Getting to the end of the session though, it struck me that I didn’t have anything in three among the pieces I’d played. So I had a crack at ‘Some day my prince will come’, which is not a tune I like very much and on which I did not distinguish myself, whereupon I remembered ‘When you wish’. I played it, and I was so pleased with how it sounded that I felt it had to be the album’s conclusion.

Working with Niko at Pughouse is such ridiculous fun, and I’m so pleased with the work I have done there. I did three church albums there, perhaps I’ll do three standards ones.

There is something that if it happens I know is going to give me the shits, royally, and that is if someone hears this and says, well at last, some jazz. Because I’ve taken my time to come around to this repertoire – and, as aforesaid, I had my reasons – my late arrival might be any number of things. Surprising, perhaps. Relieving. Regarded as a bit desperate. Consoling. I don’t know. It is a departure however from all the things I’ve been trying to achieve in the last twenty-five years, so I’ll have to deal with the reception as it comes. Perhaps this will even involve the album’s being nominated for one of those crummy awards in which I’ve never taken any interest, and then if I win I’ll have to resist my urge to stand up and give an acceptance speech beginning with ‘Just as long as you all know this is a massive pile of cattle’s business…’ It’s unlikely of course but stranger things have probably happened. Melbourne won a premiership last year. Josh Frydenberg was defeated at the last federal election. Mullets came back. I’ve recorded some standards.

CD out soon. Available initially on Bandcamp, then in a couple of record stores, and then when finally I get around to it I’ll share it streaming-side. Not initially but eventually. They can wait.

EDIT: It isn’t streaming. Streaming is evil.