SYDNEY CON JAZZ FESTIVAL 2021 : TAKE FOUR

Rai Thislethwayte Pic Shane Rozario
Fabian Almazan at the Sydney Con Jazz Festival 2021. Pic Anthony Browell
Will Vinson with the ANJO Big Band at Sydney Con Jazz Festival. Pic Shane Rozario
Mike Nock, Jonathon Zwartz and Hamish Stuart at Sydney Con Jazz Festival 2021. Pic Shane Rozario
Mike Nock at Sydney Con Jazz Festival 2021. Pic Anthony Browell
Vince Jones at Sydney Jazz Con Festival 2021. Pic Anthony Browell
Luke Howard and Nadja Noorhula at Sydney Jazz Con Festival 2021 Pic Shane Rozario
Fabian Almazzin and Linda May at Sydney Con Jazz Festival 2021 Pic Shane Rozario

What would Fats Waller think of this Festival? The creator of ‘Don’t love you cause your feets too big would probably have been mystified. It’s an old saying that white people just can’t do jazz. But then, there are many types of jazz. This Festival mostly presented the unspontaneous variety.

This all-day event was a collaboration between the Sydney Conservatorium of Music’s Jazz Unit, the Con’s Open Academy and the Sydney Improvised Music Association. There was very little that was improvised. Much of the music was commissioned specifically for the Festival and much of it seemed like music written for other academic musicians. It seemed that the performers dared not venture away from the scripted sheet music. There was no jamming.

 It was a well organised, packed day. There were many events happening simultaneously. I saw seven performances. The most fun was, yes, Mike Nock on piano with Jonathan Zwartz on Bass and Hamish Stuart on drums.  The 80 year old Mike gave the packed audience the peace, the smiles and the beauty of jazz. It was a glorious respite from the over-composed, overly loud and academic variety of jazz which the attending jazz students and serious aficionados seemed to appreciate. The rest of us weren’t so impressed. People walked out of two of the performances, away from the confusion of new compositions titled ‘The Stockholm Syndrome’ (which seemed to have no relationship to the condition in which hostages develop a psychological bond with their captors during captivity) and to the ‘Stutterer in Love’ (a cacophony of stuttering instruments).

The acoustics in the Verbrugghen Hall and The Music Workshop were difficult. Big brasses drowned the gentler instruments. The wonderful voice of Vince Jones was barely heard. The Music Café venue was a small intimate space with two huge speakers. Why does a trombone two metres from the audience need giant speakers and a sound technician nearby busily moving buttons on a slide bar? In the same venue the 3D Trio (Carl Dewhurst, Clayton Doley and Andrew Dickson) played to a small but appreciative audience in a softer fashion.

The Aaron Blakey Quartet played for many hours in the Atrium. The natural acoustics worked perfectly well without any miking. It was glorious sitting in the beautiful open space, looking at the huge Le Corbusier tapestry against the spectacular sandstone wall and listening to Aaron on the piano, Andrew Crago on the alto sax, Tom Botting on the bass and Tim Firth on drums. For me, it was one of the real pleasures of the day.

Many compositions were overly experimental and overlapped too many instrumental groupings. Will Vinson’s composition for the string quartet was a new and interesting sound when heard on its own. But  it wasn’t to be. The vocals, the strings, the piano and the sax were mostly on top of one another. It was an experiment that just didn’t work.

A tremendous amount of work had been put into organising this fourth Sydney Con Jazz Festival and the day was well-organised. The building is magnificent. The 2001 renovations incorporate the original colonial walls and display the early artefacts.  There were six performance venues operating simultaneously. There was a good mix of people, from jazz students with instrument cases strapped on their backs to older jazz lovers who remember ‘Don’t Love you cause your feets too big’ because jazz was once fun.

Featured image : The legendary Vince Jones performing at the Sydney Con Jazz Festival 2021. Pic Shane Rozario.