The Music Show

Celebrate 100 years of  broadcast radio in Australia with The Music Show in a live recording at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) in Canberra!In front of a live audience, we are joined by the NFSA's Sound Curator Thorsten Kaeding, pianist and Deputy Head of School at the ANU School of Music Scott Davie, and local experimental musician Sia Ahmad for a chat about the impact of broadcast radio on music, and music's influence on the development of media.We delve into the archives of the NFSA and the ABC to listen to recordings from lacquer discs recorded by ABC's war correspondent Chester Wilmot in Tobruk during the second world war, some of a Prix Italia winning work, and live performances by Sia and a boombox and Thorsten playing an original wax cylinder.

Ashley Naylor is guitarist who has played in many bands. He has his own bands, like Even, plays in other bands like The Church, and is even in bands on TV, like The RocKwiz Orkestra. In fact, you may have heard his guitar on The Music Show, but this time, he is on the program to talk about his most recent release - a new album of instrumental music called Soundtracks Volume 2, a follow up to his 2020 lockdown album Soundtracks Volume 1.Founding member of No Fixed Address and Mixed Relations and the godfather of Australian reggae, Bart Willoughby makes his Music Show debut. He is an alumni of CASM (Centre for Aborignal Studies in Music) in Adelaide and has toured internationally with bands like Yothu Yindi. In this interview, we journey into Bart’s incredible story as a multi-instrumentalist, and how he came to be one of the most significant figures in Australian songwriting. 

Fred Smith is that classic combo: troubadour and a diplomat. Now based back in Canberra, his career as a singer-songwriter is defined by his time in Bougainville and Afghanistan. But his new album, Look, is "a collection of songs that are not about Afghanistan", and features tributes to Leonard Cohen and Helen Garner, the latter of which he performs live in The Music Show studio. Jazz duo Claire Cross and Harry Cook's debut album for ABC Jazz, Dialect, melds her electric bass with his genre-bending piano. They join Andy from Berlin to talk about an album firmly rooted in the Australian landscape. 

Gelareh Pour and Brian O'Dwyer have been playing music together for over 10 years and have just released their debut full-length album under the project name ZÖJ. They describe the ZÖJ as an "ongoing conversation" that combines Gelareh's Persian music background and Brian's experimental percussion to create new Australian music. Their album Fil O Fenjoon was recorded in the Primrose Potter Salon of the Melbourne Recital Centre.Cellist Anthony Albrecht is co-director of The Bowerbird Collective alongside Simone Slattery, a project "crossing the arts/science divide" in blending music and conservation. As they gear up for the inaugural Lyrebird Festival, Anthony talks about historical performance, finding music in nature, and whether frogs sing quite so beautifully as birds.

Robyn Archer has spent the past year touring An Australian Songbook – it’s not The Australian songbook but it takes a swathe of Australian songwriting from household singalongs to new art song and weaves a wry and touching portrait of the continent. She spends an hour with Andy looking at the songbook as it has taken shape: from First Nations folksong, to yodelling, to the menstruation blues.

‘So much of traditional jazz is about romantic love,’ says saxophonist Holly Moore. ‘I feel like there’s never really that much on friendships and the other relationships in our lives”. Her debut album for ABC Jazz, Reunion, is a five-part suite about those bonds, from adolescence to adulthood.  We catch up with 2022 Classical Freedman Fellow Katie Yap about the project she undertook with the prize. Multitudes has seen Katie improvising, composing and performing with four unique collaborators. We talk about birds, words and get an update on what's cooking in Katie's kitchen.And we get a glimpse into The Journey Down - a project that took a car wreck-turned-sonic sculpture on the road from Kununurra to Perth.

Good times and bum times, she’s seen them all and she’s here: Geraldine Turner, lynchpin of the Australian music theatre scene from 1970s repertory to the current run of Wicked, reflects on her massive career (so far), her love of Sondheim, and Judy Garland.

The Music Show catches up with Lance Ferguson and Kylie Auldist from funk/soul stalwarts The Bamboos in between their month-long Melbourne residency and a multi-city European tour, to hear about the new album This Is How You Do It, featuring Kylie's son Reginald AK. In Song Circle at the upcoming Clancestry festival, Troy Cassar-Daley celebrates the life of his late mother and the sharing of songs and stories that got him through the grieving process of Sorry Business. With his daughter Jem joining him for this performance and on recent tours, he tells Andrew about the intersection of music and family.And Sarah Blasko on writing music for Shakespeare’s most musical play, Twelfth Night, which is underway at Bell Shakespeare.

Conor Oberst and his trio Bright Eyes are by many accounts the group most responsible for the indie-folk boom of the mid-2000s. Bright Eyes is touring the country and Conor swings by The Music Show to talk about revisiting and reworking his old songs after the band’s return from a long hiatus.Vanessa Perica’s second album, The Eye Is The First Circle, builds on the lush foundations of her first. In a time when the big band seems somewhat nostalgic she joins Andy to prove that the Vanessa Perica Orchestra has its feet firmly planted in the present. And she remembers Carla Bley, the unique bandleader who died last week.

Two musically different Australian outfits in Melbourne and Adelaide join The Music Show with live performances.Hand to Earth grew out of a musical conversation started by vocalist Sunny Kim and Yolŋu Songman Daniel Wilfred during an Australian Art Orchestra residency in the remote highlands of Tasmania. Since that first collaboration, Hand to Earth has become an ensemble involving Aviva Endean, David Wilfred and Peter Knight, and they are on the cusp on a new record release and performance at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival.Joined by Polish violinist Amalia Umeda, their show The Crow is a new commission that follows the songline of the crow (waak waak) in Arnhem Land. And ahead of their second appearance at OzAsia Festival, Hyoshi in Counterpoint drop by our the studio in Adelaide to give us a taste of their music. They're an ensemble of six women from different musical backgrounds, bringing together the sounds of Shamisen, Guzheng, strings, keyboard and a rather quirky drum-kit to create musical responses to visual artworks.