The Music Show

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.

New Zealand composer Annea Lockwood has become a staple in the American experimental community over the last 60 years. Her extensive body of work includes Piano Transplants – a series that includes her well-known Piano Burning and Southern Exposure – the premiere of which went awry when the piano went AWOL in Perth… The Music Show goes to the art gallery, where Annea is rehearsing for the premiere of a new piece, created with Brisbane composer and percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson at the AGNSW’s Volume Festival. We chat about her career, listening to rivers and her latest release – Tête-à-tête – a record made with her late partner Ruth Anderson.

Jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant's latest album Mélusine brings together the high-concept dreaminess of her lockdown album Ghost Song with the powerful band leadership of her earlier work. Cécile joins Andy ahead of her tour to Australia to draw a line from her Kate Bush covers to her 12th Century Occitan folk song renditions.Author Stephen Downes reveals the strange and shortened life of the American pianist William Kapell, who died in a plane accident seventy years ago.Violist Henry Justo is the 2023 recipient of one of Australia’s major instrumental prizes, the Freedman Classical Fellowship, which gives him a grant towards a major performance project. Henry stops by The Music Show studio to reveal his plans for the fellowship and how Debussy clinched the final competition for him.

No-No Boy is a project conceived by academic and musician Julian Saporiti that channels his research on Asian-American histories into song. His music is built on samples he has recorded at Japanese-American interment camps, in national parks, and with museum archives. Julian has just released his third album, Empire Electric, which is a melting pot of American folk, field recordings and a melange of English, French and Vietnamese languages. And The Music Show takes a trip to Art Gallery New South Wales to meet some of the artists performing at their new festival of sound and vision, Volume. We speak to Japanese sound artist FUJI||||||||||TA who has travelled to Australia with his hand-fabricated Pipe Organ for his southern hemisphere premiere. We also get a sneak peek of his performance at his sound check in the Oil Tank Gallery of Sydney Modern, the new wing of the Art Gallery of NSW.  

Iranian composer and pianist Shervin Mirzeinali’s opera Panbe Zan recreates the process of preparing cotton to be turned into cloth, featuring traditional Persian music interleaved with the rhythms and timbres of the Panbe Zani’s ritual. He’s also set to open the inaugural Iranian Music Festival in Sydney, and brings in the co-founder and setar player Ehsan Kachooei to demonstrate some of the music the audience will get to hear at the Festival.Christopher Sainsbury’s new opera The Visitors is the latest in a series of interpretations of Jane Harrison’s play of the same name. Christopher tells Andy how the score is inspired not only by the play text but by the sound world of Eora and Dharug Country, from the echoes of sandstone gullies to the song of the butcherbird.

“When you’re singing Byrd’s music today, you’re just taking his instructions from four hundred years ago, but you’re making contemporary music with them”.William Byrd was a composer of sacred – and secret – Catholic music in Protestant England. To mark 400 years since his death, Andy talks to Early Music specialist Christopher Watson, who is gearing up to perform his work with the Song Company, and we’ll hear Byrd’s biographer Kerry McCarthy from the Music Show archives.

South African vocal group the Soweto Gospel Choir consider Australia to be a kind of second home. They’re on a mammoth four month tour of the continent, performing at venues across NSW and Victoria across October, via a stop to sing for us live in the Music Show studio.The baryton is a small character in the history of music – you’d be forgiven if you’d never heard of the instrument, let along heard it played. Melbourne-based Laura Vaughan is a specialist early music performer who plays the baryton in the Gryphon Baryton Trio, alongside Katie Yap on Viola and Joesphine Vains on cello. They are presenting a concert of pieces for baryton trio by the instrument’s most prolific composer Joseph Haydn, and join us in the studio to give us a taste of music from the Esterházy court.And we remember Australian opera singer Jacqueline Dark who has died at the age of fifty five.