The Music Show

Bach is indestructible. Jazz singer Michelle Nicolle is the latest in a line of musicians to take the music of J.S. Bach and do things to it. Her jazz ensemble pops by The Music Show studio to play live selections from her new album The Bach Project, in which her acrobatic vocals draw closer and further from Bach’s original music.As an improviser himself, Bach’s music is fertile ground for reinterpretation, and we’ll hear from the late Jacques Loussier, the Brodsky Quartet’s Paul Cassidy, composer Brett Dean and the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble, amongst others, on how Bach has been transformed.

In 2019, Freya Josephine Hollick travelled to the famed Rancho de la Luna studio in Joshua Tree to record her most recent album titled The Real World. Growing up in regional Victoria, her music education mainly stemmed from Black Swan Record Store in the heart Ballarat, wihch eventually sparked her passion for music by the likes of Gram Parsons, Townes Van Zandt, and other giants of the Cosmic and Outlaw Country scene. Ahead of her appearance at the Adelaide Guitar Festival, Freya joins Andrew to talk about her evolving sound and the stories and musicians she encountered in Joshua Tree. Longtime Music Show mate, Matt Davis, stops by with some musicians he's met while on the road filming his new documentary Changing Tides. Following Dharug artist and surfer Billy Bain on a trip up the coast of NSW, Matt talks to us about First Nations communities he met who live on the coast and their connections with the land and the ocean, and musicians from these nations who use their songs to explore their identities as saltwater people. And producer Ce speaks to Acholi musician and singer, Otim Alpha who started his career in traditional wedding music, but has ended up on the dancefloor. Dubbed "Acholitronix," Otim's music combines the tunes and instruments of traditional wedding songs with electronic beats that still capture the soul of the rhythmic grooves at the heart of Acholi traditonal music. He talks to The Music Show before landing in Adelaide for the Illuminate Festival. 

This is the story a song written by Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly around a campfire in 1988. What started off as a casually recorded folk number has become what Carmody calls “a kind of cultural love song”: a foundational entry in the Australian songbook.This year’s NAIDOC Week theme is “For Our Elders”, so RN’s Rudi Bremer went to speak with Kev Carmody at his studio on Kambuwal Country to gather his recollections of From Little Things Big Things Grow as it started, the story of the Gurindji Walk Off that inspired it, and the many different iterations he’s performed and heard in the last thirty years.Wik and South Sea Islander rapper Ziggy Ramo, Electric Fields vocalist Zaachariaha Fielding from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands and Adelaide producer Michael Ross, and Zillmere State School Year 7 Class of 2003 student Tonii-Lee Betts join Craig Tilmouth to talk about their interpretations of the song that Carmody says “belongs to everyone now”.From Little Things Big Things Grow, as performed by:Kev Carmody, Paul Kelly and the Tiddas from the 1993 album BloodlinesPaul Kelly & the Messengers from the 1991 album ComedyKev Carmody and Paul Kelly live at the national memorial service for Gough Whitlam, 2014The Waifs, from the 2020 album Cannot Buy My Soul: The Songs of Kev CarmodyElectric Fields from the 2020 album Cannot Buy My Soul: The Songs of Kev CarmodyZiggy Ramo, from the 2021 single From Little ThingsZillmere State School Year 7 Class of 2003Paul Kelly & Jess Hitchcock live in 2019 on the album PeopleYou also heard Kev Carmody’s song Thou Shalt Not Steal from the 1988 album Pillars of Society, and the opening of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 (‘Choral’), performed by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and Wilhelm Furtwängler.

Robbie speaks to Electric Fields -  Zaachariaha Fielding and Michael Ross about the perspectives that have been infused into the music through collaborative songwriting and Zaachariaha's upbringing in Mimili (APY Lands). After noticing their undeniable creative spark back in 2015, they have been making music together that hark back to the days watching Rage on the weekends, while adding their own individual sounds and stories to the mix.Electric Fields made their orchestral debut last year with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in Hamer Hall, where the show ended with the audience dancing in the aisles of the concert hall. Following the success of that show, they're returning to the stage with the MSO again for NAIDOC Week this year.Bouncing off the her explorations in Blak Mass, Naretha Williams' new release Into Dusk We Fall shifts the focus from the grand organ to soft synthesisers and the voice. Written and produced with her husband, Cyrus Williams, this album was made throughout intensive lockdowns, with access to MESS restricted and both Naretha and Cyrus stuck in different timezones. She talks us through their remote collaborative process and how the restrictions helped her hone the music on the album. And an excerpt of Wash My Soul in the River's Flow, a cinematic portrait of Archie Roach, Ruby Hunter and their relationship and collaboration captured in the run-up to their iconic performance with Paul Grabowsky and the Australian Art Orchestra in 2004.

ANOHNI & the Johnsons return with My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, a kind of reunion-rebirth for the band after frontwoman Anohni Hegarty devoted over a decade to her solo work. Famed for her soulful voice that bridges an extraordinary range of intimacy and power, My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross is an album that takes ANOHNI’s lifelong preoccupations with the self and the natural world into a new space with a new vocabulary. Robbie talks to her about the album, her friendship with the late Lou Reed who inspires a new song, and Marsha P Johnson, who inspired her band name and graces the cover of the new album.And a previous Freedman Jazz Fellow, Novak Manojlovic, brings his band HEKKA into studio to give us a sneaky preview of their new album everywhere i go my body goes with me, cementing their ill-at-ease relationship with traditional jazz as they move towards their own sound.

Arushi Jain is adamant that she’s not a “classical Indian musician.” Leaning on her roots in Hindustani musical tradition, she weaves together ethereal soundscapes that feature melodies and moods based on traditional Indian ragas swirling around an electronically generated soundscapes. Previously releasing music under the monikers Modular Princess and ose | ओस, she draws on her studies in computer sciences at Stanford, and gravitates towards the electronic DIY, working mostly with modular synthesisers when she’s not programming her own instruments.We spoke to trumpeter Tom Avgenicos last year when he won the Freedman Jazz Fellowship, and now the project idea that he won it with has become a reality. Tom and members of his band Delay 45 - Rohan Kumarage on keys and Dave Quinn on bass - are live in The Music Show studio to offer us a peek behind the curtain of Ghosts between Streams.And we listen to the final single of Afar woman, Yanna Momina, who died this week at the age of 76. Known for her powerful vocal and thrilling vibrato, Momina made a name for herself as both a singer and a songwriter - defying the expectations of women within the Afar community. 

Writer Dr. Leah Broad's book Quartet charts the transition from the Victorian era to mid-20th century modernism through the lives and works of four significant female composers: Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen.

Pop music is an art, it’s a science, it’s an industrial complex. Two experts, musicologist Jadey O’Regan and psychologist Tim Byron, have joined forces to write the book on Hooks in Popular Music and they're going to tell us about the mechanics behind the music that gets in our head, from Beethoven to Britney.And producer Ce tells the story of Ethel Smyth, the Suffragette composer, and the music she wrote for her beloved Emmeline Pankhurst.

The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho died over the weekend at the age of 70. Eschewing hardcore serialism and hardcore spectralism, her music found a way of describing colour and light with the orchestra and on the opera stage. Jack Symonds is the artistic director of Sydney Chamber Opera and an advocate for Saariaho’s music. Ahead of his performance of her choral work Tag de Jahrs with The Song Company Jack remembers Saariaho and her music.Melbourne-based Speak Percussion are using music to invite audiences into the Melbourne Recital Centre and listen to the architecture. Producer Kez dropped by a rehearsal of Thomas Meadowcroft’s March Static in the foyer spaces of the recital centre to have a chat to some members of the 80-person-strong ensemble, and to their AD and assistant AD Eugene Ughetti and Kaylie Melville about the relationships between music, space and movement, and what it’s like to be a part of a community created through music.

Internationally renowned composer Max Richter is in the studio for his Music Show debut. On tour in Australia to perform at VIVID in Sydney and Dark Mofo in Hobart, Max speaks to Robbie about his "protest music" and how he the moon remains a generous source of inspiration. Perhaps best known for his extensive project SLEEP, Max also talks us through some of the thoughts behind the music to doze off to. And we are joined in the live music studio by musicians from two Melbourne groups - Firetail, an electro-jazz fusion outfit, and Gamelan DanAnda, a Balinese gamelan group. They've been brought together by The Boîte to join forces and ask the question "Does Balinese gamelan meeting electro-jazz fusion sound like Australia?"