Keith Pettigrew
For more than five years Emergent Jazz has broadcast Sydney’s emerging jazz musicians and their innovative work on Saturday evenings. Since the goal of 2MBS is to promote Australian musicians, particularly the young, many of them still on the jazz campuses of The Con or UNSW their jazz is our music. While the number of small jazz venues enable many to get a gig, without any recordings it is difficult to promote them on radio. Despite the universities’ resources they do not offer their students any recording opportunities.
To fill this gap, 2MBS created a series of record-for-broadcast sessions called As It Happened – Live At Founders. For these we invite young musicians to come into the Founders Studio at 2MBS Fine Music Sydney to record about 30 minutes of their jazz, to be broadcast on Emergent Jazz.
They play the music they play at their gigs, be that jazz standards, covers, fresh arrangements or new compositions. We record the group leader introducing the band and each of the tracks they will play just as they would at a live gig.
The subjects they cover range from the backstory of the piece to the name of the soloist or a point of musical interest the audience might not otherwise notice. Of course, this parallels the role of the radio presenter, ensuring that the audience knows what is playing and why each piece has been selected for broadcast.
Each session has a traditional sound check, allowing the musicians to adjust to the unique sound of the Founders Studio. While the studio was originally intended for small string ensembles, it works well with the acoustics of double bass and piano, drum kit and brass.
With a large band the sound can be intense, but that forces the musicians to listen more closely to each other, which is the very essence of great jazz. This was the case with our 10-piece artist-in-residence, Mosaic in 2024. Their ARIA-charting debut album was recorded in Founders and benefited from the need to listen proactively and play to each other.
The As It Happened recording session is not a rehearsal; it is as much a performance as a gig. The difference is that if the performance is marred by a technical or musical flaw we can re-record. But just like a gig, there is minimal post-production – no overdubbing, splicing or multi-tracking. It is recorded as it happened.
The studio is set up and the performances recorded by our volunteer audio engineers, currently Tim Adamson and previously Dom Parker, who prepare a studio mix for broadcast for each track. Although the result is simple, more than 16 microphones may be used to ensure that instrument and performance subtleties are captured. We have broadcast and published 16 episodes of As It Happened – Live At Founders, with another one in the can waiting for broadcast.
These can be found on our website, 2MBSFineMusicSydney.com/AsItHappened. Each group is given a dedicated link to their broadcast to use in their own promotions on web spaces and social media.
For many this is their introduction to professional-quality music recording, and the high calibre of our volunteer audio engineers means that the quality of the raw recordings often merits commercial re-release. We facilitate this process, ensuring acknowledgement of 2MBS, Founders Studio and the audio engineers.