CD Reviews

Schumann Dichterliebe Koen van Stade, tenor Neal Peres Da Costa, piano Deux Elles DXL1193 Dutch tenor Koen van Stade and...

Chances are that you’ve heard Len Vorster. Born in South Africa, he has been resident in Australia for the last 40 years, and is a pianist, accompanist, and teacher. He has achieved recognition for his recordings of de Falla (with Merlyn Quaife) and a two-piano version of Holst’s The Planets (with Robert Chamberlain) and has also recorded with Deborah de Graaff and Lauris Elms.

As the title of pianist and composer Mike Nock’s newest recording indicates, it is all about the facility of perceiving sounds. More pertinently, interpreting them in a particular way.

Jane Irving’s’ ability to navigate the many sides of the jazz vocal genre is confirmed by this album of eleven engagingly diverse songs, some of which display her accomplished pianism and others, her superbly refined scatting skill.

This previously unreleased recording of Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers is exhilarating, captured at Hibiya Public Hall, Tokyo, on 14 January 1961. This was the final show of the band’s first-ever tour of Japan, recorded for a documentary that never happened, featuring one of the band’s all-time great line-ups in the long history of Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers.

I imagine that the title of this release refers to the fact that the musicians involved hail from different hemispheres, but have also performed together in both the USA and Australia. Luke Severn is Australian and currently the artistic director and principal conductor of the Bendigo Symphony Orchestra. He is a cellist and, as a champion of contemporary repertoire, has commissioned a sonata from his friend Evan Fein.

There were the great crooners like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Tony Bennett. Then there are the modern-day equivalents like Michael Bublé and Harry Connick Jnr. And now there is Charlie Chech, a young Sydneysider with a debut EP, Checkmate.

The American composer George Walker lived a long life, passing in 2018 at the age of 96. Only in his later life did Walker receive the acclaim that his talents deserved, and it was in 1996 that he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music, the first African American to receive the award.

I had the good fortune to attend a live multimedia presentation of Life on Land’s Edge at the Newcastle Music Festival earlier this year – but while the visual component was impressive, the musical content was well able to stand alone.

The album draws inspiration from his anticipation of becoming a father and the feeling of crises and isolation at the start of the pandemic while living in New York. The music flows extremely well, and there is frequently a swing to it on a range of moods and stylistic influences.