Live at the Village is a non-profit concert series in the lower Blue Mountains, showcasing Australian jazz, folk, and improvised music. Concerts typically take place on select Saturday evenings at the historic Springwood Presbyterian Church Hall. Their latest presentation showcased Phillip Johnston, an American saxophonist now resident in Australia, a composer, performer and arranger of jazz and new music.
Johnston has led or co-led musical groups including The Greasy Chicken Orchestra, The Coolerators and The Microscopic Septet with pianist Joel Forester. He has also performed original scores for silent films at the Sydney Film Festival, Sydney Vivid, the Melbourne Festival of the Arts, MONA FOMA, the Woodford Folk Festival, the Revelation Perth Film Festival, the Melbourne International Jazz Festival, the Sydney Opera House, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and the National Film and Sound Archive.
Johnston has also composed extensively for films, including Paul Mazursky’s Faithful, Philip Haas’ The Music of Chance and Money Man, Doris Dörrie’s Paradise and Geld, and Stolen Life by Peter Rasmussen and Jackie Turnure, which won a New York Machinima Award for Best Music Score.
Puffs of Smoke is a live musical feast conceived by Johnston featuring a program of rare silent films, including The Story of the Kelly Gang, Soldiers of the Cross, cinematic archival footage of George Street in 1906, footage of a carnival of entertainers from New Zealand, The Corrick Family from Christchurch, New Zealand, who toured across Australia and the world, combining variety acts with early, cutting-edge film presentations as well as wartime cartoons and newsreel footage.
The centrepiece of the filmic presentation was early footage from a film of Adam Lindsay Gordon’s most famous bush ballad, The Sick Stockrider, which was vocalised and included the delivery of Lindsay’s famous lines, along with the music.
“Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone
kindness in another’s trouble,
courage in your own.”
Woven between the films, short narratives written and delivered by Johnston, stitched together like an Australian cinematic history lesson, which flowed like a script with a definite beginning, middle and end.
All of this was accompanied by a stunningly original and, at times, riveting twenty-first-century soundscape of improvised saxophone by the composer, with looping samples and overdubbed arrangements for sixteen saxophones.
As an entrée, we were treated to a delectable collection of musical appetisers from the Live at the Village mini-orchestra. The menu included three rarely performed works by Eric Satie, Bernie McGann and Albert Ayler. The ensemble of other distinguished musicians on the bandstand, where only true democracy exists, included Johnston on the saxophone, Gary Daley on accordion, Lloyd Swanton on double bass, Llew Kiek on guitar and mandolin, and Peter Kennard on percussion.
It was an amiable prelude to what followed.
Barry O’Sullivan.
For more information, visit: https://liveatthevillage.com.au/