BLOOD ON THE FLOOR: METROPOLIS

Friday 9 April / 7.30pm

Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

Fabian Russell conductor Carl Mackey saxophone James Sherlock guitar Sam Anning bass Dave Beck drumkit

MARK-ANTHONY TURNAGE Blood on the Floor

A musical Acknowledgement of Country, Long Time Living Here by Deborah Cheetham AO, will be performed before the start of this concert. Running time: Approximately 1 hour and 10 minutes, no interval.

Fabian Russell conductor

Fabian Russell is a multi-award-winning conductor, artistic director, pedagogue, orchestral musician and solo performer. Fabian has conducted leading orchestras in Australia and overseas. He has also served as Associate Conductor of the Australian Youth Orchestra for twenty six seasons and is currently Principal Conductor and Artistic Director of The Orchestra Project that he founded in 2002.

Fabian has a particular interest in commissioning new music and has conducted the Australian premieres of more than thirty works. Born in Sydney, Fabian had a twentyyear career as an orchestral musician. In 1993 he was appointed to the MSO where he remained until the end of its 2006 season, as well as performing as a soloist across Australia. He was awarded the Elton John Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Scholarship in 1999. In 2012 Fabian was the recipient of a Sir Winston Churchill Fellowship. In 2014 he received a Helpmann Award nomination and a Green Room Award for Outstanding Conductor. Later this year Fabian will conduct Franz Schubert’s Singspiel Friends of Salamanca also for Victorian Opera, as well as engagements with the SSO, ASO, AYO and The Orchestra Project. Melbourne based saxophonist, Carl Mackey has been a stalwart on the Australian jazz landscape for more than three decades. He has shared the stage with a diverse array of Australian and international artists.

Co-leader of award-winning group Speedball, he is a member of the Sam Anning Sextet, lead alto in the Vanessa Perica Orchestra, and can be heard in groups as diverse as Andrea Keller’s Composer’s Circle through to latin powerhouse, La Influencia. A two time James Morrison Scholarship finalist, and a Freedman Fellowship finalist in 2006, Mackey has toured extensively with appearances in the United States, UK, Italy, India, and is a regular fixture on the national jazz festival scene with regular performances at the Melbourne, Perth, Wangaratta, Brisbane and Sydney International Jazz Festivals. Highly regarded as an educator, previously lecturing at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts for 11 years, he has been on faculty at the James Morrison Academy in Mount Gambier for the last 6 years. Carl is a D’Addario Woodwinds endorsed artist.

Carl Mackey saxophone

James Sherlock guitar

James began playing classical guitar at age 7. He attended the QLD Conservatorium of Music, studying classical guitar and graduated in 1992. He has been awarded the prestigious Ike Isaacs International Jazz Guitar Award.

James works with a variety of Australia’s finest musicians as well as many visiting artists including New York jazz vocalists Sheila Jordan and Cyrille Aimee, master drummers Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts and Jon Riley, and New Orleans trumpeter Leroy Jones. James has ongoing duo projects with vocalist Kristin Berardi and MSO bassist Ben Hanlon. The duo with Kristin has toured extensively throughout Australia as well as abroad, including a European tour culminating in a performance on the Stravinsky stage at the Montreux festival opening for George Benson and Al Jarreau. Their second CD If You Were There won the Bell award for best jazz vocal release in 2010. James and Ben are about to release their second album featuring arrangements of Stravinsky’s orchestral works.

James performs regularly at Australia’s leading venues, along with making international club appearances, and has performed at many major jazz festivals. Sam Anning is a major player in Australian jazz, regularly performing with Australian jazz greats including Allan Browne, Barney McAll, Andrea Keller, Vince Jones, Paul Grabowsky, Kristin Berardi, and Jamie Oehlers. More recently he has been performing and recording with Archie Roach. After relocating to New York City in 2010 to undertake the Masters of Music program at the prestigious Manhattan School of Music, Anning quickly became an in-demand bassist in one of the world’s most competitive cities. Anning has toured extensively throughout North America and the European continent, with performances at the Montreal, Vancouver, Detroit, Jazz a Vienne, Copenhagen, Port au Prince, and Panama International Jazz Festivals.

He has performed with international jazz greats Joe Lovano, Kenny Werner, Ari Hoenig, George Garzone, Gilad Hekselman, Greg Osby, and Charlie Haden, among many others. Returning to Melbourne in 2015, Anning has made a significant contribution to the jazz scene and won multiple awards for his own recent release ‘across a field as vast as one’ including making the shortlist for the 14th Australian Music Prize for Album of the Year.

Sam Anning bass

Dave Beck drumkit

Dave Beck is one of the most versatile drummers in Australia. He carries a wealth of experience across many musical styles and is in constant demand as a freelance musician and teacher. Dave studied music in Australia and abroad in the U.S.A (in New York at the Drummers Collective and Los Angeles at P.I.T). As a drummer he has backed many national and international performers. Dave is an award winning jazz drummer and has performed with jazz legends such as Joe Lovano, Steve Swallow, Carla Bley, Hans Ulrich, and James Morrison to name a few.

He has performed at many of the great jazz festivals around the world including Montreux, Rome, Pori, Sweden, Copenhagen, Finland and Korea. He has recorded on many albums, recently including Archie Roach’s Tell Me Why, the 2020 Aria Best Male Artist and Best Adult Contemporary Album, and Paul Grabowsky’s Moons of Jupiter. He has been principle drummer for many of the major musical productions in Melbourne and played on a variety of TV shows, productions and film soundtracks.

Program Notes

MARK-ANTHONY TURNAGE

(born 1960) Blood on the Floor

Carl Mackey saxophone James Sherlock guitar Sam Anning bass Dave Beck drumkit

Against a background of improbable colour — no colour that was ever seen in nature — a vivid splash of blood on a concrete floor. Mark-Anthony Turnage insists that Francis Bacon’s painting is no more than a starting point for his piece. It is not the first time that he has turned to the century’s most viscerally Rembrandtian portraitist, but Three Screaming Popes was a more literal realisation of another art form than Blood on the Floor could possibly be. Yet it may be worthwhile to think of this work’s long gestation (Turnage has worked on it since 1993) in ways that cement the connection.

Blood on the Floor is the first of his pieces to include an element of improvisation, though he has long been passionately interested in jazz, in its structural properties as well as its Bacon-like aim at the abdomen. In 1993, Turnage worked with keyboard player and composer Django Bates on a setting (without text) of the black American poet Langston Hughes’ Junior Addict, a piece written in Hughes’ usual jazz-blues cadence. With a bleak synchronicity, the piece foreshadowed Turnage’s discovery that his brother Andrew was chemically dependent, a process of addiction that eventually led to his death. At the centre of Blood on the Floor, the sixth of its now nine movements, is a tender Elegy, a moment that stands both programmatically and musically opposed to the spikier progress of Shout, Needles, Crackdown and Cut Up. It is based on a melody Turnage played at his brother’s funeral and contains a personal motif, a small quote from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Just as he asks that the Bacon painting be seen only as a starting point, Turnage does not want a family tragedy to be seen as the single, over-determining focus of the piece. It is, though, unmistakably its fulcrum and the emotional heart of a complex work that takes him into areas of tonality not explored before. Elegy for Andy is written for electric guitar and ensemble; in transcribing solos by jazz guitarist John Scofield, Turnage grew convinced that his voicings and signature spacing of chords were compatible with his own music. Writing for an improviser is no longer considered the solecism it once was; it merely implies a moment in the compositional process where the musicians are required to do more. The danger is that a piece so conceived lapses into what has until recently been derided as Thirdstream vacillation between two quite inimical musical approaches, a bland opposition of battuta and ad lib, control and licence. Writing for improvisers, though, implies a kind of artistic self-permission, an ability to allow certain things to happen or, as the quote from Puccini suggests, a certain fatalism. In addition to Scofield, the piece is written for percussionist Peter Erskine, the most orchestrally minded of jazz drummers, and for saxophonist Martin Robertson, who plays the lyric line in Junior Addict, the second movement.

As one might expect in a work that has evolved over time, Blood on the Floor is both fragmented (concerned as it unavoidably is with emotional syncopes, elisions, departures) and also highly unified. Much of the material is established or implied in the opening section, a sour aggressive overture with a crowded, claustrophobic quality

that may be the first colouring of Bacon’s vision. The dominant interval is a wry semitone, and there is a dour, fibrillating rhythmic motif based on two strong beats followed by three light. This material is to appear again, mostly by implication, but more directly and openly in the closing movement, which completes the journey towards abstraction (in the best philosophical sense) with another painterly evocation. In Dispelling the Fears, Turnage has attempted to catch something of the mysteriously redemptive quality of Australian abstractionist Heather Betts, and her canvas of that name, in which a non-figurative white area appears to redeem the surrounding darkness, harmonises its almost poisonous tones in a way that Bacon’s dissonance of concrete, Dulux and blood sternly denies. The trumpet’s cadence of B and F is raised to F#, a more open sound, and whole not an unambiguous affirmation, evokes a less bleak prospect than might conceivably have been foretold.

For most composers, the prospect of a break in a piece as developed and complete as this would represent an unwelcome distraction. For public performance, Turnage has scored an interval between Sweet and Decay and Needles. It is there not for any bland logistical reason — like a piano move or re-tune — but because the music requires a moment to breathe and to absorb its own implications. As such, it isn’t so much a hiatus as a gentle quietus at the heart of this rough, tender work.

Brian Morton ©