John Shand Posts

June 15, 2016 / Album Reviews - Archive

RATJA YALIYALI (CAAMA Music) 8/10 We Johnny-come-lately settlers seem to have built a wall around indigenous culture, not to protect it, but to isolate it. We can squat here for a lifetime, flitting overseas for “culture hits” and never engaging with what is in our backyards, let alone beginning to…

June 14, 2016 / Concert Reviews - Archive

City Recital Hall, June 3 7.5/10 The moment came in Skylark. The almost relentlessly buzzing imagination and invention fell away as Gary Versace began a piano solo so soft, so sparse and so fragile that Ulysses Owens stopped playing the drums altogether and Clark Sommers provided the barest underpinning on…

June 13, 2016 / Concert Reviews - Archive

505, June 1 8.5/10 Gary Bartz knows that truth has a beauty deeper than mere aesthetics. When the American puts his alto saxophone to his lips he tells you some things you already know and some things you don’t, but he never tells a musical lie. He is deeply connected…