John Shand Posts

Foundry 616, April 25 7.5/10 Blokes in boaters with banjos and clarinets were so ubiquitous in Australian pubs decades after the so-called trad-jazz revival of the 1960s that, for many people, the term jazz still primarily conjures up that music. These days classic jazz is the preferred name for the…

May 4, 2016 / Album Reviews - Archive

MUSIC FOR A NEW SOCIETY/M:FANS (Domino) 7.5/10 Bleak is one of the things art does best. Usually starkness is a key tool in creating it (think Beckett), but it can also be done more gothically, as artists like Mervyn Peake have shown. In 1982 John Cale, whose body of work…

May 2, 2016 / Album Reviews - Archive

PROVENANCE (ABC) 8/10 Paul Grabowsky was Vince Jones’s musical director way back in the 1980s, and this sumptuously recorded reunion shows the rapport never went away. A joint willingness to take risks hovers in the air, disguised by a concentration on gentle songs. Jones’s voice has an inbuilt vulnerability in…