Richard Bonynge Concert Hall, October 23
8/10
Samara Joy came out and told us that although she was recovering from a cold, she’d rather sing a few notes for us than none. Compromised she was, in range, volume and breath control. She avoided introducing songs or band members, and only performed for 45 minutes rather than the scheduled 90. This, perhaps, was the peril of long-haul flights when your instrument is your voice.
The American’s misfortune makes the concert tricky to review. From what I’d heard on record and YouTube, Joy is a candidate for being the most complete jazz singer since Sarah Vaughan. But if we couldn’t experience the full glory of her tone and range, we could still relish her phrasing, notably on the bittersweet A Beautiful Friendship, which also gave hints of her ingenuity and astuteness in embellishing a melody. On this basis, she’d be frightening when fully well.
A testament to her status is that she brought a septet all the way to Australia: four horns, piano, bass and drums. It was fascinating, though, to hear this take on jazz the night after the Bill Frisell Trio. Where the latter was all about collective creativity while still having effortless precision, Joy’s band put a premium on being well-drilled.
That is not intended as a criticism, as to play such challenging and inventive arrangements (which I believe come from within the band, but with Joy unable to tell us, I can’t be sure) so consummately demands exemplary musicianship. Curiously, many of the new wave of exceptional jazz singers draw heavily on pre-1960s jazz (as Wynton Marsalis has prescribed for decades), rather than revitalising the idiom, which is what their idols did.
As good as trumpeter Jason Charos, tenor saxophonist Kendrick McCallister and alto saxophonist David Mason were, trombonist Donovan Austin stood out, starting his solo on A Beautiful Friendship with a soft, marshmallow-sweet sound, and using it to play with a 1930s mellifluousness. Bassist Paul Sikivie, drummer Evan Sherman and especially the pianist Connor Rohrer, meanwhile, made for a propulsive engine room.
Given Joy’s constraints, I actually derived more pleasure from the opening set by local singer Kristin Berardi and bassist Sam Anning. With Berardi now based in Switzerland, they hadn’t played together for some time, and, presumably at short notice, found themselves obliged to perform for an hour rather than 30 minutes to flesh out the event.
It’s a brave format for both parties, with no chord instrument or drummer providing sonic shelter, and yet I’ve never heard either sound better – and Berardi’s as good a singer and Anning as good a bassist as Australia’s produced. The songs they played, whether originals or standards, were actually enhanced by being stripped down in this fashion. The pair improvised and interacted with unbounded flair, good humour and – the sacred element missing from too much jazz – passion.