"Excellent"
Sydney Festival: Myths, histories and projections
At this year's Sydney Festival the mood was more contemporary than in recent years with the best work of the handful of shows I saw certainly coming from Australians: Sandy Evans' jazz oratorio Testimony, with the Australian Art Orchestra and a long line-up of great vocalists, and Kate Champion's Same same But Different, a complex multimedia, dance theatre work. Both works were joint initiatives of the Sydney and Melbourne Festivals (Testimony is also supported by the Sydney Opera House), so they will live again with welcome room to move and improve and impress larger audiences.
Testimony: The Legend of Charlie Parker
Jazz has rarely found a home in Australia's international arts festivals. Concerts are one thing, but an outright celebration of jazz is something else, and that's what Testimony is. First it is a response to the work of the jazz great, Charlie Parker, by an American poet, Yusef Komunyakaa, in 14 sonnets arranged or (mostly) musically composed by Sydney saxophonist Sandy Evans, or spoken by Bobby C. Secondly, it is implicitly a tribute to Australian jazz, to the musicians of the always impressive Australian Art Orchestra (under the direction of Paul Grabwosky) and in turn the many outfits with which they play, to the many vocalists who perform in Testimony, and not least to Evans herself. She treats Komunyakaa's words with respect and verve and has created some outstanding compositions. The CD is eagerly awaited.
The challenge in theatricalising what was originally a work for radio is to not diminish attention to the words and music. Director Nigel Jamieson, designer Dan Potra and video artist Andrew Savage achieve this by making the orchestra the visual centre of the action. A small ensemble of shifting dimensions (but always with piano, bass and drums) occupies the forestage and is frequently joined by vocalists. Meanwhile, the orchestra is encased in several storeys of scaffolding with full-scale screens front and back (the forward one is raised and lowered). Members of the orchestra can be spotlit. The orchestra can be disappeared or silhouetted. Images appear in front of them and behind, as if peering through. They range from the face of the narrator, to big city scapes, buses and cabs moving dreamily towards us, 50s style decorative patternings, maps, trains and chain gangs. A repeated, poignant slo-mo, kaleidoscopic shot of Parker playing as his life goes to pieces ('He was naked...') is paralleled by the orchestra and violinist John Rodgers' performing a dark, modernist fragmentation, followed by a divine, sustained lament.
The constructivist impulse of the staging means that the simple set is constantly transformed, lighting and projections altering the depth of field, evoking movement (a camera tracks up the Chrysler Building; huge industrial wheels turn), providing visual motifs corresponding to musical and poetic images. At times there's a superfluity of images, too literal, too much video clip business when the music is already hard at work, and too many visual styles relieved only by returning to key images.
Komunyakaa's poems comprise fragments of a life (including the death of Parker's daughter, his temporary recuperation from heroin addiction), impressions ('always on the move on some no-man's land'), character ('enough irony to break the devil's heart'), desires (his favorite food, chicken) and the poet's own witty be-bop-inspired litanies, ideal material for Evans. The poems are served best when they become the lyrics for Evans' compositions. Testimony does not in fact narrate Parker's life and only falters when it slips in that direction, or promises to and can't. It's a pity that on opening night the song lyrics weren't always audible in the awkward sound mix and, worse, that they hadn't been reproduced in the printed program.
There were too many high points, too many excellent performances to single out here save to mention that some of the most eccentric moments were the most celebratory: Jackie Orzacksy singing and playing electric bass on Abel & Cain and the indefatigable Joe 'EBe-bop' Lane scatting on Barrow Street and Moose the Mooch. The blend of small, taut ensembles and a magnificent, burnished big band sound, the classiness and confidence of the 11 vocalists (8 of them women) and the occasional bursts of raw but always coherent and plangent sax and trombone, made for one of the most memorable festival shows in Sydney for a very long time.
'Take a bow Christopher Williams of (ABC) Audio Arts,' wrote John Shand opening his review for the Sydney Morning Herald (Jan 18). Sad to say, Soundstage, the program for which the innovative producer Williams originally conceived and commissioned Testimony, is no more, a victim in 2001 of 'reform' at the ABC that has greatly reduced the possibility of creating such large-scale, cross-artform, stereophonic art works.
- RealTime, Keith Gallasch
