"Tribute to a genius"
What an extraordinary performance. The Festival Centre celebrated its 30th anniversary with a show which truly belongs on the world stage. Merging hi-tech video projection and animation with solid sets, live music and singing, pre-recorded narration and soundbites, Testimony pays tribute to the musical genius and tragic demise of jazz saxophonist, Charlie "Bird" Parker in breathtaking original aural and visual style.
Most astonishing was how this fusion of technology and musicianship must have been timed to the last second, yet always kept the spontaneous, improvised feel essential to the spirit of jazz.
Under the direction of Nigel Jamieson, it just seemed to come together like magic. A giant, semi-transparent film screen depicting a New York tenement dropped to reveal 15 members of the Australian Art Orchestra sitting, silhouetted in a three-tier scaffold of the building's framework. From there, individuals made their way up and down a fire escape to solo on the "rooftop".
Front of stage, Paul Grabowsky spent the night with his back to the audience, either frenetically leading his quartet on piano or conducting with equally expressive energy.
Composer Sandy Evans has seamlessly melded Parker's tunes and poet Yusef Komunyakka's 14 sonnets about Parker's life into her own sweeping landscape of jazz styles.
The screen rose again to project actor Bobby C narrating the Bird story from a personal perspective, while individual players were illuminated in windows. Projected images - alternating between screens in front of and behind the orchestra - became stars in their own right. Cityscapes gave way to New York cabs, spinning record labels and rolling railway tracks for the clickety-clack rhythm of A Day Like Today, with wonderful vocal scats by Dan Barnett. At other times, the screens became a kaleidoscope of coloured geometric patterns for Lily Dior's feisty Cuban-flavoured Black Cockatoo or echoed Michele Morgan's abstract, almost operatic vocal gymnastics on A Soft Touch for Strings, with intertwining squiggles.
However, the show stealer was Tina Harrod's sultry, Southern Abel and Cain, with its full-bodied gospel backing vocals.
The second half followed Parker's path of self-destruction, from drug abuse in Addie's Boy to the forlorn trumpet bursts which punctuate Parker's telegram to his wife following the death of their daughter.
Less successful was wheelchair-bound veteran Joe Lane's spoken introduction to Moose the Mooche, although his scatting duet with double bass more than compensated.
Like the spirit of Bird himself, Testimony left the audience soaring the musical heavens.
- The Advertiser (Patrick McDonald), 10.06.2003
