"Jazz's Great Passion"
Jazz CD of the week – five stars
The subtitle is Inspired by JS Bach's St Matthew Passion. The five composers (including himself) that director Paul Grabowsky has commissioned use thematic material from the Matthew Passion. From there on it might be better to expunge Bach from your mind. This is modern music, brilliantly written and played. Grabowsky's piece, based on the opening of the Passion (in which Christ carries the cross against a backdrop of yells and cries), is the most fragmented, wild and dissonant. It also has some of the most calm and limpid passages. It is an engrossing series of episodes, or it becomes so after a second or third hearing.
Violinist John Rodgers's finale is also wild, metrically ingenious, and probably a bit of a test for some, but pieces by Alister Spence and Doug De Vries are instantly accessible. Somewhere between these lies drummer Niko Schauble's contribution.
There is very little one can say in this space about such a detailed, often beautiful, sometimes exciting, occasionally jarring intergration of orchestral wirting and improvisation, except that it is a showcase of Australian musical talent which it would be very hard to equal. That aside, it is utterly absorbing listening. I can't say that I liked the chorales that Grabowsky has written, but Christine Sullivan sings them very well. For you, they may be the high points. Apart from Rodgers, who had an outstanding classical career before he got involved in all this stuff, the soloists are among the best in Australian contemporary jazz.
- The Sydney Morning Herald (John Clare), 26.07.1999
