Saltwater, Sugar

The Australian Art Orchestra, alongside guests Ngaiire and Joelistics premier Saltwater, Sugar, an ambitious new work of scale by AAO Artistic Director and composer Aaron Choulai. Performed in English, Motu and Tok Pisin, the piece moves between spoken dialogue, sung melodies and adventurous improvising from some of Australia’s most important instrumental artists today, bringing the AAO back to its original conception as a large ensemble.

A love story set on a sugar cane plantation, Saltwater, Sugar touches on the interconnectedness of Chinese, Papua New Guinean and Indigenous people during the time of the Gold Rush and the Blackbirding slave trade in Australia.

A scored fictional story that draws on historical events, this work is set in the sound world of Duke Ellington, through the distinct voice of the Australian Art Orchestra.

Saltwater, Sugar is commissioned by Bunjil Place in partnership with the Melbourne International Jazz Festival.

Aaron Choulai speaks about the work:

"There's a specific reason I've chosen Duke Ellington's music as a cultural reference that sits at the centre of Saltwater Sugar.

In his time, Black American music was seen as 'primitive', something instinctive rather than considered. Ellington's whole career pushed against that. Works like Black, Brown and Beige and the Far East Suite show a masterful command of compositional technique and artistic conception, placing Black artistic aesthetics at the highest level of the art form.

Pacific music has worn a similar stereotype. Celebrated within a specific context, but usually as something raw or instinctive rather than as art made with intention and craft. That's the connection I'm drawing on. I want Pacific Black identity understood with the same seriousness Ellington brought to his own work.

Although not entirely the same history, the struggle to establish a contemporary identity for colonised and enslaved communities across the Atlantic and Pacific slave trades sits closer together than apart.

Saltwater Sugar is a scored narrative that tells a love story set on a sugar cane plantation in Far North Queensland. The nod to Duke in the music carries that lineage forward, from one ocean's history to another, for the Black and Brown audiences who'll hear themselves in it."