Review: Jamie Oehlers at The Ellington Jazz Club
Jamie Oehlers at The Ellington Jazz Club
Tuesday, March 11, 2025
Jamie Oehlers presents a handful of gigs every year at The Ellington under his own name and many more as a featured soloist for other bandleaders and singers. In the main, his eponymous performances focus on the jazz legends—Coltrane, Davis and Coleman. Delivered within an ensemble of Perth’s finest players, these are always stunning shows, which is what you’d expect from one of the world’s best sax players (Perth is so lucky that he chooses to live here—he could take his pick of cities).
Occasionally, he puts on a night of his own compositions. When he goes down this path, the performance is on an even higher plane. Tuesday he delivered just such a show in a quintet with, from left to right, Harry Mitchell (piano), Zac Grafton (bass), Ricky Malet (trumpet) and Danny Susnjar (drums). It was a rare and special night, one to savour.
Over two fifty-minute sets, the ensemble wound their way through nine cutting-edge tunes—eight Oehlers originals and one, Goodbye Lullaby, by his good mate and collaborator, the trumpet player Paul Williamson. Oehlers’ tunes were a combination of recent compositions, stretching back to late 2023, and a selection from his third album, Assemblers.
There were but four pieces in the first set, averaging twelve minutes, and three long and two short in the second. Although every note felt like it had always been there, as though they were sticking strictly to the chart, it was a surprise to learn that they were ‘stretching it out a bit’ and improvising.
Each tune was a journey. Usually beginning quietly or slowly—a flourish of brushes on Zildjian cymbals, a bass pulse, or the simple statement of the main theme—from there they built in intensity and pace, weaving an ever-more intricate tapestry of sound. Oehlers and Malet’s horns harmonised, doubled, counterpointed, and broke off into searing extended solos.
Mitchell’s piano provided an elliptical harmonic underpinning broken by adventurous and esoteric features. Grafton only soloed once, 2024’s Refractions, but throughout he worked furiously to hold the percussion and horns together, bridging them with his pulsating runs, almost chord-like configurations, and occasional bowing, while the irrepressible Susnjar flew across the kit with his signature manic energy, creating a complexity of multi-rhythmic patterns that were bewildering to behold and hear. A woman up the front was so drawn into his drumming that she swayed egregiously in her chair whenever he’d solo.
Oehlers takes inspiration for his compositions from a range of sources. Sometimes it’s a state of mind, such as the spiritual paralysis of the ever-ascending Spiralysis, which opened the show; the realisation that everything is finite in the sublime and contemplative with Standing Still, which came next; or the fact that we are lucky to live in a society where free speech is tolerated with Protest, a tune from 2006 that seems to remain forever relevant.
Sometimes he writes in response to a film: his anti-rom-com theme track, You Lost Me At Hello, where Oehlers soared into Charlie Parker mode, pushing his sax to the screeching peak, and Mitchell delivered a wonderfully haphazard solo; or the portrait inspired by a British gangster movie, Bruiser—Oehlers woke the morning after seeing it with the melody line running through his head.
Every solo was sensational, especially Oehlers’, but there were no weak links. Oehlers and Malet work brilliantly together, like peas in a pod. At the end of each feature, the musician would humbly acknowledge the audience’s applause with a gentle smile or simple nod.
After the short, lyrical Goodbye Lullaby, the show closed with Hats in the Cat, another fine tune from the Assemblers album. Built around a steady pulsing bass that was mirrored in the piano’s pumping chords, this short piece contained concise but soaring solos by Oehlers, Malet, and Mitchell, and ended with a bowed bass as the horns harmonised the main melody. Another great composition.
There is nothing quite like watching improvised jazz coming together on stage in front of you. The immediacy of inspiration when a group of players fire off each other is pure magic and can go beyond what even they might expect, the whole greater than the sum of its parts. It is a privilege for an audience to be drawn into such a cauldron of creativity and a pity that Jamie Oehlers show at the Ellington Tuesday night was not recorded. It would make a sensational live album, a worthy testament to a truly great gig.
IAN LILBURNE
