Review: Mace Francis Orchestra at Ellington Jazz Club

Mace Francis Orchestra at Ellington Jazz Club
Saturday, April 13, 2024

Mace Francis is a force to be reckoned with in the Perth jazz scene. A composer, arranger, conductor, band leader, teacher, musician, festival director, Churchill Fellow, and mentor, his thirteen-piece jazz ensemble, Mace Francis Orchestra (MFO for short), turns twenty next year. In that time, they have released ten albums of original music. The latest, No Postcode, was recorded in December 2022 at Loop Studios and launched last Saturday night at the Ellington.

And what a gig it was. Most people associate jazz orchestras with marching bands and high school award ceremonies, not the MFO. There’s no doubt they could do these things, but they would more likely leave the guests agape and see some running for the exits. These guys come from a much more sophisticated and somewhat darker place. They know all about raw power, high energy, and how to blast your socks off. They have the kind of intensity that takes no prisoners, knows few boundaries, and leaves you utterly exhilarated.

The music of No Postcode is strongly filmic, though it is left up to the listener to conjure the specific visuals. Francis’ titles point the way, but the music takes you there. From one tune to the next, your mind’s eye is flooded with haunted, barren (but not) landscapes, the brooding streets of a film noir romance, and a hot, harried city. Playing at full tilt, the band is very much like the multiplicity of conflicting intentions you find in a jostling metropolis—like the streets of New York or Gotham City at high noon.

MFO is a horn-heavy band—four saxes, three trombones, and three trumpets—underpinned by drums, bass, and electric guitar. Standing in front of the stage, Francis, a diminutive figure in the crowded room, conducts. Although he is himself a horn player and pianist, he doesn’t play on either the album or in concert; he just composes and directs. As the album’s recording engineer and mixer, Kieran Kenderessy, put it, ‘the band are his fingers, their instruments his notes’. This requires a degree of faith that, even on their partially improvised solos, the players will remain true to the essence of his music. Francis' faith is well placed; the band stick with him every inch of the way.

Many of the players have been with the MFO since the very beginning, and the featured solos were spread widely among them. Not everyone got a solo, but by the end of the night, a majority probably did. It is a further sign of Francis standing within the jazz community that some of these players—notably Matt Smith and Dan Garner—are highly regarded band leaders in their own right. Only one player at the launch did not appear on the album: saxophonist Gemma Farrell, filling in for Jayden Blockley, now in Melbourne.

All six tracks from the album were played at the Ellington, but the concert was completed with four other pieces from earlier recordings.

Strategically, the show opened with Corio Landscape, an older tune in which Francis explored the ‘barren’ landscape of his childhood in outback Victoria. Beginning with a full blast of horns, it took you across some prickly and fractious terrain, stubbing your toes along the way on a few jagged rocks. To complete the picture, guitarist Garner provided some wild electric lead. The strategic point was to lay the groundwork for its sequel, Empty Landscape, the newest piece on the new album that popped up in the second half of the show.

They followed this with An Ocean Seen, the first highlighted track from No Postcode. Stressing the restless power of the multiple horns, it featured solos by three of the MFO’s remaining five founding members.

Francis then invited singer Lucy Iffla onto the stage, and they took a diversion into some jazz 'standards’ from the Love Songs I Love album. Although well-known numbers, these arrangements were anything but standard.

Despite the title, Cole Porter’s Get Out of Town has never before sounded this menacing, the horns more like a bank of machine guns than the plaintive pleas of a jilted woman.

Although Francis and Iffla have released an album of non-MFO material, Isolation Emancipation, Sarah Ramsay was the featured singer on the Love Songs recording. Even so, Iffla proved herself to be more than a match for the material. Sparring effortlessly with the horns, even then she held more in reserve. The deep, round notes in her voice seemed to resonate up from beneath the floor. There was nothing shrill or strained in her delivery. As though she had an overdrive pedal she could flick on when needed, she blasted along with the best of the trumpets, another instrument in the band, not a vocalist backed by them.

As a further sign of her range, on the Rogers and Hart My Romance that came next, she moved into gentler, more articulate territory. Expressive, almost traditionally jazz in her delivery, she sang from deep in her heart. But of course, Francis couldn’t leave it there. The horns again delivered his preferred controlled chaos. This was no wistful, broken-hearted romance, more of a Scandi noir affair that saw both partners frazzled.

To loud applause, Iffla left the stage, and the MFO rounded out the first set with SMS, another track from the new album. This is not the ‘Short Message Service’ of texting fame but an abbreviation of the tune’s shape: Solo-Melody-Solo, the searing solos trumpeted in turn by Matt Smith and Ricki Mallet.

You’d think, with such bombastic music, that Francis was a dark and difficult man. Far from it. He is as down to earth as they come, with an impish, playful sense of humour. His intros, if not making the audience laugh outright, saw them grinning gleefully. During the break, he buzzed through the room, giving out raffle tickets for his habitual door prize. As he quipped, in twenty years, he’s spent, in total, no more than twenty dollars on prizes. On Saturday, these included the self-help book How to Deal with People You Hate, a (trooly rooly) ‘signed’ Inspector Clouseau publicity shot, and, in keeping with the cost-of-living crisis, a prohibitively expensive avocado.

The second set was dominated by music from the new album: Squint Your Eyes, featuring solos by Garner and Ben Collins (alto sax), Sleepy Duke (not after the club’s namesake but Francis’ French bulldog, who snored under his desk while he composed it), the aforementioned Empty Landscape, and the title track No Postcode.

Many of these pieces were commissioned by individuals and esteemed jazz bodies, the most notable being the eponymous tune. Composed on request by Francis’ close mate, the late, great West Australian sound engineer, Victor O’Connor, No Postcode was first performed as intended at O’Connor’s wake. With echoes of Frank Zappa’s Grand Wazoo, another great jazz-horn album, it was more a celebration of the chaos of life than an elegy, and on Saturday, it featured solos by Gemma Farrell, Garner, and drummer Greg Brenton. Garner’s atmospheric guitar, in particular, was stupendous.

For No Postcode, Francis wanted to try new things and push further than he had on the previous MFO albums. He says the ideas here are more fully realised and sharply focused. The album was recorded with the entire band in the studio over three days. This may seem tight, but fully rehearsed, it actually allowed the MFO more studio time than their previous recordings. This helped greatly. After the recording sessions, Francis and Kenderessy spent some months emailing files back and forth, refining the mix, and eking out the nuances. As such, the album reflects the very best sound the band can get live. It is a testament to their virtuosity that Saturday’s launch was pretty much a carbon copy of the recording.

Francis is very happy with the album, as he should be. It is a wild and invigorating record that sits well in both the Bob Brookmeyer and Thad Jones tradition of late twentieth-century orchestral jazz (with a touch of Zappa thrown in for Victor) and the Ed Partyka twenty-first-century variation.

There are no immediate plans for other MFO shows, though there are some in the pipeline for later this year. In the meantime, you can pick up a copy of No Postcode through Bandcamp, stream it on the usual services, or hear it and the other Mace Francis recordings through his website, macefrancis.com.

If you love high quality, wild contemporary music that conjures vivid filmic images, it is well worth your time.

IAN LILBURNE

Photos by Alan Holbrook