Review: ‘This is Jazz!’ at The Ellington Jazz Club

This is Jazz! Coltrane, Ellington, Miles & more at The Ellington Jazz Club
ft. Jamie Oehlers, Harry Mitchell, Alistair Peel, Daniel Susnjar
Friday, August 25, 2023

Friday at The Ellington saw two sensational sax shows. The first was Jamie Oehlers and his all-star quartet running through a rep of American classics by the greatest of the great jazz composers. As well as those listed in the show’s rather long title, there were tunes by Sonny Rollins, Cedar Walton, Kenny Kirkland, Dizzy Gillespie, Ornette Coleman, Australian Paul Grabowsky (the only non-American) and the songwriting duo Harburgh|Arland. Oehlers’ idiosyncratic take on their most famous song, a candidate for the most famous standard in the classic American songbook, Over The Rainbow, was one of the show’s many highlights.

Perth-born Oehlers has been staggering audiences around the world for three decades with his mastery of the tenor sax. That’s not bad going for, as he quipped in one of his intros, a twenty-nine-year-old. Graduating from WAAPA in 1990, where he now teaches, he first came to prominence with performances at The Greenwich jazz club downstairs at The Maj, the Jazz Dive dance parties in Fremantle and in collaboration with Steve Tallis.

Since then he has established himself among the world’s pre-eminent saxophonists. In 2003 he won the World Saxophone Competition at the Montreux Jazz Festival and at the 2007 Bell Awards was named Australian Jazz Musician of the Year. He has released some dozen albums, many of them award-winners, and performed with jazz greats including Charlie Haden, Reuben Rogers, Robert Hurst, Ari Hoenig and Aaron Goldberg.

Last Friday he performed with his preferred quartet, from left to right, Harry Mitchell on grand, Alistair Peel on double bass, and Danny Susnjar on drums.

They dove straight in the deep end with John Coltrane’s Lottie’s Lament. We’re talking hard core, hard bop/free jazz here, terrain they’d traverse time and again as the show unfolded. In its modal, angularity, Oehlers’ opening solo edged on A Love Supreme and set the standard for the night. Shepherding the ensemble through a quick lap of solos—piano, bass and drums—he punctuating each with his signature short sax sequences or the odd lines from the full band. Air-tight and exuberant, it made the very full house fully aware that they were in for a night of serious playing.

Lottie was followed by Kenny Kirkland’s beautiful ballad, Dienda. Starting soft and sultry, it wasn’t long before Oehlers guided the band into darker waters. His opening solo was shot through with sensuality. The bass and piano solos that followed pulled it back a notch only for the interluding sax breaks to wind it up again. The tension built steadily throughout to a slow and intense climax.

“Jazz is all about walking the tightrope”, Oehlers opined at the end of this tune. “The risk factor is what drew me to this music.” To prove his point, he abandoned the set list and challenged his band’s versatility by breaking into Dizzy Gillespie’s Con Alma, another hard bop workout.

This tune enabled Susnjar to shine. He ran across his kit in a wave of toms, snare and cymbals, sometimes bare-handed, at others swapping sticks mid-roll to subtly modulate the timbre. He loved every second of it, his face breaking into a grimace of glee at each new twist.

Oehlers introduced the next tune as one we’d all know then broke into an unaccompanied improvised solo in the style of Sonny Rollins that was anything but familiar. He ripped modally through a plethora of inspired runs and trills before slowing down and stating the unmistakable opening bars of the Harburgh/Arlen masterpiece. Throughout the rest of the tune, each player in turn took off on a featured flight-of-fancy before grounding themselves back in Over the Rainbow’s primary melodies. Coltrane and Miles would have been impressed.

Having given us a taste of Rollins, the great improviser, the quartet rounded out the first set with a rendition of his classic Pent-up House. By this time they had completely settled into their groove and were clearly having a ball. The pure joy that sparkled on Oehlers’ and Susnjar’s faces as they sparred and jived off each was an utter delight.

Throughout the show, whenever one of the others was soloing, Oehlers would discretely move off stage. Apart from the odd blast on his 1938 Selma balanced-action tenor sax, the same make and model Coltrane played throughout much of his career, he’d hang quietly in the ‘wings’. It was deft touch of respect and humility that added a warm, human quality to the performance.

The second set began with a slower tune by Oz band leader and composer, Paul Grabowsky’s, best known to those of a certain vintage as the musical sidekick on the Steve Vizard (TV) Show. This very mellow and fluid number added some gravitas to the evening. Oehlers has often performed with Grabowsky and used to tease him about the nickname Vizard’s coined for him, ‘The Duke’. It was an apt reminder in a venue named after the greatest jazz Duke of them all.

To emphasise the connection, after a brisk run through the bebop brilliance of Coltrane’s Blues for You, they played Ellington’s Sophisticated Lady. Beginning again with unaccompanied sax, this time Oehlers sketched in the famous melody by sprinting through its many component parts before handing the baton onto Alistair Peel who carried the bulk of the tune on his lush bass. His was not a walk so much as a fast trot underpinned by Susnjar’s subtle brush-strokes and punctuated by Mitchell’s well-put chords. A delicate, complex and unique rendition.

In his intro to the next tune, hard-bop pianist Cedar Walton’s lyrical Firm Roots, Oehlers sketched in a moment of his own sax education.

As a young player he had the good fortune to be mentored by the great Australian saxophonist Dale Barlow. A kick-ass teacher, as Oehlers described him, Barlow knew exactly where the gaps in Oehlers’ playing lay. Whenever they performed together, he’d guide the music into those spaces. There’s no better lesson than to be thrown into your own black holes and left alone to climb out.

In the 80s, Barlow performed impromptu with Walton at Ronnie Scott’s in London and was subsequently invited to feature on the album Bluesville Time, from which Firm Roots derived. He then went on to join Walton’s New York-based quartet.

To close out the night, Oehlers took us back to the vast landscape on which we began, free-jazz, with Ornette Coleman’s Ramblin’. This dynamic tune sped up and slowed down, soared sweetly before, in true Coleman style, tearing itself apart on a descent into dissonance. If it hadn’t already, the curtain was finally rent from top to bottom.

At the end of the tune, the room exploded in a final round of resounding applause, a thoroughly deserved response to Jamie Oehlers and his brilliant band.

IAN LILBURNE

Photos by Alan Holbrook