Past Programs
Classical - 2008
Harold Lopez Nussa (First Broadcast on 26/3/2008)
29/09/2008
The excellent solo piano CD, Sobre et Atelier, is the CD Cuban musician Harold Lopez Nussa recorded as part of the prize for winning the Montreux Jazz Solo Piano Competition in 2005.
The 24-year-old musician comes from a musical family - his mother is a piano teacher, his father and brother are renowned jazz percussionists, and his uncle, Hernán, is one of Cuba’s finest pianists. Harold took up the piano at the age of 8 and studied classical music for 13 years. Although Beethoven and Chopin marked him, Cuban pianists like Chucho Valdes and Emiliano Salvador became essential since Harold took up jazz. Harold demonstrates his technical skill and invention throughout the CD, which includes compositions by Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius, Chucho Valdes, Ernesto Lecuona and Harold himself.
Einaudi/Sissoko (First Broadcast on 12/6/06)
09/09/2008
Diario Mali is the meeting place of Italian classical/pop crossover minimalist composer/pianist Ludovico Einaudi and Malian kora virtuoso Ballaké Sissoko.
It’s a CD of 10 co-composed tracks that pair the grand instruments of Western and West African classical musical styles, mostly in Manding tonality except for a semi-blues and a semi-boogie, on the whole leaning to the quiet side.
Debasis Chakroborty and Sam Evans
25/08/2008
Charukeshi is the name of a beautiful CD on Hindustani Classical Music played by Australian Tabla player Sam Evans and Debasis Chakroborty, a fine player of the Indian Classical Guitar - a modified archtop guitar played with a slide.
Debasis began learning guitar from his father in early childhood and later became a disciple of Pandit Brij Bhushan Kabra, the man who did much to popularise the slide guitar in Hindustani Classical music. Sam Evans developed a passion for world percussion in early childhood and travelled and studied in Asia, Europe and Africa from the age of 19 until his studies focussed on Indian Tabla. Over the last decade he has divided his time between Australia and India and has been accepted as a student of the world renowned tabla player, Pandit Anindo Chatterjee.
Sam and Debasis will be performing in Australia at the Darebin Music Feast, Saturday 13th September at the Uniting Church Hall, 251 High Street, Northcote, and at Music in the Round at Monash University, Sunday 21st September in the Robert Blackwood Hall.
Lakshmi Shankar
20/08/2008
When Lakshmi Shankar gave up dancing with Uday Shankar’s famed dance troupe because of ill health, it was music’s gain as she applied her dancer’s grace to singing.
Born in Jamshedpur, India, in 1926, Lakshmiji studied Carnatic and Hindustani music in her youth, but intended to be a dancer of Bharat Natyam, the classical dance form rooted stylistically and historically in the temples of south India. In Uday Shankar’s troupe, she met and married Uday’s brother, Raju Shankar, who is also Ravi Shankar’s brother (Lakshmi studied music with Ravi). On Lakshmi’s latest CD, Dancing in the Light, the accompaniment is simple but effective - Pt. Swapan Chaudhuri on tabla and Pt. Ramesh Mishra on Sarangi as she sings a khyal, two thumris (light classical songs) and two of her beloved devotional songs (bhajans) written by Mirabai, the writer of hundreds of songs to her beloved Lord Krishna in the 16th century.
Roberto Aussel plays Atahualpa Yupanqui
18/08/2008
With characteristic subtleness of phrase and use of silence, guitarist Roberto Aussel brings to life the music of fellow Argentinean Atahualpa Yupanqui on the 100th anniversary of this champion of folk music’s birth.
Born in 1954 in La Plata, Roberto began studying classical guitar from the age of 7 and went on to win first prizes at some of the world’s most prestigious competitions. He is known for his gift of being able to highlight a composer’s intention by his delicacy of phrase, across a range of diverse composers. He heard Atahualpa Yupanqui in his childhood and his music especially touched him. In Atahualpa’s music, Roberto heard the whistling of the wind, the silence between the mountains and the understanding of birdsong, his guitar vibrating as it related the suffering of the country folk, and rejoiced when performing a malambo from the Argentine Pampas. La Paloma Enamorada (The Dove in Love) is Roberto’s tribute to the music of a man which has raised such a profound feeling in him for many years.
Aruna Sairam
11/08/2008
On her CD Divine Inspiration, frill-free, wide-ranged and distinctively-toned popular Carnatic singer Aruna Sairam explores the songs of 9 poets from different eras and regions in India, all belonging to the Bhakti movement.
The songsters’ different backgrounds give the album lots of variation in language, structure, mood and texture but, although they speak in many tongues, they unite in their denunciations of paying heed to the distinctions of caste, creed, gender and narrow-minded rituals of worship. Aruna is adept at singing the language of love, floating above a pleasing churn of South Indian percussion and violin.
CD of the Week - Calcutta Express Band
23/06/2008
The Calcutta Express Band is the brainchild of Australian guitarist Guy Strazz who, with his 7-string East-West guitar, plays a mixture of Bengali folk, Hindustani Classical and Afro-Brazilian styles with two percussionists and santoor player Sandip Chatterjee.
Guy Strazz (formerly Strazzullo) received one of the Arts Music Fellowships from the Australia Council for the Arts in 2001. An accomplished jazz player with a strong interest in intercultural music, he went to Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) in 2004 at Sandip’s invitation where he recorded the bulk of this CD with him and ‘young lion’ tabla player Biplab Bhattacharya and multi-percussionist Somnath Roy.
CD of the Week - Oregon
02/06/2008
On 1000 Kilometers, Oregon continue to explore the fusion between jazz, chamber music and music from around the world, still fresh after 37 years of being together as a group.
Sprinkled with freely improvised cuts, the pieces are mainly composed by Ralph Towner and are mostly new. Oregon are a group whose early recordings have stood the test of time and have shown them to be way ahead of the pack in blending composition and improvisation and genres. They are also adept at integrating the strong musical personalities of their members, guitarist/pianist Towner, multi-reed man Paul McCandless, bassist Glen Moore and their only member who hasn’t been with them since their inception - Drummer Mark Walker, who’s at least 15 years younger than any other member of the group. The album is named after and dedicated to their late, beloved European promoter, Thomas Stöwsand, whose tours sometimes necessitated a drive of over 1000 kilometers between venues, a distance that came to be called, with a bit of light-hearted grumbling, a ‘Stöwsand’ in the band’s parlance.
CD of the Week - Sambasunda
26/05/2008
The Sunda Music is an overview of the music of SambaSunda, the 16 or so strong innovative Bandung, Java-based group who mix Javanese and Balinese gamelan with Jaipong, Middle Eastern music and Latin grooves.
It’s a compilation of 5 of their albums, each with its own flavour. SambaSunda is the brainchild of multi-instrumentalist Ismat Ruchimat whose work with a non-traditional orchestra in Norway expanded his vision to the potential of a bamboo gamelan orchestra.
Uri Caine
19/05/2008
Uri Caine’s CD, The Classical Variations, is a collection of 20 of the Philadelphia-born pianist’s edgy jazz interpretations of Mahler, Beethoven, Schumann, Mozart and Wagner, including 10 previously unreleased takes on Bach.
In Uri’s world, he improvises on an early piano on Beethoven pieces, plays Bach as Fats Waller or John Coltrane would, and gets a gospel belter to sing Mahler. The result is exciting music that defies identification in time or place.
CD of the Week - Raphael Imbert
19/05/2008
On Bach/Coltrane, French saxophonist, composer and student of sacred music Raphael Imbert explores the connections between the spiritual music of Johann Sebastian Bach and John Coltrane, playing with a church organist and a string quartet.
Working on his premise that Coltrane is the only true mystic in the history of jazz, Raphael improvises on some of his lesser known compositions - Crescent, Song of Praise, The Father, The Son and the Holy Ghost and Reverend King, and also on Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. Recorded in a church with a bassist, percussionist, counter tenor Gérard Lesne, the Quatuor Manfred String Quartet and organist André Rossi, it ranges from the quietly devotional to the ecstatically exuberant.
Harold Lopez Nussa
26/03/2008
The excellent solo piano CD, Sobre et Atelier, is the CD Cuban musician Harold Lopez Nussa recorded as part of the prize for winning the Montreux Jazz Solo Piano Competition in 2005.
The 24-year-old musician comes from a musical family - his mother is a piano teacher, his father and brother are renowned jazz percussionists, and his uncle, Hernán, is one of Cuba’s finest pianists. Harold took up the piano at the age of 8 and studied classical music for 13 years. Although Beethoven and Chopin marked him, Cuban pianists like Chucho Valdes and Emiliano Salvador became essential since Harold took up jazz. Harold demonstrates his technical skill and invention throughout the CD, which includes compositions by Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius, Chucho Valdes, Ernesto Lecuona and Harold himself.
