18/8/24 - 4 Pieces

There’s an attitude which is frowned upon in Australia, where tall poppy syndrome is the norm. I’m talking about when people say “hey, look at this awesome thing I’ve done.” Which is essentially what I’m about to do. A bit over a month ago I took my band Underwards down to Canberra to record the 4 pieces I had written for us as part of my PhD. The School of Music at ANU has an awesome studio, and because the work is research, I can get my music recorded and mixed for free. Perks! We recorded them over 2 half-day sessions and played a gig at Smith’s Alternative in between. It went well overall and we got a great crowd at Smith’s – most seats were full on a Tuesday night for an out-of-town band and most faces in the crowd were unfamiliar. This week I was down in Canberra again, and I spent a day in the studio with Sophie Edwards and then Craig Greening working on edits of the recordings. It’s always fascinating observing the differences between your perceptions of a performance on the day and then hearing the music down the track through headphones or studio speakers, hearing the unedited audio and then the edited, and then down the track the mix and the master will be different again.

A couple of days after the edits, I listened to the tracks again. This is where the “I’m awesome” bit comes in. I write a good tune. I’ll even go so far as to say I think my improvisations have improved too. Of course I can’t take all the credit though because the musicians in my band are fantastic and bring their personalities into the music, giving it great energy and character. And also, Country has contributed in a big way, because the making of these pieces involved Country, in the physical sense at the times when I was there in one of my 3 spots and musical ideas formed in my mind because of the interactions, but also because of Country in my mind when the music was being created and Country in my mind when I play and hear the music. The music, in a way, IS Country, as well as being part of me. So, listening back to them, I really like how they turned out, and they take me back to Country.

“Not Yet” was the first one to be written. Last year Underwards went on tour. In the one weekend we played at the Hydro Majestic in the Blue Mountains, Orange Winter Jazz Festival, and Kandos. Kandos is in Dabee Country, one of the areas in focus in my PhD. Underwards had already recorded a collection of pieces about Dabee Country before I began the PhD, so it was extra special to play there. I went out there a couple of weeks before the gig to plan a piece that Underwards would perform with Uncle Peter Swain, a Dabee elder I’d had a bit to do with from the previous Dabee Country composing project. He and I sorted out how a performance with him narrating his poem Heartbeat and playing didge, and Underwards accompanying him, would work. Then we went to the pub and had a trumpet and didge jam. While I was out there (and it was only for the day – the previous day I’d gone to my Bulgamatta spot and then stayed the night in Katoomba to make the trip to Kandos shorter the next day) I decided I definitely needed to drive out to Ganguddy before the drive home. So it was only a short visit. I went up to the Pagoda Lookout (where you can see a beautiful vista of the Cudgegong River winding through rocky hills, and the distinctive skyline of jagged hills) and sat for a time, probably only about half an hour. It felt way too short. I felt perfectly at home and comfortable. It’s a familiar place that makes me happy. And so when I got up to leave it was very difficult to go. I actually got up a few times, took in the view again because I find I can never get enough of a great view, and then sat back down again. Am I really going to go? Not Yet. Surely it’s ok for me to stay a few more minutes. Like visiting a friend and having to leave way too soon. And that’s exactly it – if Country is a friend, if I feel so at home with Country in this place, of course I don’t want to go.

So, Not Yet is a love song for Ganguddy, but it’s also for the spot I’d been the day before at Mt Banks overlooking Bulgamatta. Reluctance to leave lookouts is very normal for me, so as well as being a Ganguddy experience, a meeting too short, it’s an observation about myself, a kind of celebration of something that’s me, which is a lover of amazing lookouts. It’s also about what happens when I’m in these places for long enough. There’s always more to observe through all the senses, and the changes in weather and light and movement and noise, and the differences on different days. And there’s also the inner observations, where my thoughts go, what I feel in my body, the jolt when I come back to where I am from being lost in my thoughts. So, that’s what “Not Yet” is about, and I’ve gotta say I think the recording turned out beautifully. I quite like my solo. There’s a lot more to say about the composition itself in terms of musical choices and approaches, but that’s for another time. Like, when I write about it in my thesis.

The second piece is “The Scrubs.” This one is an outlier in that it’s not a Dabee, Bulgamatta or Iron Cove piece. Its original inspiration came from Yuin Country, specifically the south side of Twofold Bay. It’s about dense understory regrowth after a hot bushfire, in this case the 2019/2020 bushfires. It’s also about how I learned a lot last year about what unhealthy Country looks like, and how most of our now-typical Australian bush here in the southeast of Australia is actually unhealthy Country. The scrubs took over when Aboriginal people were not allowed to take care of their Country – when land was taken from them, and they were taken from their land. Cultural fire is what keeps Country safe from bushfires, but that kind of care for Country stopped with colonisation. And so now we have areas completely covered in eucalypt forest with a dense understorey, when before 1788 a lot of the forest was open, with far fewer trees and lots of space between them, typically. Yes, there would be stands of forest but they’d be separate from other stands so that fire wouldn’t obliterate everything. Some would be more fire-resistant areas of rainforest too. There’d be a variety of habitats maintained, and Country would be cleaned and rejuvenated by cool, controlled burns appropriate to their localities. Read “The Biggest Estate on Earth” by Bill Gammage for more on this. It’s fascinating.

So anyway, “The Scrubs” is about thick and tangled and dangerous undergrowth, and about the mess we’re in with how to care for Country. Cultural practices are coming back but often it’s not as simple as doing it the old way. The old way was about maintaining healthy Country as part of doing things a certain way for millennia. The old way didn’t factor in a couple of hundred years of poor health. Also, there’s all the regulations with fire and all the opinions on how to burn to reduce hazards.

I like how this piece turned out. It’s actually quite fun, which is… maybe counter to the overall message. It’s definitely tangled and in-your-face. It’s groovy too, and there is a long and fairly ridiculous guitar solo. And then there’s a faster, semi-thrashy section at the end. I need to think about this and ponder whether the fun of it means the piece is not so successful in a way. Also, when I write for Underwards, it’s not a clean slate – I am writing for our sound and character, and thinking of the pieces in comparison to the other stuff we’ve got, how they’ll fit in a performed set and eventually an album. Sometimes I write for what I think the band needs at the time, e.g. “we need a new banger.” So that’s definitely in play here. Still, good tune I reckon.

The third is “Beach Ball Gambol.” The story of the beach ball can be found on an earlier blog post with an obvious name. An improvisation I did on the trumpet in response to the beach ball episode is what this piece stemmed from. In attempting to emulate the rolling of the beachball on top of the water I improvised a lot of chromatic repetitive patterns, and transcribed a bunch of little note collections from those. I made them into a score to be used with the Decibel Score Player, a graphic-score reading app which scrolls an image slowly horizontally. As the playhead (a vertical orange line which shows where you are in the music) moves through each individual bar, we play the notes in the bar (which are the note collections) in order, at will, as many times as we want. Sometimes you have to choose between 2 notes, sometimes you have the option to skip notes. There are sections of free improvisation, sections where not everyone is playing. For drums, there are sometimes sequences of notes which are up for interpretation, sometimes the drummer is asked to play a groove in a certain tempo. All up it’s a pretty crazy piece which yields different results each time. I’ve taken to singing some of the notated sections, and in the improvised bits I crumple and blow up the beach ball, or play ocarina, or whistle. It’s very fun! And that’s really the story of the beach ball – a playful episode with Country.

The newest of the four pieces is “Cormorant’s Dive,” and it’s a Dabee Country piece, about the Cudgegong River at Ganguddy. Here’s a little quote taken from an earlier blog post about my trip there in January; “I finished off my walk with a relaxing dip in the river, sitting on submerged rocks, and thought of what was hidden underwater - what was the depth of the water before the weir was added? What did it look like here? These thoughts led to a few little ideas for a piece of music which I’m going to write for Underwards.” There’s music in “Cormorant’s Dive” which arrived in my mind while I was sitting there in the water, and I think of it as part of Country’s contribution. There is a tempo-less shimmering section which occurs 3 times throughout the piece, in which I play both repeated high notes, and a rapidly falling 4 note motif. The shimmers are the rippling water and the light, and the trumpet sounds echo a bird call I was hearing. The rapidly falling motif was the first thing that popped into my mind, and I think of it as reflecting a diving motion, into the water. But something about these combinations of sounds is very much of that scene, and the sky and the light. It’s a little bit magical. The other parts of the piece are in a fast tempo, but the feel is relaxed with some simple melodies, 2 short solos by me and guitarist Hilary, and a longer one by Nick on bass. The piece is about the levels of the Cudgegong River – the surface of the water now, with the weir built by colonisers, the surface of the water pre-weir and what that may have looked like, and the very bottom of the river. While I was there I watched a flock of cormorants diving, hence the name. As our newest one this was perhaps the most difficult one to record because it takes time to get comfortable with a piece, and the edits were fiddly too, so when I listened back to it I wasn’t sure if I would like it as much as the other 3. But I’m pleased to report it was a lovely listen, and there was also something about it that was fresh to me, like another layer to the story or another way of looking at it, which I can’t quite put my finger on currently. But it made sense in an unexpected way.

So there you have it, quite a long post but a satisfying musing on some of my PhD works to date. The plan is that, once I’ve written us a few more pieces, we’ll go back down and record again, maybe next year, maybe 2026, and the full collection will be the next Underwards album. Unfortunately this means the album won’t be available for a while, but, perhaps I’ll release some as singles. There are also other pieces I’ve written, one for Spectra Jazz Orchestra and a couple for solo trumpet, maybe with accompaniment, as well as the pieces I made using field recordings last year.