Pannikin MC concert notes & running order
Live video and mp3 extracts from The Melbourne Festival 2005
Detailed information on all the pannikin guest artists is available through the Jon Rose Web Site
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| 1. | Barrier Band Stabs |
| duration 6 mins |
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Good evening.
Welcome to our little home made multi media experience. This performance takes place on Kulin Nations land - the traditional owners of this area of Australia we now know lovingly as Melbourne. I'm not just saying that for politically correct etiquette; this show that you are about to witness celebrates two main aural traditions. One the Aboriginal, is arguably the oldest ongoing musical tradition that we have as a species and it's also our direct line back to the origins of music itself; the other derives its content from the do-it-yourself nature of music practice throughout the last 200 plus years of white settlement. The music establishment tend to look on the second tradition with a mixture of embarrassment, amnesia and surprise that there was any music going on in Australia before the American troops turned up here in the second world war to show white Australians how it to play big band swing. But there was and still is a lot of home grown music going on which doesn't necessarily tug its forelock (cringe) at some overseas model. Our starting point is a cut up tribute to the Barrier Unions Brass Band of Broken Hill, and despite wilful neglect and lack of support, it is still going strong. The instrumentation of our own live band onstage is also based on the Broken Hill Town Band of the early 1900s. The kind of band you could have heard in many small towns across Australia in the days when all music was live.
Robin fox is featured playing the electronic kitchen blender (sampler) there.
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| 2. | Thank You Very Much Song |
| duration 5 mins |
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Andreas Hadjisavvas migrated to Australia in 1976. he composed a song, his 'Thank You Very Much Song'. He's reluctant to talk about the origins of this masterpiece - whether he was genuinely happy to arrive in australia from the madness of a divided cyprus; or whether, it's just the first words of English he was required to learn to take his position behind the counter. Or whether it's another act of theatre of which his shop was full - I remember the first day I walked into the place, there was a whole stand dedicated to boxes of ear cleaners (these little matchstick things with cotton wall stuck on the end) - anyway on one side of the aisle the boxes were marked for left ears and on the other - for the right ear. That's him, that's Andreas. Anyway 30 years later he is still singing his 'Thank you very much song' and at times he has had this song playing back as a tape loop in his shop on 6 or 7 cassette decks - a level of intimidation unparalleled probably in any other shop in this country.
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| 3. | Department Store Pianist |
| duration 5 mins |
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Of course musos used to make good livings playing in clubs, cafes, hotels, restaurants, radio and television shows. You name it, where ever there was social interaction, there you would find live music. Not any more. Musak is ubiquitous, but no one is actually playing it - or from the musos point of view, no one is being payed to play it. A few years back I came across an anomaly - a live musician playing in a department store in Sydney. Naturally the management wanted to fire him in one of their downsizing, vaporising, economic rationalist drives. But there was such a public outcry 'We want our live piano player back' that they had re-install him and his piano. His name is Michael Hope and he has a repetoire of some 3,000 songs - just in case he didn't have enough, I wrote this little piece of shopping muzak for him to play on the job.
That was our cellist Sally Maer suffering from an overdose of too much shopping choice.
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| 4. | Er-Hu Concertino |
| duration 5 mins |
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Shen Pangeng is on a mission. He is trying to get everyone in Melbourne to learn the er-hu - the two string Chinese violin. It could take him a while me thinks but he has already got school kids at and essendon grammar schools under his spell where he also runs a whole Chinese orchestra right under yer noses. So this is a little concerto for er-hu, toy piano, strings, and the Melbourne telephone directory - played by Daren Moore. It is probably the first piece of music ever written with the Melbourne Telephone directory in mind - and I suspect it will be the last. Please welcome Shen Pangeng.
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One of Melbourne's most famous sons, the composer percy grainger was into whips - but for extra musical purposes as far as I'm aware. Ashley brophy on the other hand makes music with whips and lassos. His whole family is in the circus business. His sister was already handling lethal snakes as part of her act before she was sixteen; one of his brothers runs a circus in moscow; the other a boxing troupe and a pub in outback queensland. Ashley and his wife rochelle run their own circus production company in Gosford NSW. Ashley tells me that when he was a kid, he and his brothers used to play tunes on whips. I certainly would have liked to hear that. Anyway one whip maestro is better than none and here he is ----
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| 6. | Simultaneous Hum & Whistle |
| duration 4 mins |
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That's a hard act to follow but we don't have a problem doing it.
Michael A Greene is a computer programmer in WA and is one of two people in the world who can whistle and hum independent lines of music at the same time. We know there are two them, because I wrote him up on the Australia Ad Lib website, where he was discovered by his soul mate somewhere in the darkest North of England - afflicted with the same ability. This is quite an exercise in duality - try it some time. Here he is performing the 'The Ashgrove' as a canon.
Now here comes the tune 'Good King Wenceslas', first as a canon, plain vanilla, bog standard canon; then as a mirror inversion, that's with the hum doing the tune upside down and the whistle doing the tune the right way up; finally as an augmentation, that's with the whistle playing the tune twice as fast as the hum; And for his grand finale - Michael will hum 'Danny Boy' and whistle a well known Oz song at the same time. This is the audience participation spot so join in on either whistle (left side) or hum (right side).
If I ever think I'm getting too much of a nerd, I have only to think of Michael A. Greene!
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| 7. | White Man Jump Up |
| duration 5 mins |
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Ladies and Gentlemen. Corrugated Iron, where would we be without it? As with most things, the quality has declined over the years but Darren will demonstrate at the end of this piece that even today's pumped up galvanised zinc cheap replica of the former glory known as The Corrugating Iron still gives us that heavy metal sound.
We'll arrive there after some pioneer, explorer type, eyes searching the horizon, film music. Think epic travelogue.
Darren Moore - corrugated iron; Robin Fox - kitchen blender.
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| 8. | Ruined Piano Homage |
| duration 5 mins |
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In 1888 a French juror named Oscar Comettant estimated that Australia was overfull with not flys, not sand, not poms, but too many pianos. There were 700,000 pianos already imported into Australia by the centennial. That's a lot of Johannas - about one Johanna for every two and half people. Wind the tape forward and we come across Ross Bolleter who specialises in playing ruined pianos. These come in various grades of decay, from the wilfully neglected to the totally rooted. As you'll see the one featured next has actually morphed into someone's backyard. Both Ross, Hollis and myself have had the pleasure of playing the first piano to arrive in Alice Springs. It came on the back of a camel - water barrel on one side, piano on the other. Now suitably ruined, it sits forlorn in the telegraph station with a damn great termite hill growing inside it.
Anthony Pateras, maestro of the prepared Johanna, will deliver a homage to Ross Bolleter and his Ruined Piano project WARPS.
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| 9. | Didjeribonefiddle |
| duration 5 mins |
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That was Hollis Taylor inventing an Australian fiddle tradition right there; and she was preceeded by Mark Atkins playing the didjeribone - a fairly recent invention of muso Charlie McMahon - the transposing didgeridoo. Some ungenerous souls suggest that it contains the worst aspects of the didgeridoo and the worst of the trombone - but we strongly disagree. Mark should have been live but unfortunately the planets haven't lined up right, so he will be arriving next week to play tonight's concert.
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| 10. | Chain Saw Tribute |
| duration 5 mins |
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Who can tell the difference in a blindfold test between the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra? Not many if any I should think - especially since orchestras around the world sound more and more the same these days.
We're ending the first half with a tribute to WACO - that's the West Australian Chainsaw Orchestra, which unlike the two previously mentioned orchestras, does have a unique and clearly identifiable sound. Formed in 1984 to demonstrate against old growth forest logging, WACO has undergone many structural and artistic changes - to the extent that it no longer exists. But there are those of us who believe that the chainsaw is an instrument capable of deep and profound musical expression, indeed john briggs the orchestra's conductor did suggest three influences on their post modern aesthetics - Duke Ellington and the swing bands of the 1930s, Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School of Composition and last but not least the polyrhythmic intensity of Woody Woodpecker.
Please welcome on my left Bruce Lindsay and Jim Kokkalos; on the right Rod Cooper and Shane Pierce - who are playing the chainsaw parts in the tribute orchestra tonight. They are doing this for free ladies and gentleman, giving their time and hopefully not their limbs to support the Pannikin project. As with all traditional chainsaw compositions, we start with a little counterpoint for string trio.
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| Interval |
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| 11. | Ntaria Lamentations |
| duration 6 mins |
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The Ntaria Aboriginal Women's choir is the result of a cultural collision. In 1872 Lutheran priests turned up to convert the locals 150 K to the west of Alice Springs to Christianity. The first of many mistakes, they failed to ask the Arrente people living there if they had chosen a good place for a good water supply - consequently the mission barely survived the droughts of the early years. No matter how you view this cataclysmic event for the Aboriginal people, in the space of 3 years, 53 Lutheran hymns had been translated into Arrente and a 40 piece choir was making this extraordinary hybrid music. It's the music of Bach sung with a unique Aboriginal sound and articulation. But like many of the items you are hearing in this project, there is an irony and deep sadness embedded in the performed music. As you will see there are not many singers left, in fact sadly two of the women died in the month before we got to record this piece of video.
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As you can hear our Bird Song mimicry session has started. We're gonna let it run for a few minutes before introducing our next guests who are Roseina Boston and her hubbie Harry. Roseina is a Gumbayungirr elder from the Nambucca Valley. Her Aboriginal name is Wanangaa, which was given to her by an Aboriginal elder and means "stop," as Auntie Roseina was always running about everywhere. She was born under a lantana bush on Stewart island in 1935. Her grandfather's brother Uncle George Possum Davis was well-known for his Burnt Bridge Gumleaf Band of the 1920s and 1930s.
You are looking at one of Roseina's paintings and she is going to give us a yarn about it.
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That was the Goori Flag Song. Yes, Country and western - one of our many cultural imports. But the next musical genre, as far as we know, was invented here in Australia.
Imagine that while playing as a kid with your brother, you invent a new musical genre. This is what Leslie Clark did and he is the inventor of Finger Music. Any of you who went to University in Melbourne might have come across him, going around with a sign on his front 'The man who plays music on his fingers' flogging his cassettes for $2 - and, as I discovered later, giving all the proceeds to charity. Something of a sage and a deeply spiritual man. He has lived a very simple but a very hard life. He is someone else who should have been here tonight but he suffers chronic arthritis. He was however determined to document his music; I recorded this a few months ago in the aged care facility in Resevoir where he now lives.
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Well our next guest is the busiest working muso I know, 5 and 6 nights a week he is packing them into Jim's place about 80 ks south of Alice Springs. Bus loads of tourists from Europe, the States, all over. He is Dinky The Singing Dingo. I could speak for hours on the qualities of Dinky's vocal attributes but better to hear him - this is a little improvisation session we had a few years back. All the opera singer students should be sent off to Dinky, to study his phenomenal technique.
Erkki Weltheim there on viola with some interspecies small talk.
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| 15. | Majestic Theatre Organ |
| duration 7 mins |
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Ron West runs the only fully operational silent movie house in the world - that's the Majestic Theatre in Pomona, Queensland, that's where he is tonight. The theatre has been going since 1921. Every Thursday is a special night, you can catch Ron playing theatre organ to accompany 'The Son Of The Sheik' staring Rudolf Valentino and Vilma Banky - it's been running continuously for eighteen years! Ron is a very dedicated man, we knew we could never get him down here, so we came up with another solution. When we videoed him, we asked him if he wouldn't mind if we lopped off his hands and stuffed'em in these washing up gloves - part of the technology for the virtual Theatre pipe organ that I've been developing to play along with him.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Live from the Majestic theatre Pomona Queensland. Would you please put your hands together for, the incredible, the irrepressible, the indespensible, not to say the irreplaceable - Mr. Ron West and his Theatrical Organ.
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| 16. | Auctioneers & Riffs |
| duration 7 mins |
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Some years ago Hollis and I were invited to the ghost town of Milparinka to play the fence around the graveyard. In the bar that night we came across John Traeger, auctioning off a duck to an extremely inebriated crowd of punters. Tonight he's doing his more traditional fare. Auctioneering at its best is a form that exists half way between singing and speaking; it is a major aural tradition in this country, the rhythms, the speeds, the turn of phrase, the vocabulary itself, differs from state to state. This most definitely requires audience participation.
Clayton Thomas on double bass. Clayton is one of the great improvising musicians that you can hear in venues around this country - but as you can hear tonight he's playing it straight.
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As you can see, we are morphing into the Sydney Saw Orchestra.
Sue Harding will be joining the mix in a little while. She has been specialising in making music from Dot Matrix Printers - some of you may not be to excited about the prospect of listening to obsolete technology being run through its paces, you may think it is the audio equivalent of watching paint drying, but you would be wrong. Check it out, there is much rhythmic complexity there, interesting pitch relationships too, it's beautiful damn it. And remember 'you don't call Wagga Wagga Wagga, 'cause Wagga Wagga Wagga is wrong'.
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| 18. | Dot Matrix Printers |
| duration 3 mins |
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Dot matrix printers
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I came across Lucas Abela alias DJ Small Cock alias Justice for Dual Plover about 10 years ago. In those days he was attacking a lump of concrete on a turntable with a Samurai sword. Later he developed a Freddy Kruger type stylus glove with which he attacked various victims of vinyl. These days he is running a glazing business - if any of you have troubles with your windows falling out, Lucas'll fix you up no worries. He is actually singing 'Ave Maria' into this piece of glass - it's just that it's loud, very loud.
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