About

– 2011 Australian Jazz Bell Awards: Best Jazz Ensemble – Australian Art Orchestra / Young Wagilak Group
– 2010 Sidney Myer Performing Arts Awards: Group Award
– H C Coombs Creative Arts Fellowship 2010, Australian National University Research School of Humanities and the Arts (recognition of groundbreaking work on the Crossing Roper Bar project)
– Classical Music Awards 2009: Outstanding Contribution to Australian Music in a Regional Area (Crossing Roper Bar, Tura New Music Tour 2008)
– The Bell Award 2005: Best Australian Ensemble
– Helpmann Award 2004: Best Australian Contemporary Concert (Kura Tungar)
– Deadly Award: Best Music Score for Theatre (Ruby’s Story)
– The Age Green Room Award 2000 Melbourne International Arts Festival (The Theft of Sita)

The AAO has been in operation since 1994. My aim then was to create a national ensemble of improvising musicians drawing on a diversity of approaches to music making, with individual expression within a group context, as well as a high level of ensemble playing being central to the band’s effectiveness. Each member of the AAO has charted a unique, personal, expressive course in their careers and the AAO has become richer as a result of those 20-odd personal journeys.

Before 1994, Australia did not have a band like the AAO. A group of musicians, stylistically divergent, each one a specialist either as an improviser or instrumentalist, each one willing to explore music as notation, improvisation and, above all, expression.

The AAO was originally assembled for a particular project, a suite of pieces called Ringing the Bell Backwards which I composed between 1990 and 1993. The director of the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts, the late Richard Wherrett, was enthusiastic about the concept of the suite, based on popular European songs of the 1930s and 40s. I regard him as a Founding Father of the AAO. I must also acknowledge the contribution of Leo Gmelch, a trombonist from Munich, who commissioned many of these pieces in their original form for a series of recordings made in Germany. Without those projects the whole idea of the AAO may never have happened.

Hearing the musicians together during that time was a remarkable experience. Australian improvisers have a natural tendency towards the unexpected, the irreverent, the passionate, the adventurous. Many of them have developed their skills removed in a sense from the perceived centres of jazz and experimental music, whether New York, Amsterdam, Tokyo or Berlin, while being aware of what is coming out of those places. This physical separation has resulted in a more delineated sense of individualism in Australian improvised music, less adherence to formalised styles of playing, and even an emerging sense of awareness of our own accumulating music traditions.

We have also remained true to our commitment to new Australian music. Within this framing we have a vision of Australia as a nation in constant and meaningful dialogue with the world around us; a nation open to new ideas, interested and critically engaged, but not driven by a ‘nationalist’ paradigm in any narrow, jingoistic sense.

The driving idea behind the AAO is that music is a language which establishes and builds connections between people, whether as individuals, societies, cultures or as nations.

Paul Grabowsky

Read the AAO's Mission Statement