Paul Grabowsky on the Australian Art Orchestra

Paul Grabowsky interviewed by Andrew Ford

AF: The Australian Art Orchestra isn’t something Winton Marsalis would approve of much or at least he wouldn’t think it was jazz. Would he?

PG: Sometimes. I mean the people in it certainly have backgrounds in jazz…most of them. Is it jazz? It’s such a funny question about the Art Orchestra. It’s a question at the very core of what it is that we are purporting to be.

The rhetoric I have surrounded the Art Orchestra with …. again, it is attention seeking. To get up and say ‘this is a contemporary music ensemble’ is designed to raise the hackles of the contemporary music fraternity. I want them to be upset by that notion. Whether I mean it is another question. I like to be provocative. It is the only way in this country to be heard. It’s so hard to get something like the Art Orchestra on its feet in Australia.

Ten years ago when we started the orchestra, I made some outrageous statements. The symphony orchestra is dead and this is the way to go … you know. I can remember friends from the MSO coming up to me in this very building and saying, ‘How can you say things like that; you’ll make us lose our jobs’. Of course that will never happen … please god.

The Art Orchestra is a jazz sensibility; we do things in a jazz way. Not everything we’ve done is jazz. One could hardly call Mary Finsterer’s Constans a jazz work. She wrote a piece which draws on the resources of the Art Orchestra. And so, it’s a way of bringing back into a dialogue with other forms of music, our experiences as musicians. I think we could talk about a jazz process in that regard. So therefore we have done Into the Fire with the Sruthi Laya Ensemble—what has emerged out of that is a dialogue between two different sorts of music. A couple of weeks ago we had some workshops with a flute player and a gottuvadyam (slide veena) player from South India and a few of the members of the Art Orchestra. It started of with them teaching us some ragas and some of the ground rules about how one improvises within the structure of a raga and then we did some free improvisation with these guys. where we did improvisation from our point of view and on both sides it was a miraculous experience and, I think, we all came away enriched by the process.

It isn’t just a cultural colonisation. I think we are at a point where everything that we try and do is a dialogue sort of experience and I think in the same terms about our relationship with what I would call the classical contemporary music fraternity…. that when I ask those people to write something for us I hope that it will be an opportunity for them to explore something new in their own compositional language … take advantage of the fact that here is a bunch of people particularly skilled at improvising and, therefore, how is that going to be assimilated into what a composer does who normally doesn’t apply that sort of thing? and that the end product will be something of great discovery and value for both sides.

- The Music Show, 12 July 2003