Australian Art Orchestra
CD

Music That Goes Right Into my Bones

Review of Ruby's Story

I have no fixed idea about the virtues or otherwise of pre-settlement Aboriginal culture; nor do I have statistics on how many benefited and how many suffered from the removal of children. I did, however, go to school with Aborigines in the 1940s and remember a most unpleasant attitude to them. Also an eerie sense of something gone from the sandhills and lagoon. At the same time I despair at the self-defeating hostility of Aborigines who live around me today. Ruby Hunter, whose life is evoked in music and song on this remarkable disc, has said that she remembers nothing but happiness from before she was taken from her parents at the age of eight. Archie Roach sings on a song we all know - Took The Children Away "Teach us how to live, they said/Humiliated us instead". Roach's songs alternate here with Hunter's. There is a pain of loss in this music that goes right into my bones. But there is also a rich evocation of things that remain - notably the river - and infectious memories of childhood fun. Roach sings with an emotional quality drawn from American country music (adopted long ago by Aborigines) and black American soul. His flowing time, manipulations of vocal tone, and his weird and affecting slow vibrato, make for one of the most distinctive presences in Australian popular music. Ruby Hunter is something else. Sometimes there are spooky hollows in her low dark voice. There is a range of textures, inflections and rhythmic quirks that is quite unique. This is the voice of extreme experiences. The flexibility of Paul Grabowsky, his mastery of idioms both as pianist and arranger, will astonish those who may have found the spiky dissonances of the Art Orchestra hard to grasp. On the first track he pairs Roach's beautiful singing with James Greening's rich and soulful trombone. Can contemporary jazz musicians play like this? Of course they can. Part of the jazz avant garde agenda was to revive the larger-than-life soulful playing that was in danger of being refined away. Note also John Rodgers's violin, Paul Cutlan's clarinet, Phil Slater's trumpet, and the glorious setting that Grabowsky has devised for those wonderful singers and musicians. The recorded sound, by Melbourne's Robin Gray, is superb

- Sydney Morning Herald, SIMA website (John Clare), 15 April 2006

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