REVIEW
Melbourne International Jazz Festival, 16 – 25 October 2025
Exit polls are going to be in the news as voters in the US and Victoria deliver verdicts on the “Mango Mussolini” and the orange wave, but what would audiences have said as they filed out of this year’s array of jazz festival events?
Audience involvement – the degree to which they feel connected and satisfied – is key to the personal experience of each punter and, therefore, the collective response. What’s the vibe after a gig?
I’m trying out a theory that collective experiences can be categorised to an extent, despite the host of individual preferences at play. I realise it’s madness, but bear with me. (Warning: this festival review is not going to be highly technical – no dominant sevenths or augmented triads will be mentioned. This is a blog, after all.)
On the festival’s closing night, I arrived late at the new Bennetts Lane Jazz Club (immediately next door to The Jazzlab) to hear Mandisi Dyantyis pouring his powerful vocals and golden horn notes into the packed 300-seat venue, accompanied by members of Melbourne’s Afrospace Interchange. The force of his musical personality was immediately apparent, the encore and standing ovation inevitable. As audience members filed out there was a collective “Wow!”
At 6pm that evening, at our city’s beloved but much larger Hamer Hall, musicians were thick in the corridors as we awaited the “Super group” Aziza – Dave Holland bass, Chris Potter tenor sax and bass clarinet, Lionel Loueke guitar and Eric Harland drums – for a 10-year celebration of their eponymous album.
This outing – from the funky opener Aziza Dance to the closing piece, Sleepless Night, featuring Loueke’s mouth percussion – did not disappoint. It was a display of finesse, playful dexterity, lightness, energy, repeated motifs and skilful yet restrained playing that at times could be described as graceful, even pretty. But did it excite? It’s harder to judge in large venues, but there were no encore calls. Audience members seemed quietly satisfied rather than rapturous. Is Aziza, is good.
My tentative theory of collective experiences so far, then, is that there are visceral responses to musicians who engage strongly with audiences and a different kind of appreciation felt when consummate skills are on display.
Of course, both often apply. On Monday 19 October at 9.30pm, Downbeat pianist of the year Kris Davis joined Robert Hurst on double bass and Johnathan Blake – fresh from four days of travel – on drums at Bennetts Lane in one of four outings. I expected cool, contemporary New York jazz and wasn’t sure I’d love it. By the end I knew why this trio came so highly recommended and why some punters went to all four of their Melbourne gigs.
Was it because of the skills on display? Yes, but so much more. I loved the coherence of the trio, the sheer driving force of their performance, their ability to Run the Gauntlet, so to speak. I loved their false endings and sudden restarts. I loved Davis’s ability to vary so much at the keyboard with such ease. I loved Blake’s fine motor skills, enabling such fast and sustained work at the kit. Overall I loved the propulsion that epitomised what a piano trio can provide, which is also what improvised music especially can deliver.
Earlier that day, in the smaller room at The Jazzlab, Asteroid Ekosystem brought an injured Ed Kuepper to the stage along with his prerecorded guitar takes, the famed Lloyd Swanton on double bass, Alister Spence on piano and sampler, and Toby Hall on drums.
They played pieces from Sounds Have Dreams, often extending beyond the guitar grabs to deliver a wall of sound rock feel to the engrossed, enthusiastic audience. I thought of a rocket gearing up for take off or a Necks concert without the need for patience. But Out Upon Circumference (from the self-titled album released in 2020) was quite beautiful, with piano embroidery in the spaces and plaintive guitar chords.
A group improvisation wrapped this gig, which definitely had visceral appeal.
Chapel Off Chapel was the perfect venue for classically trained pianist Belle Chen to display her affection for Ravel in a carefully crafted performance utilising synths and programming, but the attraction for this packed crowd – it was the second festival event to sell out – came not only from the sweeping soundscapes, tumbling cascades of notes and pounding chords.
Chen, who moved from Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia before moving to London, shared deeply personal insights on pivotal life experiences, including a moment of acute awareness in a rainforest at sunset and a realisation that caring for someone close can defy the challenge of distance. The musicianship and the emotional revelations had a powerful impact in a concert that was beautifully lit.
In true improv fashion, let’s take the lighting cue and run with it. At the same venue on Thursday 22 October the audience was treated to a triple bill celebrating the 50th anniversary of Japan and Australia signing the Basic Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, ably assisted by Atsuko Yashima, who set up the Tokyo Jazz Festival in 2002.
Rock concert lighting was indeed chaotic for the irrepressible Tenors In Chaos, a hard-swinging sextet featuring tenor saxophonists Tomoaki Baba, Yu Kuga and Akihiro Nishiguchi along with bassist Takashi Sugawa (who we heard with the Banksia Trio last year), Kazuhiro Odagiri on drums and Naarm’s James Bowers sitting in on keys.
Spotlights flew everywhere as these super confident and competent tenor players pumped out Steam Trane, Blue Trane and Giant Steps to an audience no doubt revelling in the high-powered delivery and obvious skills. I liked the more subdued Ring Tones best. Bowers was excellent in the energetic D’s Got Changes, in which Nishiguchi almost set my newish hearing aids on fire with his piercing soprano sax.
Crazy lighting was also on display in the first set by Stereo Champ led by May Inoue on guitar and, to my delight, featuring expat James Macaulay (now living in Japan) on trombone and guest Eugene Ball on trumpet.
I loved this group, which played fun, quirky and jaunty jazz with tasty guitar squawks, wah-wahs, whistles and growls, lots of drum chatter and plenty of foot-tapping rhythms.
The lighting was low, but stable for the solo piano set by Misaki Umei, who began playing at age four and released studio album Asleep Above Creatures in 2025. Clearly Umei is a pianist with great skills and her performance was potent. The appeal of this outing was in her expertise at the instrument, though, rather than any personal connection with her audience.
Another partnership, this time with Korea’s Jarasum Jazz Festival, brought us Soojin Suh’s Coloris Trio, featuring Soojin Suh drums, Jaehun Kang piano and Hoo Kim bass. This concert, one of two by this drummer-led ensemble, was exquisitely nuanced and definitely valued for the band’s focus and drive as well as skillful execution.
What was so alluring? Perhaps it was Coloris Trio drawing on the Korean principle of “melodic breath”. I loved the feather-light brush work, the sharp piano attacks and spaced chords, the resonant bowed bass, the little keyboard sentences, the driving bebop akin to the Kris Davis Trio, the soft but swift solo mallet work from Suh at the kit. I put Korea on my travel list.
Perhaps I need to also add Cuba. Saxophonist and composer Yosvany Terry learned to play the chekeré from his father, violinist Eladio “Don Pancho” Terry, but in the second of four outings at the festival he did not demonstrate his ability with the instrument until the encore. That dexterity, combined with his vocals and some audience response chants, brought the house down.
What a band to begin the festival on Friday 16 October at The Jazzlab. The rhythm section –Yosvany’s brother Junior Terry, now in Melbourne, on bass, exciting New York drummer Julian Miltenberger and Brett Williams in superb form at the piano – was given plenty of opportunity to shine, while Yosvany showed how well his woodwind instruments could play that role too. I was thinking Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley as this deeply satisfying concert ended.
While the elder Terry had great presence on stage, Faris Ishaq mainly let his reed cane instrument, the nay, do the talking at Bennetts Lane on Sunday 18 October in a concert facilitated through the London Jazz Festival.
Ishaq was to have performed a solo set first, but obviously loved playing with Zela Margossian on piano and Adem Yilmaz on drums (“I’m going to steal you guys,” he said). Indeed, the three-way conversation made it hard to imagine that the three had not always played together and the Yilmaz-Ishaq connection was evident.
Born in Bethlehem, Palestine and initially self-taught, Ishak showed us the variety of air-sourced sounds that the nay can produce, whether cushioned, plosively percussive, softly feathered or delivered with light vibrato. Pitches varied as he changed instruments, the sound often following sinuous pathways. This was an outing to savour
Textures, tempos and timbres were the attraction when the Tomeka Reid Quartet took the stage on Saturday 24 October at Bennetts Lane in a restrained outing. In the second of four concerts at the festival, the ensemble of longtime collaborators – Reid on cello, Mary Halvorson on guitar, Tomas Fujiwara on drums and Jason Roebke on double bass and cassette recordings – chose to play material from their 2023 album 3+3 rather than the most recent Dance! Skip! Hop!.
This meant their mix of Western classical, avant garde and modes rooted in the African diaspora called for concentration during seamlessly morphing long-form pieces. Bowed bass was paired with plucked cello in a role reversal, and Reid demonstrated her capacity to introduce an array of creaks, whistles and sound spikes into a conversation that often repeated rhythmic motifs.
My one regret of this festival was that clashes prevented more than a brief glimpse of Resonance at The Jazzlab on Sunday 18 October, a concert undeniably one where the musicians’ skill and carefully chosen compositions combined powerfully. One meaning of “resonance” is the ability to evoke or suggest images, memories and emotions. This quartet did that so well.
In the absence of much-loved vocalist Kristin Berardi, Michelle Nicolle brought her magic alongside Andrea Keller on piano, Sandy Evans on saxophones and Jenny Barnes on vocals to explore gender, creativity and care via new works by Keller, Michele Morgan and Hazel Smith, with settings of poems by Sara Teasdale and Jeannie Greensfelder.
From my short listen I know that this concert would have stayed with the audience long afterwards.
Finally, in this long review, there are those concerts where concepts and ideas are at the heart of what the musicians offer. I love these, although it seems best to know a little about the origins beforehand – an odd twist on the spirit of Ravi Shankar’s famous quip: “If you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you’ll enjoy the playing more.” I do prefer to understand what’s behind the music.
Four MIJF concerts fit this category, each of them a festival highlight. The best I will leave till last.
Before Resonance, a double bill inaugurated festival Artistic Director Michael Tortoni’s new – and now widely acclaimed – venue, Bennetts Lane Jazz Club. First up was Eugene Ball’s Continuum: Jazztrack at 50, which celebrated a half century of that esteemed ABC radio program begun in 1996 by Jim McLeod. Aptly, current presenter Mal Stanley was on stage before Ball’s seriously talented octet began playing.
Ball’s composer’s notes reveal how important Jazztrack was to him as A Jewel, A Lifeline – opening up a broader world of jazz. Even this horrendously long review cannot do justice to this compelling music, which is available as a digital album, but highlights included partners Ball and Tamara Murphy playing together in On Gossamer; A Locket (dedicated to drummer the late Allan Browne) and Gatehouse Stomp, the only piece in this commissioned work that Ball’s parents liked.
Next up came Hyperbaroq’s Tripudiis Sonis Variis, the result of six years of research and reflection by Mirko Guerrini, Ilaria Crociani and Stephen Magnusson. I hope those who attended this concert took the opportunity to read the excellent program booklet handed out, which revealed the origins of this project that set out to interpret and continue baroque music’s “affeti” – the uninhibited expression of feeling.
This concert was deeply affecting and superbly performed, as well as conceptually exciting.
Much more abstract but just as exhilarating was the Chapel Off Chapel performance on Saturday 17 October in which American composer and trombonist George Lewis did not play a note. Instead, he brought two new commissioned chamber ensemble works and another from 2017 to be performed by staff and students from the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance, the Monash Art Ensemble and members of Australia’s premier new music ensemble, ELISION, known for tackling very difficult pieces.
Lewis has released program notes. In Le Négrier, he wanted listeners to imagine themselves on board a slave trading vessel, hearing “not only the sonic testimony of the ship, but also the appalling violence and objectification of human beings that financially supported the Age of Enlightenment”.
Borrowed Time called on musicians to explore alternative ways of playing, knowing, and doing, guided in part by cards held up by the players to offer directions in sonic behaviour – such as “imitate”, “difference”, “loop last phrase” and “end?” – and in part by collective improvisation.
In Arcades, Lewis calls on the musicians to “feel their way through the piece from beginning to end, establishing and re-establishing consensus”.
This three-part concert of innovative, abstract music was exciting to watch unfold. Kudos to the festival and Monash University for making it happen.
Last but most certainly not least was Saltwater, Sugar – a scored narrative jointly commissioned by Bunjil Place, where it was performed, and the festival. I made the difficult decision to miss hearing The Bad Plus on Wednesday 21 October in their last Australian concert and journey to Narre Warren for this “work of scale” by Australian Art Orchestra Artistic Director Aaron Choulai. I do not regret that choice.
The 18-member ensemble, with Ngaiire and Joelistics in spoken dialogue roles, performed this monumental work that connects Chinese, Papua New Guinean and Indigenous people during the time of the gold rush and the Blackbirding slave trade in Australia.
Choulai, who wrote the score and had the story idea for the provocative and challenging script written by Joel Ma that is much more than a love story set on a sugar cane plantation, used Duke Ellington’s music as a reference point because he wanted Pacific Black music and identity understood with the same seriousness, intention and craft that Ellington applied in his work.
It’s easy to dub this work “provocative” but harder to deal with its full import. The power in the words comes in part from their relevance to today (“They call me illegal, they call me immigrant”) and part from the imbedded call to arms (“I was baptised in an ocean of tears. I am angrier than I look and mightier than I seem. One day I will burn these fields and this rich family’s house to the ground”).
Then there’s this: “… this land is stolen and in 100 years whoever’s in charge will still be winning votes by getting folks angry about people like you and me, still getting rich off the labour of people like you and me. I’m not waiting for change. I want justice.”
Around these words it’s impossible to forget the music, which drives the messages home.
Then come the last words, full of import: “More to come.”
As exit polls and actual votes are counted in the weeks to come, the impact of Saltwater, Sugar will linger. Kudos again to the festival for that.
Did the theory of categorising concerts by the nature of their appeal have any value in the end? You be the judge.
ROGER MITCHELL
PS: Images will be posted from these concerts later
PPS: I managed to stay a while at the final late night jam hosted by The Rookies. As always, it was so much fun.
PPPS: Thanks to festival and venue staff for assistance throughout.