88x8 - Matt McMahon and Monica Brooks

RARETY & ROMANTICISM

If you’re a Sydney jazz-lover, you’ll know & love Matt McMahon. Since running away with the Wangaratta Jazz Piano Award in 1999, Matt’s formidable technique, impeccable taste & genius in unobtrusively enhancing every conceivable style of music from standards to avant-garde, whatever the band instrumentation, on whichever quality keyboard, at wherever faraway venue, is the stuff of legend. Every performance has integrity that rewards deep & careful listening. An unshakeable fidelity to the principle of always making musical quality paramount leads him to eschew personal showiness for group substance, to subordinate bravura individual indulgence to the quality of the ensemble.

Which is precisely why every rare solo Matt McMahon performance on a fine piano in a beautiful setting for an appreciative audience is a genuine occasion. Ten fingers, 88 keys & the history of jazz are his band, leaving him free to express a gentle lyricism; a quiet, recondite sort of Celtic romanticism that can pass unnoticed in larger or louder group settings.

Each rare Monica Brooks performance is a treasured event. Often confined to infrequent performances in the improv/free/alternative music scene at small, non-commercial out-of-the-way spaces, her music - whether playing harmonium in the women’s super-group Great Waitress or performing solo piano - refutes every lazy stereotype asserting that free improv/jazz is necessarily harsh, strident or inaccessible. Though Monica’s personal style is understated & unassuming, her solo piano is unfiltered romanticism, as perfect & endless as a shimmering waterfall tumbling through pure air, sparkling onto soft green-covered rocks & cascading away in an endless silver stream. It is unabashedly romantic in spirit; lush & lyrical in expression, seemingly running in a direct current from heart to fingers into the hearts of listeners. Monica’s music brings to mind the sound-world of uniquely rhapsodic solo piano recordings by legendary Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, who lived much of her life in a monastery & died a few years ago after performing only too rarely in her 100 years of life.

Don’t blow the opportunity of improving your life by seeing Monica & Matt in Church.