Crossing Roper Bar a winner
Nearly 10 years ago leading jazz musician Paul Grabowsky crossed the Roper River, one of the great waterways of northern Australia, to pitch his tent in the Arnhem Land community of Ngukurr.
Thus began a continuing musical marriage between Grabowsky's Melbourne-based avant-garde Australian Art Orchestra and the traditional custodians of the ancient manikay song cycles of the Top End.
The cross-cultural musical bridge ended up spanning the continent as the 2008 Crossing Roper Bar tour, brokered by Perth-based producer Tura New Music and featuring the AAO, Wagilak, Gujarra and Nyilapidgi musicians from Ngukurr and Ruby Hunter.
If you were lucky enough to be in the Heath Ledger Theatre audience on Tuesday night, you would have heard the final concert in this year's Crossing Roper Bar tour, which started in Darwin and took in Kununurra, Broome, Karratha/Roebourne and Exmouth along the way.
This time, popular Broome-based Yawuru singer/ songwriter and Pigram Brothers member Stephen Pigram joined the AAO and Wagilak Songmen members Daniel(clapsticks and voice) and David Wilfred (didgeridoo), less for a cultural exchange than to continue the evolution of a new art form.
Imagine this, if you can. Piercing ululations and soaring melismas sharply punctuated by the rhythmic extremes of clapsticks and digeridoo as Daniel and David stretch tradition to breaking point.
These same qualities taken up by keyboardist Grabowsky, drummer Rajiv Jayaweera, electric guitarist Stephen Magnusson, bassist Chris Hale and trumpeter and sound artist Peter Knight in funk, jazz and blues-inflected swathes of crashing counterpoint, terrifying tremolandi and sheet-lightning harmonies.
Then, in the middle of this maelstrom: Pigram's gorgeous songs breaking through the clouds like sunshine.
The emotional effect is, and was, overwhelming.
