Review: UNESCO INTERNATIONAL JAZZ DAY CONCERT at Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre

Reviewed by Barry Lenny, Wednesday 30th April 2025.

A global celebration of jazz was celebrated in Adelaide with the UNESCO International Jazz Day Concert attended by many appreciative and enthusiastic audience members. Applause and cheering was the order of the day. Sarah Bleby, the Executive Producer of the Adelaide Guitar Festival and Commercial Music at the Adelaide Festival Centre, introduced the concert.
 
Jazz in Adelaide has a long history. Way back in my youth, I regularly attended The Creole Room in North Adelaide, and often went downstairs under Gays Arcade to The Cellar. The Southern Jazz Club is another long-running institution. More recently, until it was demolished, The New Cabal was the regular Wednesday night band at the much-loved La Boheme wine bar. From ‘trad’ to modern jazz, you’ll find it all around Adelaide. I played in two Big Bands, Ron Coe’s Powerhouse, and the Brighton Big Bad Band, and led many of my own small groups over the years. It was encouraging when, in 2011, UNESCO announced that the last day in April was to be International Jazz Day. It was even greater when Adelaide was announced as Australia’s only UNESCO City of Music, an event that we are now celebrating as it reached its tenth anniversary.

Jazz is so valued here that the Elder Conservatorium at the University of Adelaide created a jazz course alongside its long-running conventional Bachelor of Music degree, (They also now have a musical theatre course) This jazz course has turned out many excellent musicians over the years and is currently under Head of Jazz,  Mark Simeon Ferguson who, with a small group of staff, graduates, and students as the Adelaide Edition, opened the concert with his own composition, 3:23am, the tune chosen as the International Jazz Relay composition for 2025. It is being played in 21 cities in various countries around the world.

With Ferguson at the piano, he was joined by Aria Award winner, James Muller, on guitar, Lucinda Wearing, alto saxophone, Ben Spitty, flugelhorn, switching to trumpet for the second number, Jasmine Hall, trombone, Tasha Stevens, bass, and Bailey Hall, drums. 3:23am began quietly on piano, adding guitar, then brass and rhythm section into a gently swinging number, opening space for a guitar lead by Muller, then Spitty’s flugelhorn, with the whole band taking it out.

Their second number was another of Ferguson’s compositions, A Glimmer, lifting the tempo, and with Spitty changing to trumpet to take the first solo, followed by Ferguson, and some fine ensemble playing. The whole world needs a glimmer of hope right now, and this piece expressed that.

After a pause while the stage was reset and the bands changed over, Fersuson’s daughter, Ciara Louise Ferguson, a 2025 ABC Jazz Artist in Residence, brought her group to the stage. She was also the 2024 recipient of the COMA (Creative Original Music Adelaide) Emerging Jazz Writer’s Award, She is heavily involved with jazz choirs at all levels of skill and it was no surprise that her set was based strongly around vocals, herself as lead vocalist at the piano, with Stacey Riley Theel and Jasmine Elisa Hall, and bassist, Bonnie Marie Grynchuk, adding harmonies. Drummer, Zed Crawford, completed the group.

Most of the songs were her own compositions, the others were her arrangements, all notable for the fine vocal harmonies. The natural world inspired many of her works, seen in rising sea levels and flooding in the blues, The Ocean Has Swallowed My House, with a great trombone solo from Jasmine Elisa Hall, and the Blue Banded Bee, an Australian native, in Amegilla cingulata (its Latin name).

We were in familiar territory with the Miles Davis/Bill Evans number, Blue in Green, and we went right back to 1927, when Louis Armstrong recorded Struttin’ With Some Barbecue, written by his then wife, Lil Hardin. Don Raye, who wrote songs for the Andrews Sisters, added lyrics about meat, not realising that ‘barbecue’ was hip slang that Cab Calloway explained, in his ‘Jive Dictionary’, referred to “a girlfriend, a beauty”. Those erroneous lyrics were the ones used by this group, to my amusement.

A lively piece for piano was Frankie, a tone poem for her dog, followed by the gentle ballad Indigo Sky of Love, for piano and solo voice, then a change of genre on As It Was, by Harry Styles, Kid Harpoon, and Tyler Johnson. She explained that she used this as an interim step with her choirs to lead them into jazz. She then introduced the recipient of the 2025 COMA Emerging Jazz Writer’s Award, Danica Elle (Lammertsma), to much applause With an introduction, telling the audience all about the insect, Amegilla cingulata, with an appropriately Latin feel, closed her set.

After the interval, the ARIA-nominated Zela Margossian Quintet took to the stage. With her at the piano, her group consists of Stuart Vandegraaff on alto and soprano saxophones and clarinet, Jacques Emery, bass, Alex Inman-Hislop, drums, and Adem Yilmaz on percussion, including frame drum, bongos, and cajon. She is here with the support of Nexus Arts.

Born in Armenia and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, her jazz fusion sounds are influenced the by music of her early life in the Middle East, Armenian folk songs and dances that go back many centuries. Some of the songs in this concert came from her first two albums, and we were treated to a preview of a few that will appear on her third album, coming soon, so watch for the release of that one.

She began with In Flight, giving a taste of what was to come, contemporary jazz stylings blended with what, for most of the audience, would have been unfamiliar tonalities, using scales beyond major and minor, and even beyond the ecclesiastical modes. Short, repeated motifs were a feature of many of the numbers, with strong bass lines and extensive use of drums and percussion working closely with one another, the saxophone riding high on the waves of accompaniment, alternating solos with the piano. The very energetic number, Forecast, followed, a solo section highlighting the rapid and intricate work of the drums and percussion

Free Kicks referenced the time when she was pregnant and feeling the kicks of her soon-to-be-born son. With a degree of affectionate humour noticeable, this was also more towards the more familiar contemporary jazz end of the fusion spectrum. The pace then slowed completely for the ethereal piece, Devotion.

The Child in Me draws on Armenian folk songs that she sang as a child, recordings of which she discovered on old cassette tapes that he mother had brought with them to Australia. In a world full of troubles the gentle ballad, The Good That Exists, offers hope and reveals another facet of her music. It utilises one of those long series of short repeated motifs, with varied percussion beneath. Ceasefire, a livelier work, is a timely call for, and expectation of peace, filled with bright optimism and featuring the evocative sound of Vandegraaff on clarinet.

The very short, fun piece, On Ya (for the benefit of those in other countries, it is Australian slang for “good on you”, a compliment), highlighting the percussion and bass, brought the evening to a close, resulting in a well-deserved standing ovation and loud applause to end the evening.

Photography, Shane Rozario.