Above image: Sandy Evans…
At the Paddington Uniting Church on Sat Oct 31, the 2026 women’s jazz festival was closed with a splendid concert given by three performing ensembles: a duo featuring singer Michelle Nicolle and double bassist Jonathan Zwartz; the ConChords Jazz Choir; and four musicians playing music from the album Resonance: pianist Andrea Keller; saxophonist Sandy Evans; singer Michelle Nicolle once again (who filled in for Kristin Berardi, who was featured on the album, but was unable to participate in the eight-gig tour done by the Resonance ensemble), and the voice improviser Jenny Barnes.
This concert was the penultimate performance of the Resonance quartet, with only one performance still to come, at the Wangaratta Festival of Jazz & Blues the following day on Sunday, Nov 1. Also this concert saw the end of Jess Green’s two-year term as program director of the Sydney International Women’s Jazz Festival (SIWJF) for 2025 and 2026. It was fitting at the end of the concert that she was called to the stage, and celebrated for the sterling work she had done over two years, and presented with a bouquet of flowers by Nick Pontikis, CEO of the Sydney Improvised Music Association (SIMA).
This concert took place in a church, which was exceedingly risky, prompting alarm bells amongst a number of jazz enthusiasts. Certainly, in my case, hearing jazz in a church has not been a happy experience in the past. I’m now once bitten twice shy, given the performance by the American jazz singer Jazzmeia Horn at St Stephens Uniting Church in Sydney in December, 2024. Horn was the headline artist for the women’s festival in that year, and I wasn’t the only person looking forward to enjoying her enormous talent. Regrettably the sound was appalling.
I’ve never heard a concert at Paddington Uniting Church, and was taking no chances at this performance on Oct 31. Accordingly I arrived early in order to secure a seat where I could be as close as possible to the performers’ acoustic, unamplified sound, and also be close enough hopefully to hear what was coming through the artists’ foldback monitors. On the balance of probabilities, I felt I’d done enough to maximise my chances of experiencing the best sound possible, under the circumstances. This turned out to be the case, give or take.
I gather that others in the venue were not so fortunate. A friend who sat towards the back of the church, near the sound technician, was severely critical of the sound she was subjected to. Her testimony, which arrived by email the morning after the concert, indicated that, in fact, this concert was not as successful soundwise, as I first thought. Where I was sitting, in the front row, the sound was basically acceptable for the first two ensembles: the duo of Nicolle and Zwartz; and the ConChords Jazz Choir. But, in the case of the third ensemble, the Resonance set, there were moments when the sound was unsatisfactory, even where I was sitting. More on this conundrum below.
It was an unmitigated pleasure to hear Michelle Nicolle singing live, as for many years my appreciation of her artistry has been limited to her recorded albums, which I’ve praised highly in a number of reviews. Here, she was saddled with the unenviable task of performing in a duo context with only double bass to accompany her, without the benefit of a chordal instrument. At the best of times this scenario is exceedingly risky, even for experienced performers like Nicolle and Jonathan Zwartz. Nicolle had to rely on the ability of Zwartz to ensure that the harmonic structures of the tunes were clearly in the air, so that her vocals could stay in tune. It says something for the great ability of both Nicolle and Zwartz that they were able to navigate through a selection of tunes in immaculate style.
They presented five compositions: Woeful Blues, an instrumental written by the American pianist Mulgrew Miller, with lyrics by Tamara and Michelle Nicolle; a tune called Tell The Truth, one of Nicolle’s own compositions; two numbers from Nicolle’s 2025 album The Silent Wish, recorded in the US with the American guitarist Larry Koonse: the Tim Finn composition I Hope I Never, and the Benny Carter/Sammy Cahn composition Only Trust Your Heart; and another Nicolle composition One Beer.
I was very glad that Nicolle chose to close the set with One Beer, far and away my favourite of her outstanding compositions; it’s a perceptive and moving tune, which can bring tears to one’s eyes. The primary elements of Nicolle’s artistry were all there: the beautiful sound quality of her voice; her impressive microphone technique; her mastery of the wordless vocal; her faultless phrasing… and so on. I don’t think I was the only person in the room to realise we were in the company of arguably the finest female singer in Australian jazz.
The ConChords Jazz Choir, an a cappella group directed by Naomi Crellin, was next cab off the rank, with an exquisite performance. They opened with a tune called Give Me A Reason, composed by Mim Crellin. This was followed by a Kristin Berardi composition Ode To Oli, apparently written for her first-born son. It included a middle section from the Berardi version that sounded improvised, but I’m told that it was written out and harmonised by Crellin. Then it was on to Don’t Be a Fool, composed by the Australian pianist/songwriter Sarah McKenzie, whom Crellin described as “Australia’s Diana Krall”. They closed with a spirited version of the Sonny Rollins classic St Thomas. This choir performed beautifully and had an exceedingly lovely sound; a credit to all concerned.
Now to the Resonance set, a fascinating project devised by two giants in Australian jazz, the pianist Andrea Keller and saxophonist Sandy Evans. Both are of course distinguished composers as well as great instrumentalists and between them, out of the ten tracks on the Resonance album, they’ve written seven originals. The others are free improvisations, with the aforementioned two musicians being joined by Nicolle and the extraordinary Jenny Barnes.
There were so many highlights in this music that it’s difficult to know where to start. Certainly Evans’ beautiful sound on the saxophone was a highlight throughout, given that the acoustics of the church enabled her huge sound to be heard to advantage. Evans’ tenor saxophone is one of the signature sounds in Australian jazz, instantly identifiable, and it was interesting to hear her playing the unusual curved soprano saxophone, where her sound was just as beautiful.
Moreover Keller is equally prominent as one of the finest musicians in Australian jazz, with prolific achievements to her credit. I don’t know whether either woman has been prevented from achieving their aims by a glass ceiling in jazz, but Evans is on the record having said that, as a founding member of John Pochée’s great band Ten Part Invention in 1986, where she was the lone female, outnumbered by nine male musicians, she hasn’t suffered from misogyny; on the contrary I understand she’s known nothing but equality. As for Keller, testimonies abound; it’s not for nothing that the Melbourne jazz writer Ian Muldoon wrote in 2021, “we should be grateful we’re alive to bear witness to the beauty of the pianism of Andrea Keller”.
Both Evans and Keller were articulate in outlining the inspiration behind the Resonance project. Evans referred to the extraordinary poem written by the experimental and performance poet Hazel Smith, on which Evans’s composition Sear & Soothe is based. Evans drew attention to the poem’s fascinating last line, “She holds a to-do list in one hand, lifts a galaxy with the other”. In my view, however, the killer line in Smith’s poem occurs a little earlier. One doesn’t have to be a woman to relate to the sentiment expressed in the following striking sentence. She reveres all the women who were hanged, beaten or stoned to death throughout history’s scandalous ode to justice.
Most of the lyrics in the various Resonance compositions were written by poets. Other than the aforementioned Smith, they included Jeanie Greensfelder, Michele Morgan and Sarah Teasdale. One composition from Keller entitled Everywhere Nowhere, had words written by Keller herself. Keller made a point of mentioning the book Invisible Women, written by the British feminist Caroline Criado Perez. I’ve now googled this, and know that its subtitle is Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. In a nutshell, it describes the adverse effects on women caused by gender bias.
As an example of such gender bias, Keller referred to the design of the modern piano keyboard, which has disproportionately favoured male pianists since the late 19th century. This design hasn’t suited female pianists who, on average, have a smaller hand span than male pianists. In fact, said Keller, many of her students in Melbourne can play tenths with their left hand while her own smaller hand span means that tenths are not possible. Subsequent to the review she’s written, “Unfortunately. I can only reach some 9ths, but am nowhere near a 10th – which means that I can’t play some of the jazz voicing sounds made part of the language/vocabulary by Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, and others.” The fact that the design of the piano keyboard is an illustration of gender bias is something that’s never occurred to me. The upshot of this historically, as Keller pointed out, is that the most celebrated pianists over the last century or so have invariably been men!
An arresting surprise at this gig was the communicator and sound maker, the extraordinary Jenny Barnes. A friend who emailed me the following day, wrote: “Hearing Jenny ‘sing’ making sounds borrowed from scat, Indian ragas, even speaking in tongues, was creative and tastefully put together.” Barnes’s contributions were scintillating, particularly in the free improvisation pieces. Evans said that it was Keller who introduced her to Barnes, prompting Evans to think: where has this woman been all my life? I feel the same way; I’ve never heard any performer quite like Barnes, and it was highly enjoyable and instructive to experience her artistry for the first time.
The same friend who commented positively on Barnes’s work has often accompanied me in the past to jazz concerts I’m reviewing. She and a friend had already bought tickets for Resonance, so was unavailable on this occasion to join me. Naturally I was interested to hear her verdict on the concert, particularly in relation to sound. Her testimony was unsettling indeed. She stated that “from where I sat, the echoey acoustics blurred the clarity of the music immensely. This was despite the fact that the sound guy had no reverb in the mix. He said that it was due to the venue. My friend was also troubled by the mouldy atmosphere and lack of ventilation in the church. These factors were so overpowering that they made listening very laboured, and detracted from the enjoyment and excitement of the concert, despite the music being brilliant in so many wonderful ways.”
On that note, I think I’ll leave it for the moment. But this sort of testimony from a musician whom I know to have excellent ears, does suggest that SIMA should seriously consider jettisoning the practice of presenting important concerts in a church. I stress that, on this occasion, I found the sound acceptable where I was sitting, close to the stage, for the first two ensembles. Thankfully there were no drums, and amplifying a duo and an a capella choir, immensely simplified things for the sound technician during those first two sets.
During the Resonance set however, I began to suspect that, in the live acoustics which prevailed, I had little confidence that the sound was acceptable elsewhere in the venue. Even where I was sitting, with all its attendant advantages, I found that when the energy level of the music increased, the sound inevitably suffered. At these moments Nicolle’s vocals were not only difficult to hear with clarity, but also they were drowned out. I shudder to think of how poorly the sound was travelling to the furthest extremities of the venue. My intuition was that, given the poor acoustics in the church, the sound technician was saddled with an unenviable task.
This, the final concert of the 2026 Sydney Women’s International Jazz Festival, took place at Paddington Uniting Church on Saturday, October 31, 2026. It featured the duo consisting of vocalist Michelle Nicolle and double bass player Jonathan Zwartz; the ConChords Jazz Choir, directed by Naomi Crellin; and four musicians playing music from the album Resonance: Sandy Evans (tenor & soprano saxophones), Andrea Keller (piano), Michelle Nicolle (vocals) and Jenny Barnes (voice).
