Above : Barney McAll… Photo credit Anthony Browell
The seventh all-day Sydney Con Jazz Festival was held at the Conservatorium on Sunday May 31, 2026, featuring 140 artists in 26 concerts. Once again, as I’ve done in previous years, I congratulate its artistic director David Theak on bringing off a splendid and unique event. As it’s only biennial I wish it could be annual. I say unique because this is a wonderful, indeed indispensable, opportunity for members of the jazz community to gather together in one place. And, what better place than the Conservatorium which has had such a profound effect on the careers of so many of our finest musicians?
Those who are familiar with my reviews over the years, will know that I’ve been writing at length online, primarily in the Music Trust’s Loudmouth until its demise in late 2024, but more recently in Sydney Arts Guide. That’s apart from my thumbnail jazz album reviews in The Australian. In this review, however, which will cover only a small percentage of the available performances – I was at the festival from 12 noon to 9 pm – I will confine my comments to brief impressions, rather than the normal blow-by-blow accounts.
Also the friend who accompanied me to the festival has an excellent knowledge of local musicians, and always has perceptive comments to offer about what she’s heard. “Basically I found this day to be joyous and uplifting”, she writes. “It was good to be in the presence of so many amazing, creative and beautiful musicians – to hear them and be with them.” So, I’ll interpose some of her thoughts below wherever possible.
Barney McAll’s Unforeseen Quartet opened the festival @ 12 noon in the Music Workshop. In many ways this all-star Melbourne band, presenting a fascinating selection of McAll originals, provided the most outstanding performance of the day. Other than McAll on piano, they included Julien Wilson (tenor saxophone), Hugh Stuckey (guitar), Yunior Terry (double bass) & Danny Fischer (drums).
I was mightily impressed by how this band carefully controlled its dynamics in a room which might have had poor acoustics for jazz. I wasn’t sure if McAll’s piano was amplified, but I can say that his lovely piano solos were clearly heard. Of course the musicians frequently dropped their volume down to a whisper, which I perceived as a realistic awareness of how their music would project to the audience. In this respect, the great drummer Fischer led the way, providing a model of how to play the drums in this sort of space. Wilson’s brilliant tenor solos also benefited from the dynamics just mentioned, while his huge unamplified sound was a veritable tonic.
At 2 pm the Lucy Clifford Quartet performed in the Music Café. I asked to hear this group because I loved Clifford’s 2024 album Between the Spaces of Knowing, which won the ARIA award for Best Jazz Album in 2025. Clifford, also winner of the Jann Rutherford Memorial Award in 2022, presented half-a-dozen of her thoughtful originals, many of them from her award-winning album; I heard Breathe, Sundaze, and possibly others where I wasn’t able to catch the titles. Her nostalgic ballad Drift, inspired by her hometown of Thirroul, north of Wollongong, was a memorable highlight. I understand Clifford now lives in Boston. Only she and saxophonist David Reglar survived from the album personnel, and they were joined for this gig by two superb players, Felix Lalanne (guitar) and Tully Ryan (drums). An excellent band, dominated by the two electric instruments, showed how compositions utilising funk time-feels can be converted into thought-provoking jazz.
The performance by The Exhibits at Recital Hall East at 3 pm, was much-anticipated for the simple reason that James Muller is arguably the finest jazz guitarist in Australia but has rarely played in Sydney since he moved to Adelaide some years ago. It was therefore bracing to hear his effortless virtuosity once again, His group included two other Adelaide musicians Lyndon Gray (double bass & occasionally electric) and Tom Noonan (alto saxophone) plus Sydney’s Tim Firth (drums). As a matter of interest, Firth replaced the group’s original drummer who left Adelaide recently for France, and Noonan is about to take up a teaching job in China. This quartet played a terrific set of interesting compositions primarily written by Muller and Gray.
There were sound problems during this performance which I believe could have been improved had common sense been applied. There was a microphone on stage which I knew was alive, because I heard a sound technician test it as I walked past on the way to my seat. Both my friend and I agree that, when Gray made announcements from the back of the stage holding the bass, it would have been better had his voice been amplified. Not only that, Noonan was playing his alto saxophone unamplified, and unfortunately I could hear him clearly only when the other musicians played quietly. When the music’s energy level came up and its volume increased, Noonan was in my view often drowned out. Sitting next to me, my friend interestingly did not experience the same difficulty. I simply ask: why was the available mike not placed in the bell of Noonan’s alto? This sort of thing has been a perennial problem in past Con festivals, as many of the performances take place in venues which have acoustics designed for classical music and are often unsuitable for say loud drums. I do not think Firth, palpably a great drummer, would have played at the volume level he adopted, had he been aware that his sound was frequently overriding Noonan’s saxophone lines.
The Josh Meader Trio took the stage at 4 pm in the Music Workshop. Once again this was a highly anticipated performance, as I’m told Meader has 133,000 followers on Instagram, and 4,000 friends on Facebook. He has developed an immense reputation in the guitar community world-wide. His majestic playing in this set was breathtaking. He played a series of his own compositions with short, pithy titles, such as Eclipse, Axe and Energy, broken up by a stimulating solo version of Erroll Garner’s Misty. This trio, which is dripping with talent, has apparently just returned from sold-out concerts at Ronnie Scott’s in London. Other than Meader, it includes Matthew Thomson (piano, keys, synth bass), and Alex Hirlian (drums), both of whom are National Jazz Award winners at Wangaratta, Hirlian in 2018 and Thomson in 2021. I reviewed their album Tides of Time in The Australian in March, 2025, and found it so good that I was compelled to give it five stars. Thomson is so brilliant on the keyboards that we didn’t miss at all the absence of a normal bass player, and Hirlian, a brilliant and tasteful drummer, full of nuances in his style, was a delight to hear. Every time I hear him play, he’s like a breath of fresh air. I feel that he and Melbourne’s Danny Fischer are very much in the same class.
Hearing the three guitarists Lalanne, Muller and Meader in quick succession, I was struck by the fact that all three clearly had their own individual voices on the instrument. They were united by their virtuosity; otherwise their styles were like chalk and cheese, completely unlike each other. Isn’t this the unique quality of Australian jazz, that it can produce players of the same instrument whose styles are so different that each musician triumphantly retains his own individual voice? I believe this applies to other instruments as well throughout the country. Isn’t it true also when we compare the styles of trumpeters such as Niran Dasika, Tom Avgenicos and Phil Slater? That’s why I’ve argued elsewhere that the extraordinary creativity and individuality of Australian jazz musicians have, over the years, created a jazz culture unique in the world today. And it’s all on display at an event like the Con Jazz Festival.
Perhaps the most ambitious performance on the day took place in the Music Workshop at 6 pm, when vocalist Kristin Berardi and the German pianist/composer Florian Ross presented a program of Ross’s compositions. The ensemble included Phil Slater (trumpet), Brett Hirst (double bass), Ben Vanderwal (drums) and a string quartet led by Michele O’Young. Put together courtesy of a three-hour rehearsal the day before, this was the most exquisite performance of the day for me. The promotional blurb perhaps says it all: lush, cinematic chamber jazz, featuring Ross’s rich harmonic language; modern jazz meeting contemporary classical, with sweeping lines and intimate moments. Most of the pieces featured Berardi’s masterful wordless vocals, either written or improvised, and it was invigorating to hear improvisations from the great musicians in the all-star ensemble, particularly as always the brilliant bass solos from Hirst, and the ravishing solos played by the inimitable Slater on trumpet. I trust that this extraordinary music will be recorded in the fullness of time, so that it can be savoured in the future, and dwelt upon at length.
This concert was introduced by Con staff representative Steve Barry, who demonstrated the same problem I identified above: the practice of speaking to the audience without using an available microphone. As I like to live and let live, I’m not the sort of person who will call out from the audience, although I’ve often wished I’d been brave enough to do so. In this instance I was gratified that some bright sparks in the audience were assertive enough to cry out “we can’t hear you”, or “use the microphone!” Barry then turned to the microphone which was standing erect next to him and used it, to great effect. Mission accomplished. Might I be bold enough to suggest that, as a general rule, those speaking from a stage at this event should adopt a professional approach, and always use a mike, if one is available? This would guarantee that what is being announced can be heard clearly. In my view this is just common sense.
The gala concert in the Verbrugghen Hall @ 7.30 pm was opened by vocalist Leah Berry & pianist Mike Nock in a lovely set of Nock compositions to which Berry had written lyrics. I found it odd that the various compositions were segued into each other without the audience knowing when a particular composition had ended, and when applause was called for. This meant that, as far as I can remember, no applause was delivered by the audience until the very end of the set. My accompanying friend aptly summarised this performance in the following terms: “I thought that performance was heavenly. It made me feel that all is still playful and good – the collaboration of the old and wise master with the young and adventurous, the young being gentle, respectful and curious in the way that many new aged young people are. It was different to hear it all segued into one continuous piece, but in this way I felt it was a beautiful symphonic tale rather than individual tracks from a record.”
The Nock/Berry set was a most appropriate curtain-raiser for the headline artists, alto saxophonist Ben van Gelder and guitarist Reinier Baas. This Dutch duo provided an impressive set to bring the festival to a close on a very high note. I was pleasantly surprised because, in preparing for the festival I’d viewed a number of YouTube clips of this duo, and found their music somewhat dissonant and not very pleasing. Playing live however, and perhaps courtesy of excellent amplification in the Verbrugghen, their music sounded astonishingly beautiful. Baas adopted a wide variety of deeply resonant sounds, such as tremolos and other clever guitar effects, which were, at least in my experience, very unusual, and pleasant to the ear. Van Gelder was just as lyrical with a highly fluent alto sound, and their technically proficient sudden passages in unison were a delight. I read somewhere on the internet that van Gelder and Baas played together for a decade before they first recorded. If this is true they had obviously prepared their music well over a long period, and successfully brought their individual voices together, successfully integrating their two styles. Once again, my friend chimed in with some thoughts which are well worth quoting: “Ben & Reinier played some fairly short statements well and tastefully, instead of elaborating too much. They could then present another colourful idea to demonstrate their range of experience… all very enjoyable and kinda Dutch in character.”
This review is over 2,000 words, and I feel this should hopefully be enough to provide the reader with an impression of what the 2026 Sydney Con Jazz Festival was all about. To some extent I avoided those artists whose albums or performances I’d reviewed recently elsewhere so, to that extent, my choices were stymied. Still, I heard a lot of magnificent music throughout the day, which underlines how crucial this biennial festival is. Sydney is otherwise seriously deprived of festivals where our finest jazz musicians can perform, other than the annual Sydney Women’s International Jazz Festival, and the Manly Jazz Festival, both coming up later this year. The deficit considerations are that our own arts festival, the Festival of Sydney, which takes place in January & February, deliberately excludes local jazz artists, and Sydney still doesn’t have its own international jazz festival, on the model of the Melbourne International Jazz Festival and, for that matter, similar festivals which take place in every State capital city, other than Sydney. I am aware of encouraging moves being made to inaugurate such an international jazz festival in Sydney in 2028, but that’s another story.
Let me close with my friend’s thoughts on the nature of the festival: “Everything presented was amazing. It takes a lot of guts and talent to be a jazz musician, to put your soul out there and have this conversation or that conversation that is on the tip of your heart – or that of the person you are accompanying, and it also takes serious skill to transpose those words and feelings into music. We were offered a real treat. Thanks to all who organised and participated in this great day where we could recognise and celebrate and connect with our jazz.”
