IAN BLAKE: Home

The Quantum Leap show My Sister, My Brother takes the stage at The Canberra Theatre today for four days of performances: take a look at the QL2 promo.
I've written and recorded a piece for the segment One of Us, choreographed by Patrice Smith and the Quantum Leapers.

The new combo with Andrew Cronshaw, Tigran Aleksanyan and Svetlana Spajic made its debut at the WOMAD BBC stage in Wiltshire last weekend.
You'll be able to hear the performance soon via the BBC's Listen Again service: a rich mix of Serbian village vocal music, the mesmerising sound of the Armenian duduk, and two Englishmen trying to keep up.

And I've just ventured into this blogging business...

According to Clint Eastwood's character in In the Line of Fire, it's ukulele and not ukelele. Have I been getting it wrong all these years...? Clint plays a craggy FBI chap with a lounge piano habit who would probably have known about this sort of thing: a quick googling of 'ukelele' leads with that slightly eyebrowraised question Did you mean: ukulele? but a trip to Wikipedia reveals ukelele to be a variant spelling common in the UK. Aha! Tapping into the race memory there. That's a relief. Mind you, the ambiguous schwa, as in /ˌjuːkəˈleɪli/, could go both ways...

If all this seems somewhat retentive, let me put it down to The Method: I've been developing the character of Brendan Nelson, Leader of the Liberal Party in Australia (this evening at least), who's plinking a pink Flying V uke in the political cabaret Three Nights at The Bleeding Heart.

There's a glowing review from Alice Allan in Australian Stage Online. And a real stinker from Aaron Ridgway in The Canberra Times, which I'll link to as soon as I can find where it lurks online. I think these reviewers attended the same performance, so you could take an average...

Once again, the rafters of the Belconnen Labor Club rang to the strains of Sean O'Problem & The Alpha Rhythm Boys as this forward-thinking chamber ensemble premiered its Fantasia for Stylophone and Folk Combo last week and received much-merited plaudits plus the odd Guinness.

Zoey Pepper's March concert went very nicely, with a programme including my new piece for voice and bassoon which had at last acquired a title: The River Daughter. On the right is Tiepolo's view of the story, in which Daphne is starting to sprout laurel leaves just as Apollo catches up, while her unimaginative rivergod dad (responsible for the transformation) looks on.
Not a brilliant solution, but a great poem... (Ovid, Metamorphoses)
The menu ranged from Monteverdi to a brilliantly channelled manifestation of Dead Elvis (Vegas Period) wielding his reedy rod.


I've just completed a ten-minute piece for Quantum Leap's forthcoming work My Sister, My Brother: QL2 Centre for Youth Dance are working with a group of choreographers and composers to bring this show to the Canberra Playhouse in July.


The Blue Bear has been capturing Mike Jackson's performance for Lynne Pilbrow's FunMusic for Little Kids project. Ted Ibert, the studio manager, is a Bear of Few Words, but did mention that he liked We're going on a Bear Hunt: which seems somewhat counterintuitive unless you know the song.

One of the great things about doing music for kids is the chance to explore a wealth of sound possibilities over the course of a CD's worth of short songs. And to try and make it fun/tolerable for groanups too. The floor is covered in instruments: looks like this project's going to include ukelele, stylophone, ocarina, hot fountain pen, bass clarinet (handy for elephant impersonations), the distressed banjo, the much-reviled melodica (dunno why: it's a great sound), and one of the Rigby Brothers' paraceltic lap harps. That'll do for now.

Überceltic chantoozie Cassidy Devine was unable to attend the Cassidy's Ceili gig at Belconnen Labor Club last week, so a quick call managed to rustle up Sean O'Problem & The Alpha Rhythm Boys. As Frank Zappa once pointed out, the most important thing in art is the Frame: a focus, perhaps, provided by the Boys as they stood there occasionally vogueing in a dilatory fashion while drawing attention through their unique brand of Absent Audio™ to the devastated acoustic ecology of The Belco Labor Club.

(Horacio Vaggione says: 'I don't know a musician who doesn't, in one way or another, produce "a listening proposition". Each musician proposes...a way of perceiving things which in fact is an operation that produces meaning...An acoustical fact is always a musical fact.' While Helmut Lachenmann asserts: 'One can only try — in whatever way — to create situations which bring people back in touch with their concealed (and contused) antennae and therein with their own creative potential.')

The Boys achieved a perfect balance as the evening wore on: an eerie equilibrium of non-music and non-audience; Nabokov and Cage gazing down from Heaven the while, as together they waltzed away the night.

Off to Western Australia this week for the Fairbridge Festival: playing English music in a folkrockish vein with Brian Heywood's rootybeat combo Bluetongue. (Not a livestock-threatening disease but a fine Australian lizard. Faux Croc, perhaps?)