Jeremy Rose & The Earshift Orchestra - Iron in the Blood

An award-winning musical production, Jeremy Rose & The Earshift Orchestra’s Iron in the Blood is a powerful exploration of Australia’s colonial past.

Inspired by and featuring text from Robert Hughes’ seminal book The Fatal Shore, the production uses two narrators William Zappa and Philip Quast, stunning visuals from Mic Gruchy and Rose’s sophisticated compositions to bring to life the story of Australia’s founding.

Iron in the Blood provides an opportunity to explore Hughes’ masterpiece with a musical narrative that creates a rich perspective, from jazz evocations of Australian natural beauty to the folksong of the colonialists. Composed and conducted by Rose, the work is brought to life by a stellar 17-piece orchestra, drawn from Rose’s colleagues from Sydney and Melbourne. This grouping is described by Paul Grabowsky as an “ensemble comprising some of...  more

credits

Jeremy Rose and the Earshift Orchestra
Jeremy Rose – conductor, soprano saxophone soloist (2, 3)

Phillip Quast - narration
Bill Zappa - narration

Scott Evan Atwell-Harris – alto, soprano saxophone, flute, piccolo
Scott McConnachie – alto and soprano saxophone (solo tracks 1, 4)
Michael Avgenicos – tenor saxophone (solo track 4)
Matt Keegan – tenor saxophone, alto clarinet (solo track 6, 8)
Paul Cutlan – tenor saxophone, bass clarinet

Patrick McMullin – trumpet, flugelhorn
Callum G’Froerer – trumpet, flugelhorn (solo tracks 8, 10)
Charles Casson – trumpet, flugelhorn
Nick Garbett – trumpet, flugelhorn (solo tracks 7)

Mike Raper - trombone
James MacAulay - trombone (solo track 7)
Eleanor Shearer - trombone
Colin Burrows – bass trombone

Joseph O’Connor – piano, harpsichord
Ben Hauptmann - guitar
Thomas Botting – double bass
Daniel Fischer – drums and percussion

Adapted from THE FATAL SHORE by Robert Hughes
Copyright © 1986 by Robert Hughes
Recorded by permission of the author’s estate.

Produced by Jeremy Rose

Recorded 21, 22 January 2015 at Music Workshop, at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Australia
Recorded, edited, mixed and mastered by Bob Scott
Recorded digitally to ProTools 11
Assistant engineer Ilia Bezroukov

Art direction and design: Denise Bert, elevator-design.dk

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Iron in the Blood Review Excerpts

Audrey Journal /  Sydney Morning Herald / RN’s The Music Show

“Jazz orchestra and two actors with Mic Gruchy’s superbly complementary big-screen visuals – the work is a dialogue between idioms and eras. This is a major Australian work and should be embraced by our key festivals.” –

– ★★★★½  Sydney Morning Herald (live review)

“A brilliant Sydney jazz composer and instrumentalist, a young man with a social purpose…. extraordinary music, reminiscent of comparable works such as Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite and Wynton Marsalis’ Blood on the Fields.” – The Australian (live review)

Rose’s composition and orchestration here is reminiscent not only of Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Gil Evans but, at times, of Igor Stravinsky and Peter Sculthorpe. It is a powerful mélange to which Rose has added much of his own as well.

★★★★ Geoff Page, The Australian Book Review

“Australia’s early history is expertly portrayed in uniquely blended narrative documentary and jazz composition… the orchestrations always add depictions and dramatic illustration to this absorbing documentary.”

★★★★★ – John McBeath, The Australian

“Harrowing history told by a bold, emerging Aussie voice.”

★★★★½ LIMELIGHT MAGAZINE

“It would be an understatement to say that Jeremy Rose is one of the most creative and restless musicians in the Australian jazz scene.” australianjazz.net

Liner notes by Paul Grabowsky

To say that the word ‘jazz’ is layered with a complex of ironies is rather to understate the idea. Born into a post-slavery melting pot, the genius child of many parents, a higher realization of the multicultural truth of its birthplace than anything else, it posed a challenge to every orthodoxy from the outset. It denied the sanctity of the ‘work’ as aesthetic sermonizing, preferring its own real-time vernacular as a language of an oratory both simple and eloquent, in which street and church, project and field, black and white melded seamlessly. A double threat, it demonstrated a new virtuosity, liberated from the servitude to musical text that defined ‘classical’ music, whose very epithet suggested the plinths and pediments of courthouses and museums. More viral than merely influential, it travelled up rivers, across oceans and borders, grafting onto its host wherever it landed, producing undergrounds of converts, attracting those attracted to la vie bohéme, smoke, yearning, grief, joy, love and death unmediated by the discreet ethical counseling of the establishment.

To say that Australian history is layered with a complex of ironies is also to somewhat understate the idea. Australia until quite recently liked to date its history from the arrival of Arthur Philip’s fleet of convicts and their various penal officers and guards off Port Jackson on January 26 1788. This date, still known as Australia Day, is our celebration of nationhood, but for the descendants of the Eora people who looked with fear and wonder at these strange objects disgorging their disease-laden cargo, it is a day still to be given its appropriate designation in the story of this place. For far from being a ‘terra nullius’ as future apologists for the process of settlement would have it, this land has been the home of many people speaking many languages, living in a unique relationship to some of the most challenging geography on earth, successfully, for – at the latest estimates- at least 60,000 years.

‘The Fatal Shore’ is Robert Hughes’ magisterial reflection on the arrival of Europeans in the early years of settlement, their extraordinary brutality, both towards the indigenous people, and toward each other, and their survival and transition from gulag to nation. It is written in the eloquent, sonorous voice of a man made famous as the art critic for Time Magazine, and the author of such art-historical classics as ‘The Shock of the New’ and ‘American Visions’. He pulls no punches in describing the situation of the early colonizers; this was truly an experiment in which man’s inhumanity to man was redefined, at the culmination of an era familiar to many as the Age of Enlightenment. Here is irony writ large, and Jeremy Rose has taken on the extraordinary task of paying musical tribute to Hughes’ historical jeremiad, using a sophisticated jazz language itself employing layers of irony.

With an ensemble comprising some of the most creative improvisers of the new generation, Rose has realized an appropriate language for the musical prose of his model. In intricate, colorful, varied compositions, he captures a trans-Pacific tone in which formal, carefully composed sections carefully evoke landscape, water, fauna, innocence undone, horror, and hope, while deftly summoning up the provenance of the new arrivals with reference to folksong, fife-and-drum marches and a hint of the eighteenth-century drawing room.  Jazz is a language well able to protest injustice; the music of Mingus and Max Roach was part of the soundtrack to the civil rights movement; the fusion of ensemble precision and personal statement in this suite recalls sources as diverse as Ellington, Gil Evans and noir film scores. But most importantly, in the midst of angst and alienation, confusion, loneliness and despair, is space; time suspended, the hum of an ancient, and patient, land. That is the jazz message of this work of Jeremy Rose, an apposite musical voice to take its place in the hall of ironic mirrors as boon companion to Hughes’ masterpiece.