Jeremy Rose & The Earshift Orchestra
Iron in the Blood
Released on ABC Jazz/Earshift Music
Bell Award for Best Produced Album. Iron in the Blood
Presented at the 2020 Sydney Festival, co-presented by Sydney Writer’s Festival and City Recital Hall.
Inspired by Robert Hughes work ‘The Fatal Shore’, Iron in the Blood is a musical production with jazz orchestra, two actors and visual projections. The work features text from Hughes’ seminal work The Fatal Shore, read by two narrators, Phillip Quast and Bill Zappa.
It is a powerful work that explores the rich tapestry of Australia’s colonial past.
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 both Sydney and Melbourne. This grouping is described by Paul Grabowsky as an “ensemble comprising some of the most creative improvisers of the new generation”.
ARTISTIC STATEMENT | JEREMY ROSE
I have always had an interest in my countries’ founding. After reading The Fatal Shore, I felt my schooling had romanticised the real colonial experience and I had been robbed of some of the dark truths surrounding Australia’s early days. The idea for Iron in the Blood spawned when I read an interview with Wynton Marsalis where he said he was inspired to write his epic suite Blood on the Fields that depicts the African American slave experience after reading The Fatal Shore. This felt ironic to me – I immediately felt an onus to use the book to further explore Australia’s history and convey my feelings through music.
In my practice, I’m interested in expanding dialogues between music disciplines, styles and cultures. Jazz is the perfect vehicle to portray the complex ironies of Australia’s founding, with its use of improvisation, virtuosity and sophistication. Jazz can draw from all sorts of music and convey the vast set of perspectives on Australia’s past.
The work took two years to compose, and with the passing of Hughes’ in 2012, Iron in the Blood serves as an important tribute to his monumental book that continues to shock and remind us of where Australia came from and perhaps where it is going.
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.
FULL REVIEWS
★★★★1/2, John Shand Sydney Morning Herald, September 24, 2018
The impetus is easy to understand. The youngish Jeremy Rose reads Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore and has his conception of his homeland turned on its head. Where was this in the school history syllabus?
Last year, Rose, a Sydney-based composer and jazz saxophonist, released a recording of Iron in the Blood, his musical response to Hughes’ book. Now here was the live premiere, and huge kudos to Riverside Theatres for presenting this ambitious work.
Performed by a 17-piece jazz orchestra and two actors and accompanied by Mic Gruchy’s superbly complementary big-screen visuals, the work is a dialogue between idioms and eras.
That dialogue exists between Hughes’ pivotal 1986 account of colonisation (that bravely debunked so much accepted history) and Rose’s contemporary reaction to that work, between composition and improvisation, and between musical idioms (including colonial folk).
Rose’s triumph is not just to have created a boldly imaginative 70-minute work, it is to shine a fresh spotlight on Hughes’ text by selecting especially poignant tracts of his succulent prose for actors Patrick Dickson and Michael Cullen to deliver with relish.
This was the full-blooded writing of a big heart and potent intellect confronting the evil implicit in bringing 160,000 convicts here as tortured slave labourers, and in committing unbounded atrocities against the continent’s first people, including genocide in Tasmania.
Those quick to decry a “black-armband view of history” may fail to grasp that the point is not to wallow in guilt, but to understand the past and its implications, so wrongs might be confronted, addressed and avoided in the future. Rose’s music is partially programmatic and partially operates in a jazz universe that runs parallel to Hughes’ masterpiece, carrying occasional echoes of Charles Mingus, who knew something about combining the musical expression of anger, stoicism, anguish, beauty and rambunctiousness.
Rose also found his own ways of representing the cruelty implicit in a mindset that sought to expunge a “criminal class” not just from English society, but from an entire hemisphere.
Notable soloists included alto saxophonist Scott McConnachie, guitarist Ben Hauptmann and bassist Tom Botting. The volume was sometimes excessive, partly compounded by Rose’s tendency to use four trombones or trumpets where two might have sufficed to create a desired colour.
But make no mistake: this is a major Australian work and should be embraced by our key festivals.
Eric Myers, The Australian, 26 September 2018
Novelist Peter Carey once said that Robert Hughes, in his monumental book The Fatal Shore, “grasped the cruelty of Australia’s birth and shoved it in our face”. Hughes’s words, read at Riverside Theatres last Sunday, were a harrowing experience. In the premiere of his oratorio Iron In The Blood Jeremy Rose selected those excerpts for maximum impact. A brilliant Sydney jazz composer and instrumentalist, he is at 34 a young man with a social purpose. Opening the concert with an acknowledgement of country – in this case, the Darug people – was a salutary reminder of one of the work’s major themes: the destruction of Aboriginal society. Another theme was the dystopian nightmare of the convict experience, whereby an unexplored continent was converted into a jail.
Rose was questioned recently by a broadcaster who doubted that jazz was capable of exploring Hughes’s dark themes. The composer was forthright. As the establishment of a penal colony in Australia involved much improvisation on the part of the settlers, why not deploy a form of music where the central concern is improvisation? That’s jazz.
Using an orthodox 17-piece big band, with himself as conductor and occasional soloist, narrators Michael Cullen and Patrick Dickson, and visuals, Rose demonstrated that his powerful 70-minute work was well able to match the scale of Hughes’s thesis.
In most places the music reflected Hughes’s luxuriant prose. There were glimpses of Australiana throughout. In the early movements, for example, there was a fascinating representation of the mixture of curiosity and trepidation in the minds of the local Aborigines who saw the ships of the First Fleet sail into what was to become Sydney Harbour. The Aborigines’ sense of foreboding – they had never before been invaded – is palpable in the music. Hughes’s terminology was compelling. The transportation of English criminals – initially 750, but totalling 160,000 by 1850 – was a failed experiment, as crime in England was not deterred. The convict era, marked by brutality and cruelty, was exacerbated by starvation, exhaustion, and a sense of abandonment. It foreshadowed the 20th century gulag.
A stellar line-up of handpicked musicians, including four Melburnians, presented this extraordinary music, reminiscent of comparable American works such as Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, and Wynton Marsalis’s Blood In The Fields. Excellent solos were heard, but this was primarily an occasion, owing to Rose’s compositional abilities, to celebrate the jazz orchestra itself as the instrument of choice.
★★★★★ – 5 stars, John McBeath, THE AUSTRALIAN NEWSPAPER
This is an extensive work of broad musical, historical and narrative scope. It’s a musical adaptation of Robert Hughes’s iconic Australian historical work The Fatal Shore The Epic of Australia’s Founding (1986), complete with narration by Philip Quast and William Zappa.
Composer, conductor and saxophonist Jeremy Rose has orchestrated jazz based music as exposition and ambience for this enormous work, assisted by funding from the Australia Council for the Arts, performed by Rose and the 18piece orchestra.
As the cover notes by Paul Grabowsky state: “Rose’s music deftly summons up the provenance of the new arrivals [to Australia] with reference to folk song, fife and drum marches and a hint of the 18th century drawing room.”
Australia’s early history is expertly portrayed in 11 tracks of uniquely blended narrative documentary and jazz composition. From the First Fleet’s arrival in 1788 through until Hughes’s words of summation, this documentary holds the attention on both musical and descriptive levels.
The arrangement features various solos throughout, notably Rose’s soprano sax alternately floating, climbing and drifting over the orchestra in Time Immemorial Pts 1 & 2. Numerous other solos feature Matt Keegan on tenor sax, Paul Cutlan on baritone sax, Callum G’Froerer on trumpet, James Macaulay on trombone and several others.
The music enlivens and dramatises the narrative, which at times is fearful and cruel and is occasionally uplifting, but the orchestrations always add depictions and dramatic illustration to this absorbing documentary.
★★★★½, Andrew Aronowicz, LIMELIGHT MAGAZINE
http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/content/jeremy-rose-iron-blood-earshift-orchestra
Jeremy Rose read The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes’ seminal account of Australia’s invasion, colonisation and transformation into a penal colony, in 2012. He was struck by the brutal reality faced by prisoners shipped over from the continent, as well as by the Indigenous population, and eventually found a way to engage with that dark history through music.
Iron in the Blood is a series of scenes performed by Rose and the Earshift Orchestra, underscoring narrated excerpts of Hughes’ work, read by actors Philip Quast and William Zappa. The excerpts give an overview of the struggle of the convicts, as well as the cruelty of British officers and lawmakers. The descriptions of the treatment of the original population – particularly the genocide of Tasmania’s Aboriginals – are harrowing. Musically, Iron in the Blood is an eclectic experience. Tracks draw on more conventional jazz idioms, while art music traits are present too, including sonic landscapes with dislocated, chromatic harmonies and extended instrumental effects. Some of the most intriguing features are the extended, frantic, improvised solos, often underscoring the most disturbing parts of the narration. Individual performances and sound are excellent, and the narrations are enjoyable both on a theatrical and educational level. Rose has really honoured this awful chapter in our country’s history.
THE AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW
Geoff Page
★★★★ – 4 stars
Iron in the Blood is jazz musician Jeremy Rose’s ambitious and heartfelt tribute to Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore (1986). Although some academic historians may demur, The Fatal Shore remains a crucial book for understanding the brutality of Australia’s colonial origins.
To create his eleven-part tribute, Rose has assembled The Earshift Orchestra, an ensemble of seventeen musicians, nearly all of whom are youthful, like the composer. Two accomplished actors, Philip Quast and William Zappa, perform short excerpts from Hughes’s book (which are sometimes excerpts from original documents themselves).
These are cleverly and movingly integrated into the work as a whole.
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. Listeners tend to think of jazz as primarily improvisation but a great deal here is written down – then stirringly performed in the idiom. There are also several improvised solos, including a couple of memorable ones by the composer and others by trumpeter Nick Garbett and saxophonist Matt Keegan, to mention just two. The rhythm section of Joseph O’Connor (piano), Thomas Botting (bass), and Danny Fischer (drums) also plays an indispensable role – even when playing rubato.
The sources of Iron in the Blood are not only to be found in the work of the composers and arrangers mentioned above, but also in British folk song. The optimism in these parts is a useful counter to, and relief from, the harsher textures portraying the (still-astonishing) savagery of the ‘System’.
This project was supported by the Australia Council with cooperation from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. It is hard to imagine money being better spent.
THE MUSIC TRUST
John Clare
A few words adjunct to the inspiration for this exceptional work.
At the beginning of a recent ashes series a team of young English public school chaps – part of the otherwise convivial balmy army perhaps – foregathered in one of the pubs along George St, Sydney, and began singing with relish Bound For Botany Bay (Farewell To old England forever etc) just to remind us that we were all convicts. Why weren’t they beaten up? Because we are really gentlemen – or more likely because few of the younger drinkers in the CBD would have known the song or given a thought as to what it signied. Furthermore, in some quarters it has become fashionable to claim a convict or two among one’s ancestors. Me? No idea and do not care.
In Melbourne of course the feeling has been a little different. Melbourne’s white ancestors were not convicts but settlers, according to some. Further, they came not from over the sea but overland, to reach the excellent grazing near Port Phillip Bay. Having lived in both cites I can report that it is possible to fall down one of the old diggings in the bush behind my sister’s place on the road to Bendigo. Film and popular music critic Lynden Barber (himself from England) once remarked that Melbourne felt “faintly European”. Hmm, I think it has a distinctive Melbourne feeling. The gold diggings, incidentally, accounted for some of its prosperity.
If you live in Sydney, as I do now, it is possible even in modern times to feel a curious presence, a clanging but increasingly muted resonance, specially if you live – again as I do – in one of several places around the harbour. Oh yes, many were convicts. My grandfather was originally a bushman who rode in the Light Horse in World War 1, but some time later he lived on the north side of the harbour where it was still possible to keep a horse, which in this case used to hide from him behind the same tree each morning. Sometimes it gave a little whinny of excitement when my grandfather came closer – still pretending he could not see the sweet nag. The family also had a pet kangaroo which came and went, opening the gate on its own. He also fought bare knuckles, bossed shearing sheds and spoke to trees without embarrassment.
My point here is that some of us can still feel in this the old Australia. The beginning of my era saw refugees arrive at Maroubra, eeing from the rise of Adolf Hitler. There were Aborigines at school and a suburb of them at nearby La Perouse. They once simply lived here, but were now demoted to wards of the state, often treated with disdain. This is part of this project’s concern.
Whichever was your era, it is still fascinating to look back further. The late Robert Hughes (undoubtedly our best known art critic) looked back at the most abrupt change of all in his very impressive book The Fatal Shore. Some felt he was too harsh, and later he confessed this might be true. But it all happened. It is a matter of emphasis.
Sydney composer and saxophonist Jeremy Rose has incorporated some of Hughes’s best prose – which is very good indeed and well read by Quast and Zappa – and a few convict songs, into a long, dramatic, foreboding and sometimes dissonant and chilling series of brilliantly orchestrated fragments and longer themes played by The Earshift Orchestra, which includes some of Melbourne and Sydney’s most gifted players and improvisers. Rose will be familiar to many as the leader of a band called The Vampires who create colour and excitement using reggae and Latino rhythms. More recently he has shown himself to be an impressive – indeed distinctive – writer of longer musical forms. While sections of this work are basically massive punctuations, the volume also drops radically at whiles, giving rise to tranquility and rather beautiful liquid twittering and singing clarinet, soprano saxophone and ute. These lovely atmospherics oat over Paul Cutlan’s wonderful baritone saxophone, which suggests the curious beating drone of the digeridu. Joseph O’Connor’s lyrical pianistic complexities and the percussion of Danny Fischer and Botting’s double bass also help lift these sections above the earth even as they suggest the earth itself.
These devices are all most effective in the sections “Time Immemorial 1 and 2”. This is where Hughes’s concept of the end of a wall made of thousands of miles of distance is introduced. It is indeed the end of that barrier. The end perhaps of eternity. Some extraordinarily perceptive and superbly cadenced thoughts of Captain Cook are also read. Had a very poor education that man. Hmm.
Brilliant effects are also achieved, realising graphically and very musically the delirium of slow starvation that fell on the intruders. While the Aborigines ate well and failed to convince the white men they should eat what they ate. In the narration there is the fascinating comparison made by Hughes of the jubilant American sense of space (“Go West young man”) and that of the early white Australians, as in the section “The Melancholy Bush”.
There are too many details here to allow a comprehensive description of the work. Note however how the reeds are sometimes made to dance sinuously and to rise in a series of melodic undulations harmonised to an almost banshee shrillness and simultaneous eerie sweetness. More bluntly, the work is often dramatic, forceful, even jarring, and also brilliant in its voicings and changes of momentum. The trumpet section sometimes blasts up high in a way that may remind some of the old Stan Kenton orchestra.
There is an appreciation included in the notes, by Paul Grabowsky, himself a master of orchestral expression I am thinking now particularly of Ringing The Bell Backward. This is a period of impressive conceptual Australian works, including Lloyd Swanton’s Ambon, Paul Cutlan’s Across the Top and the band Baecastuff’s Mutiny Music.