Spirit Lines: A Musical Reconciliation

This performance will be live streamed straight from our main stage to you at home simultaneously via the Frankston Arts Centre Facebook page and YouTube channel. Join us online on Thursday 9 July, 7.30pm!

A new musical collaboration between Mutti Mutti man Kutcha Edwards, multiple Latin Grammy winner Daniel Jauregui and percussionist Adrian Hearn, exploring the reconciliation of ancestral lines in a spirit of hope. Together, the trio have embarked on a journey of collaborative songwriting, working on principles of dialogue, exchange and partnership.

Spirit Lines, as they refer to themselves, blends Uncle Kutcha’s stirring blues, Jauregui’s Venezuelan melodies and Hearn’s Afro-Caribbean rhythms to evoke a highly original harmony that strongly resonates at a time in which so much guise needs to be given to harmony and reconciliation. The resulting creation, according to Uncle Kutcha, is “like dropping a pebble”: a small contribution with tremendous ripples.

Born on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River, Uncle Kutcha Edwards has had a long and prolific artistic career in acts such Watbalimba, Blackfire and the Black Arm Band with whom he toured extensively in Australia and internationally, as well as releasing several solo albums. “Music is not what I do, it is who I am. My songs may be contemporary but they are more than 40,000 years old. They come through me from my ancestors and my people…and they tell our stories,” he says.

Born across the planet, in Venezuela, Daniel Jauregui is a musician, composer and producer with an active career as an international session musician. His name has been credited in over 50 releases in a variety of genres, many of which hit top spots in charts around Latin America and USA, has shared the stage with many top international artists such as Shakira and Juan Luis Guerra and received two Latin Grammys. In Melbourne since 2012, he has quickly risen to a key role in the Australian music scene.

The third element in the musical collaboration is Adrian Hearn, percussionist and scholar who has studied Cuban and West African drumming for over twenty years, initiate of the Afro-Cuban batá drumming tradition, and leader of the band Suns of Mercury.