The Jazz Haus Canberra: Paul Grabowsky

Paul Grabowsky is coming to Tuggeranong Arts Centre on Saturday 12 July, and while it’s difficult to describe Grabowsky’s career easily, it is easy to understand what a special and rare opportunity this will be for lovers of jazz and classical piano.

His ability to seamlessly integrate jazz and classical elements is frequently noted, with performances often incorporating both established works and his own improvisations. His solo performances reprise much of the music recorded on his album Solo (ABC). Mainly composed by the pianist, the music explores ideas that have interested him for decades: harmonic ambiguity and simultaneous tempi, often explored within the framework of songs without words, melodic, whimsical and memorable. He also often includes songs that refer to the canon of great jazz composers (Ellington, Monk) and masters of the American popular songbook.

His gig calendar takes him from one end of the country to the other, performing everything from orchestral works to art songs. In the next few months alone, he will perform both solo and in various formats with Vince Jones, James Morrison, William Barton and the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, to name just a few. Don’t miss a rare opportunity to experience this intimate solo performance.

Among his many awards are eight ARIAs, the Melbourne Prize for Music, a H.C. Coombs Fellowship and an Order of Australia. He has been a director of some of Australia’s most prominent arts festivals, the composer of nearly thirty feature film scores, and several works of music theatre, the founder and leader for nineteen years of the Australian Art Orchestra, an executive at the ABC, and currently heads up Monash University Performing Arts Centres.

Whether as composer, teacher, television personality, mentor or advocate for the role of artistic expression as a defining attribute of contemporary life, for him this is all informed by his work as a pianist, and composer, particularly in the field of jazz, where, according to him, ‘the piano never lies’.

His musical journeys have resulted in collaborations with musicians from many countries, not least with the First Nations peoples of Australia, and those journeys continue.