Frank Presley's interview with singer/bandleader Judy Campbell 14

Historical article recovered from a Wayback capture dated 2018-02-24.

th

Nov 2004

” Personally, everything I do is underpinned by that search for unity and diversity.”

Frank Presley:

Judy, what is your musical background?

Judy Campbell:

Varied like most of us

FP:

Are you from South Africa?

JC:

I’m from South Africa originally but I’ve been here forever. I started out classical training and I come from a family of Jazz musicians. So Jazz was kind of a no brainer in a way and more lately I’ve come to also be involved in quite a lot of classical music and I’ve always been very involved in choral music. Also singing in vocal groups and choirs. I now direct the choir at the North Shore Temple Emmanuel here in Chatswood. I have a very wide musical range of activities.

FP:

The band ‘Mosaic’. There’s just a fantastic line up in this band. There are so many great musicians to choose from in Sydney. How do you go about choosing a band, especially one like this one bearing in mind your theme ‘Common Ground’?

JC:

I don’t think it was quite so calculated as sitting down with a piece of paper and saying ‘ok who are we going to have on drums here’. It grew a little more organically than that. Different people played at different gigs and it is gradually like the pieces fall into place. Do you play tennis at all?

FP:

Yes

JC:

It’s when you hit that sweet spot and you think that’s it. That’s how I arrived at the combination that’s on the CD. Of course with such a great line up you don’t always get all these people available and that’s OK because there are lots of other great players. There’s kind of a core of the band, which is mainly Gerard Masters, Justine Bradley, Mark Ginsberg and myself, and we are the four vocalists in the band (four part vocals in different parts). The four of us have to be there otherwise it doesn’t work at all.

FP:

You’ve come back from South Africa recently on a tour. Tell us about that.

JC:

It was just awesome really. We had the best time. We actually made a documentary. We went to the National Arts Festival. We worked with an indigenous African choir there who are actually on the CD. We collaborated by distance with them and recorded an African song called ‘Nkosi Somandla’. That was quite an experience and we forged quite a good relationship with them. Now we’re talking about doing a collaborative CD of African material actually because they have invited us to tour with them in Holland in 2006. That sounds a long way away but it isn’t . Plus we played at the Cape Town Jazz and Blues Festival. We did so many gigs it was just amazing. Really really a full schedule. The real highlight of it was also delivering music workshops in townships around Cape Town. A lot of our documentary covers that material because it’s so interesting. These incredibly talented kids who don’t have access to venues and bands. You have to be very sensitive to the whole situation there and just go with an open heart and mind. We were able to do that fortunately and we were also able to get some of these kids to the venues we were playing. We did a lot of collaborative stuff which was great. Really exciting. One of the things with ‘Mosaic’ which makes it a very appealing package for festival organisers because within that line up you also have, Nick McBride’s ‘Rectangle’, you have the Gerard Masters Trio, etc etc. Five bands in one and they are very different in flavour.

FP:

How important is funding from the NSW Ministry of Arts for Jazz music and improvised music to be able to do things like the tour of South Africa?

JC:

Well it doesn’t happen if you don’t get that support. That’s it. We did earn fee income over there but the grant from the NSW Ministry was such that we couldn’t have done it without that. It’s a really important part of supporting the arts in Australia.

FP:

There are other art forms and even the more traditional style of Jazz, the argument is there that they don’t need those grants because they’ve got a sufficient following to be able to support it, but it’s certainly a proven way of organically growing the music especially in Europe.

JC:

I think almost anywhere. If you have a good vision of what you want to do on a tour and you’ve got your ducks all lined up, and you’ve got your support from the other side that you need to make it work, then you bring the funding from this side. It’s a really strong combination and I’d say that things have come out of this tour on many levels both in terms of future opportunities but also the impact it’s had on the band and on what I can see is possible as opposed to what I saw as possible before this tour. So I think these grants are incredibly important on a number of levels. They literally help you promote the band in new markets, but the impact that it has on the band itself as a unit and artistically I think is very important certainly in our case it’s had a big impact and I’m very grateful for that grant.

FP:

Judy, the whole theme of ‘Common Ground’, tell us what you’re trying to achieve with that.

JC:

That’s part of my ‘shtick’ you know? Personally everything I do is underpinned by that search for unity and diversity. With ‘Mosaic’, we’ve done some interesting work with cross media events work in visual arts. We hope to do another one of those up on the central coast next year at the Lake Macquarie Art Gallery. Finding ways to bridge things that are viewed as unbridgeable or separate disparate. An example is the event, which we did tonight, which combined jazz, funk, traditional Indonesian music and traditional Jewish music but all in a Jazz context and it was demonstrating this idea of common ground.

FP:

Jazz is a great vehicle for that isn’t it?

JC:

It is a wonderful vehicle for that because you can draw from different sources and threads really effectively and amalgamate them into something wonderful and new and fresh and fun to play so that’s something that is my kind of mission I suppose you could call it.

FP:

Interesting you mentioned the Jazz to visuals in the background. I first came across that at a performance by Ornette Coleman at the Umbria Jazz Festival (Italy) in 1998. It’s distinct in my memory that he had some dancers and some African drummers on stage with his normal band but a constant visual movie documentary thing happening in the background. So you were listening to all different aspects of the music but at the same time watching this visual, which was obviously synchronised.

JC:

As an integrated performance piece. Well what we did was slightly different. We did some of that. We had this theme of unity and diversity and we had sculptures and we had photographic exhibits and paintings. The photographic exhibition for example covered the transformation of a woman into a man through a series of very graphic photographs of that change process. That was certainly diverse and we had a pair of clay cellists done by a sculptor John Balland. It was all looking for this theme even though it was clay and sculpture, there was music in that piece, but what the Gerard Masters Trio did on that particular night was, one of the sculptors came up on stage with one of her pieces and talked about it and why she had done it. What the background and the underlying meaning of it was for her and then the trio actually responded and created in the moment a brand new piece of music in response to that, which was really interesting. People really enjoyed it because they felt they were on the inside of the magic circle. Inside the creative process. They got to actually be a part of it. Something that an audience doesn’t usually get to be a part of. They see the finished product rather than the process of its creation.

FP:

A lot of people say they don’t understand Jazz but that really comes to the essence of what Jazz is all about doesn’t it?

JC:

Well certainly the improvisational side of it yes. To try and capture an essence and render it in a sound painting if you like.

FP:

Judy tell us about the piece ‘Common Ground’

JC:

Well that encapsulates this whole philosophy that I was talking to you about. You’ll hear, if you listen carefully in the background, the backing vocals actually say the word ‘peace’ in Hebrew and in Arabic behind these, what are meant to be, kind of angels voices exhorting people to find common ground. Looking for the things that unite us as opposed to allowing the things that divide us to define how we relate to one another. The lyrics are really very important in this. Mark and I wrote the tune together which was an interesting exercise in common ground right there and I wrote the lyrics for this.