The Music Show

Harnessing looping pedals, percussion and vocal manipulation, Tune-Yards make a very big sound for a core membership of two people. It's been ten years since the experimental pop project released their third album Nikki Nack and creepy hit Water Fountain . Songwriter and singer Merrill Garbus is on The Music Show to talk about the duo's complex rhythms, vocal athleticism, and how to play with word...

Legendary jazz pianist Herbie Hancock returns to The Music Show. He’s a bandleader, a composer and a professor, and at the age of 84 he’s got one of the longest living memories in the jazz world. He joins Andy to remember collaborators like Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter, and to ask whether jazz can be a path towards peace.  Tenzin Choegyal is a Tibetan multi-instrumentalist, and as he shares Tibet...

For someone referred to as "the Queen of Jazz" and "First Lady of Song", there's a surprising amount we don't know about legendary jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald. She didn't fit the image of a star: she was incredibly polite, avoided drugs and swearing, and kept her private life entirely private. But when she sang, people listened. Her clear diction, perfect intonation and master of scat singing made...

Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto makes a welcome return to The Music Show, this time with American singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane. They talk about collaborating and songwriting and perform live in the studio; and Pekka tells us about completing and conducting a symphony by his late brother, Jaakko Kuusisto. When was the last time you sat down and listened to a record from start to finish? And wh...

How The Saints and Radio Birdman paved the way for punk and independent music in Australia.

Australian music icon and proud Torres Strait Islander Christine Anu  has just released her first album of new music in 20 years. Waku-Minaral A Minalay was recorded across the Pacific in places like New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Torres Strait Islands and the Solomon Islands - utilising traditional percussion instruments like the Warup (drums), the Urub (shakers) and the Kulap (seed pot rattl...

In 1961, the first elected leader of the Democratic Republic of the Congo was assassinated just months after the country’s newfound independence. Unbeknownst to themselves, US jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Dizzie Gillespie, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln played an unlikely role in his death. Belgian director Johan Grimonprez joins us on The Music Show to explain the bizarre lin...

With a voice comfortable singing baroque repertoire and world premieres, Roderick Williams is one of the most sought-after baritones in the UK. He’s also an arranger and composer (he wrote music for King Charles’ coronation), but tells Andrew Ford that his most important label is ‘musician’. He’s in Australia for concerts at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, the Newcastle Music Festival, a...

Kamilaroi and Tongan singer and musician Radical Son (AKA David Leha) has just released his second album, a full decade after his debut. Called Bilambiyal (The Learning) it demonstrates his growth as a songwriter with a knack for weaving personal stories alongside wider reflections on culture, community and Country. He's also a masterful collaborator, bringing in the voices of legends Frank Yamma...

Brett Dean and Matthew Jocelyn's Hamlet (2017) has been one of the most successful operas of recent years with performances at the Glyndebourne Festival, the Adelaide Festival, New York's Metropolitan Opera and the Bavarian State Opera. Now it comes to the Sydney Opera House in its original production by Neil Armfield, with the tenor Allan Clayton, who created the role of Hamlet, perhaps singing i...

This program contains strong language throughout.  Before Madonna brought voguing into the limelight, the queer community had been quietly putting on balls and celebrating this form of expression since the 1970s. Far from the ballroom of waltzes and tangos, queer ballroom is an artform, a community, a form of protest and its very own genre of music. You might have seen the seminal documentary Pari...

Andrew Gurruwiwi leads the Andrew Gurruwiwi Band in what they call 'Yolŋu funk', a mix between reggae, heavy metal, and funk in language from across the region. Andrew tells us about his music-making, his career as a radio presenter, and explains the stories behind some of the tracks on the band's dynamic debut album, Sing Your Own Song. "He basically invents the rules of jazz. He shows you 'this...

First Nations listeners are advised that this program contains the names and voices of people who have died. At the start of NAIDOC Week, The Music Show explores the legacy of the late Ruby Hunter – short in stature, a giant in music, and a mentor and parental figure to so many First Nations musicians in subsequent generations. We’ll hear Ruby from the archives, and catch up with Emily Wurramara a...

Russian-American conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya comes to Opera Australia to conduct Puccini’s Il trittico, a rare triptych of operas which span tragedy, farce, and religious fervour. Lidiya is at home with the operatic canon but she’s also conducted a swathe of new opera world premieres. She joins Andy to talk about finding the same passion for the music through new and old works. Three of India's m...

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners are advised that this program contains the names and voices of people who have died. Neal Peres Da Costa’s most recent recordings include a Mozart piano concerto and a Robert Schumann song cycle, each using a model of piano its composer would have recognised. But as he explains on today’s show, there’s much more to this music than getting the instrum...

British singer songwriter Grace Petrie has an EP called “There’s No Such Thing As A Protest Singer” – but if there was such a thing she would definitely be one of the preeminent ones. Her musical career started in the early years of the UK Conservative Party’s now 15 years in government, and she’s railed against injustice throughout those years. She’s on The Music Show to talk about hope, activism...

Sixty years ago The Fab Four toured Australia for the first and last time. Greg Armstrong is the co-author of When We Was Fab - Inside The Beatles' Australasian Tour 1964. He takes us behind the scenes of the tour— the promoters who lucked out by signing the band up before the height of their fame, the late inclusion of the Adelaide shows, the band's unprecedented reception in the streets, and how...

American composer Caroline Shaw’s latest album, a collaboration with Sō Percussion, is called Rectangles and Circumstance. It’s a collection of ten songs run through with words by Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte, William Blake and Christina Rossetti, as well as Caroline herself. She joins Andy from her home in the US to talk about her collaborators and her co-poets. German cellist Nicolas Altstaedt ...

This week on the Music Show, we take a look into the archives to an interview with the late, great Clive James. Andy spoke to Clive back in 2003 about what it was like writing for the song and the stage, and they discussed some of Clive's favourite pieces of musical poetry — from Stephen Sondheim to Aretha Franklin.  As ever, we’re indebted to Penny Lomax and Maureen Cooney for producing the first...

Three authors on music from The Music Show archives. Margaret Atwood spoke to Andrew Ford back in 2003, after the transformation of her novel The Handmaid’s Tale into an opera by Danish composer Poul Ruders. Andrea Goldsmith joined Andy on stage for the 2013 Melbourne Writers’ Festival after her novel The Memory Trap invoked Beethoven amongst other composers. Live performance from Zoe Knighton and...

The Music Show goes Deep Inside the Blues with photographer and writer Margo Cooper, who’s assembled a beautiful book of photographs and interviews with blues musicians from Chicago to the Mississippi Delta. She joins Andy on The Music Show to outline a sprawling, searching and ultimately living tradition, plus interviews with Blues legends from the Music Show archive. Deep Inside the Blues is pub...

Indie-rock veterans Deerhoof are set to make their first appearance in Australia in a decade, and drummer Greg Saunier joins us on The Music Show to discuss their journey. With a repertoire spanning nineteen albums and a diverse range of styles, Greg talks to us about politics, conceptual art, and his own foray into solo work for the first time in the band's long career.  Soprano Anna Fraser sings...

Ziggy Ramo returns to The Music Show with a new album that’s more than just an album. Human? will be released later this year but right now the only way you can hear it is through QR codes in his book of the same name.  It’s a new and beautifully contradictory sound for Ziggy, blending folk (with guest vocals from Vonn) and his signature rap, precipitated by Ziggy picking up the guitar for the fir...

Artist Jeremy Deller first made the connection between acid house music and brass bands back in 1995. The project that emerged, ACID BRASS, brings community bands together in raucous live events. Deller says he was “liberated by brass bands” – since then he’s won the Turner Prize, made conceptual, installation and video art across the world, and represented the UK at the Venice Biennale. Now he br...

Errollyn Wallen’s memoir Becoming a Composer is a look into the mind of the composer as well as the life of one. Born in Belize but now based in the far-flung north of Scotland, where she sometimes inhabits a lighthouse, she works at a brisk pace, composing prolifically for orchestra, chamber ensemble, choir, and over twenty operas. Her major public commissions have included music for The Last Nig...