Perth Voice Interactive

CHRISTMAS bells could be hard to find in Perth music shops this year—and not because of a production shortage.

“I’ve been buying out all of the local shops’ jingle bells,” WA jazz diva Libby Hammer confesses to the Voice.

In the hands of eager 4–7 year-olds they’ll ring out a jazzy Christmas as part of Hammer and her Jazz4all gang’s very interactive Christmas Cushion Concerts, at the Ellington Jazz Club.

It’s all about getting kids interested in jazz from an early age, with a mix stories and popular songs such as Jingle Bells and Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer—but not as you know them, Hammer says: “We jazz it up. Kids love it.”

Often older siblings, who’d tried to look cool and bored during the show, sidle up to band members to say “I have been playing guitar for a while,” Hammer says.

Jazz has a chequered past in Perth, as the Fremantle Jazz Festival in the early 2000s demonstrated, when it failed to anchor as an annual event despite attracting a stellar international line up and sell-out shows.

Many fear jazz as something too hard to understand, and despite its longevity as a genre it’s never become mainstream—nor even part of the top 10 on commercial radio—something Hammer would love to change.

“One thing we want to do is share our knowledge of jazz and make it accessible.”

What to the uninitiated can sound discordant just needs to be understood, and people need to appreciate what a musician is doing with improvisation, the patron of Jazz Fremantle says.

“[They] are following a chord progression and composing on the spot.”

Mistakes are something to be expected in the process—and is the flipside to the “exhilaration” of the moment, Hammer says.

“Sometimes you create absolute magic, that you couldn’t do if you rehearse.”

Armed with a University of WA degree in French and a passion for theatre, the 45-year-old “discovered” jazz at 23.

“I heard the mysterious and sophisticated sounds…and wanted to learn more.”

Accepted into the WA Academy of Performing Arts jazz course she’s never looked back and Libby Hammer and Hip Mo’ Toast are synonymous with jazz in Perth.

The Libby Hammer Quintet is performing a series of Christmas shows for adults at the Ellington Jazz Club, Beaufort Street, Perth, December 22, 23 and 24, 7.30pm.

“[Jazzy] Christmas tunes, including cuties such as All I Want For Christmas is My Two Front Teeth, Cool Yule and Santa Baby.”

The Kids’ Cushion Concerts are on December 23 9.30–10.30, and 11am–noon. Tickets on the Ellington website.

by JENNY D’ANGER