ABOUT 100 saxophone players will belt out AC/DC’s It’s a Long way to the Top as part of the inaugural WAAPA Sax Festival in Perth this weekend. The two-day event culminates in a mass sax orchestra playing songs including March by Gustav Holst, the theme to Cinema Paradiso, and a fun arrangement of the aforementioned…

TO make their upcoming concert truly authentic, The HIP Company is playing music transcribed by Jesuit missionaries who lived in Beijing during the 18th century. The ensemble specialise in Baroque music, using traditional instruments and scores to make their performance super faithful to the original, with the odd contemporary twist. Their latest project Chinoiserie fouses…

SOME of the best art is borne out of adversity. In September 2021, Perth artist Simon Sieradzki was due to return from his studio residency in Germany, when Australia’s borders slammed shut and he found himself stuck in Leipzig. After scrambling to find somewhere to stay, he went along to the opening of an art…

• Gemma Farrell (middle) with her quintet. PERTH musician Gemma Farrell has been nominated for a humanitarian award for her tireless efforts for women and non-binary performers in jazz. Farrell has been running the Young Women in Jazz Program since 2014, and at the height of the #metoo movement in 2017 formed The Artemis Orchestra,…

Is childbirth as traumatic as the scene in Alien when the creature bursts out of John Hurt’s stomach? That’s one of the questions Kaitlin Tinker tackles in her darkly comic one-woman play Earthside, which draws parallels between Ellen Ripley’s daring escape from the Nostromo spaceship in Alien and the struggles of childbirth and looking after…

AFTER spending seven years trading licks with blues journeymen Dilip n the Davs, Andrew Pring and Daniel Wiggins knew each other’s chops inside out. So when their time playing with the Davs drew to an end, the pair found something was missing – like that person you’re so close to they can finish your sentence.…

IT WAS three years in the making and features more than 70 artists, 200 artworks – welcome to the highly ambitious Tracks We Share: Contemporary Art of the Pilbara. Taking the audience on an artistic odyssey from the Pilbara coastline, inland through the towns and the pastoral leases and on into the desert, the WA…

THERE comes a time when the pressures of life can start to erode the wide-eyed joy and creativity you took for granted as a child. This happens to the protagonist in the play The Great Un-Wondering of Wilbur Whittaker, who by middle-age has conformed to the 9-5 and his dreary, sensible life in the suburbs.…

IF you chucked Glenn Miller and Led Zeppelin into a blender, you’d probably get something close to the jazz odyssey Astonishing Device. It’s the latest album from Perth jazz guitarist Joshua Nicholls, who started out shredding in his bedroom to axe deities like Dave Mustaine (Megadeth), John Petrucci (Dream Theater) and Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin). “I’ve…

AFTER 126 years, the oldest art society in WA – The West Australian Society of Arts – is still going strong and will hold its annual exhibition in Fremantle this month. Featuring oil, pastel, watercolour and acrylic paintings from about 150 WASA members, the exhibition includes a diverse mix of amateur and professional artists. The…