Kate Ceberano and the PIJF All-Star Big Band

Kate Ceberano and PIJF Artistic Director Graham Wood. Image by Chantel Concei 

Opening for Kate Ceberano and the PIJF All-Star Big Band was the Julien Wilson Trio, comprising Melburnian Julien Wilson on saxophone, Stephen Magnusson on guitar and Steve Grant on accordion. It was a surprisingly attractive if seemingly unlikely combination of instruments, capable of real poetry. Already seasoned as a trio for the past decade, the three men served up truly beautiful, sometimes wild and strange music for the first half hour of the evening. In this year’s prestigious Jazz Bell Awards, Julien Wilson has just taken out no fewer than three separate awards: Best Australian Jazz Song of the Year for his track ‘Trout River’, and two others with the Julien Wilson Quartet, which pick up the title of Best Australian Jazz Ensemble as well as Best Australian Traditional Jazz Album, for ‘This Is Always’.

There were three big stars onstage when Kate Ceberano stepped up to the microphone: Ceberano herself, in full voice and ebullient form; the 16-piece Perth International Jazz Festival All-Stars Big Band under the personally diffident but musically assured direction of self-confessed ‘big-band junkie’, Music Director Mace Francis (Musical Director of the Western Australia Youth Jazz Orchestra or WAYJO); and lastly, the sublime acoustics of the Perth Concert Hall venue.

It wasn’t hard to see why the ARIA-award-winning Ceberano has long been the nation’s darling. Hers was a gorgeous, curvaceous stage presence with rich full sound to match, encased in a sexy graphite-grey sheath gown complete with a skittish kick-pleat thanks to one of Western Australia’s most noted fashion designers, Aurelio Costarella.

Noted for the versatility she has accumulated over her quarter-century of performing experience, Ceberano nonetheless clearly relished this return to her jazz roots, and ‘sang her ass off’ to quote the Festival Artistic Director, jazz pianist Graham Wood’s subsequent tweet. With Wood, flanked by a literally flamboyant candelabra à la Liberace, and the Big Band, she rolled out crowd-pleasers like ‘Greasy Sack Blues’, ‘I’m Beginning to See the Light’, and a velvet-mellow ‘Don’t Get Around Much Anymore’. Flagrantly flirting with the Big Band (‘all testosterone-fuelled’, she teased, with a shy director Francis visibly recoiling from the heat, judging by his body language), she tango-kicked that memorable dress as she sashayed across the stage towards the band to get more up close and personal, to establish stronger rapport.

It took just one encouraging ‘Onya Kate!’ shouted out from the audience during a rare hear-a-pin- drop pause, for Ceberano to warm the temperature further, as she relaxed prostrate on a couch to deliver a sultry ‘Night and Day’, and shamelessly schmoozed her adoring fans.

It wasn’t all jazz all the way. But it certainly was huge entertainment. And speaking of huge, the Big Band was spectacular, with luminous solos by the likes of New York-based trumpeter Mat Jodrell, US-based saxophonist Troy Roberts and Perth’s own saxophonist Jamie Oehlers, not to mention Wood’s elegant keyboard work.

There were some rough edges here and there—Ceberano mentioned onstage that she’d had only one rehearsal with the Big Band—but this was a night to remember, three hours of big value for patrons who had paid from $50–$80 for their tickets, and one justifiably ‘blurbed’ by the Festival organisers as the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the 2014 PIJF.