Eric Myers Jazz

sydney arts guide

This folder contains reviews written by Eric Myers for the Sydney Arts Guide, edited by David Kary. Readers can click on the INDEX button for a list of reviews or articles in this folder.

THE EXTRAORDINARY HIROMI PERFORMS AT CITY RECITAL HALL

Reviewed by Eric Myers

Sydney Arts Guide, October 27, 2025

The Japanese pianist and composer Hiromi Uehara, mostly known mononymously as Hiromi, is not a new artist. She is now 46 and has been around for a long time, even though her profile in Australia has been low.  She first came to notice internationally as long ago as 2011 when she won a Grammy for her work on the album The Stanley Clarke Band, which won Best Contemporary Jazz Album in that year.  She’s known for blending a number of genres in her compositions and playing, including stride, post-bop, progressive rock, classical and fusion. Throughout her career, she’s released 12 acclaimed albums. In 2021, she performed at the opening ceremony of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which were postponed to 2021 owing to the Covid pandemic. Clues to her uniqueness can be gauged by the adjectives writers have come up with to describe her…

SAMARA JOY: A GORGEOUS PERFORMANCE AT THE WOMEN’S JAZZ FESTIVAL

Reviewed by Eric Myers

Sydney Arts Guide, October 28, 2025

The 25-year-old American singer Samara Joy, nominally the headline artist of the Sydney International Women’s Jazz Festival (SIWJF) performed under somewhat difficult circumstances: she had come down with a respiratory infection in advance of this concert. Given an exceedingly warm reception from the audience as soon as she emerged onstage at City Recital Hall, she immediately apologised for her condition, saying that she had travelled a long way to get to Australia, and she would do her best to “give what I got”, or words to that effect. It had been heard that the four front-line players in her American septet (trombone, trumpet, alto sax & tenor sax) were also sick, while the rhythm section players (piano, bass & drums) were well…

MELANIE CHARLES: AN ODD EXPERIENCE AT MARY’S UNDERGROUND

Reviewed by Eric Myers

Sydney Arts Guide, October 29, 2025

When a musical artist such as Brooklyn-born Melanie Charles is promoted as “renowned for her genre-blending fusion of jazz, soul, and R&B, layered with electronics and samples”, one doesn’t quite know what to expect. Those genres are of course related forms of improvised music, but which of them would be dominant? In fact, I wondered, how much jazz would we expect to hear, in what is after all a jazz festival? The result in this case, I’m sorry to say, was ambiguous.Of course, the Sydney International Women’s Jazz Festival (SIWJF) is not merely a jazz festival, it’s specifically a women’s jazz festival, so I expect that the inclusion of Charles (compositions, vocals, flute, effects) and her two accompanying musicians Paul Wilson Bae (keyboards), and Cinque ‘Ignabu’ Kemp (drums) could well be justified…