The ceaselessly innovative and searching composer and Butch Morris died yesterday in New York. He had been under treatment of cancer for several years. Morris was 65. He developed an approach to big band music that he called conduction. It made demands on musicians by insisting on intensive, intuitive listening, reaction and interaction. The effort involved adjustment to Morris’s highly personalized methods of conducting while simultaneously composing and arranging through a system of cues and hand motions.
Russell Morris redefined himself and the Australian Blues genre in 2013 with the release of the landmark album ‘Sharkmouth’. The stories, people and events of our collective history would see Russell collect the ARIA for Best Blues & Roots Album. He followed this success in 2014 with ‘Van Diemen’s Land’; an album whose panorama spanned colonial horrors to WW2 bombers and Japanese labour camps; dramas on river and sea and character portraits from Birdsville to Kings Cross. It went on to receive another ARIA nomination for Best Blues & Roots Album & win multiple Australian music awards. In 2016, Russell completed his trilogy with the release of ‘Red Dirt, Red Heart’; filled with tales of bushrangers, jails, desert road trips and indigenous heroes. Again he collected the ARIA for Best Blues & Roots Album. Ghosts & Legends: Songs From The Blues Trilogy is a personally curated album of songs from Russell’s multi-award winning blues trilogy.
This is Russell Morris and Rick Springfield like you’ve never heard them before. They have come together to create Jack Chrome & The Darkness Waltz, an album that celebrates Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) with the narrator, Jack Chrome, leading the listener through a compelling song cycle about life and death.
This is the second recording for Quartz from Olwen Morris, offering a cross section of works from the Classical period through the early Contemporary. Olwen Morris grew up in war-time rural Wales, where she was first taught by Josef Gruenbaum, a musician and lawyer from Stuttgart, who with his family had fled Nazi Germany. Olwen made extraordinary progress, and enrolled at 14 as the youngest student at Cardiff College of Music, (later becoming the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama). She soon made her first early live broadcasts, including a concerto with the BBC Welsh Orchestra, and debut concerts in Cardiff's City Hall and Reardon Smith Theatre. Teaching, directing church music, organ improvisation and chamber music have all played parts throughout a lifetime in music, but solo playing continues to remain the vital center of it all. Her performances of the Viennese classics are remarkable for their insight and depth, and her playing of French music for sensitivity to sensual sound, also reflecting her long close association with northern France, where her artist husband, David Morris painted.