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hey both sat on the floor, legs crossed, their backs against the window, violins poised, and improvised together. Tuppence the dog voted with her feet and padded out of the room, but the rest of us watched in gobsmacked admiration. “It was a little intimidating,” Jenny confides, recalling that evening as we conduct this interview over Skype. “I tend to focus on one particular technique at one time, and for the last couple of years it’s been classical viola and composition. The Indian classical technique is so thorough that in order to feel comfortable, you have to be playing it every day and I wasn’t. So I chose not to do the traditional Indian forms that Kala was offering; I decided to mix it up a little bit and go for a more open and melodic strand. Which I hope was pleasing for all!”
T
It’s morning for me in London, but the flame-haired Jenny I see on my screen is reaching the end of an energetic day of tree climbing in the Dandenong mountains with her children. Jenny is fourth gen- eration Australian on both sides of her family, her ancestors being of Irish and Welsh extraction. “Poor desperate settlers, but no convicts’ blood I’m afraid,” she laughs from her Melbourne kitchen, her broad Aussie accent full of good cheer.
She can pinpoint the exact moment she decided to sing Aus- tralian settler songs. It was on 13 March 2004. Until this point she’d done everything but. She grew up playing in church, got a qualifica- tion in classical viola, spent time in Ireland learning local fiddle styles, was taught by Arto Järvelä in Finland, studied Carnatic Indian violin, toured with ‘chamber pop’ group Naked Raven, joined a load of good-time Celtic bands and had wild times composing electro- acoustic soundtracks in the Circus Oz Band. Then followed several years leading the Australian world music fusion group Akin, and the release of a now hard-to-find solo album of instrumental pieces called Into The Ether.
“Akin did a lot of touring, so I went to a lot of folk festivals”, she remembers. “Every single time I saw what we call ‘bush bands’, play- ing Australian folk music, I’d have to walk away. It was really jolly, up- duh-duh-duh-da! It was just straight-ahead three chords and it seemed to be very masculine, I suppose. It didn’t appeal to me.”
That March in 2004 she had the radio on while caring for her five-month-old baby. “I was listening to my very favourite pro- gramme, which is called The Music Show [on ABC radio]. I was listen- ing to this young man singing an English song, ‘Early one morning, just as the sun was rising…’ I listened to it and all of a sudden it exploded into these beats and beautiful string lines. I went, ‘What’s this?!’ It was Jim Moray. They interviewed him and I thought, ‘Fancy that, an English person singing English songs.’ It was so right. I thought, ‘why aren’t I playing Australian songs?’ Every single festival I went to, we were always doing Irish songs, American songs, Scot- tish songs. Imagine the most daggiest thing you could possibly wear that you threw out ten years ago. That’s half as daggy as it was to sing Australian songs! But I thought, it really should be done. I didn’t tell anyone for a long time,” she reveals. “I was too scared!”
Eventually she asked two Melbourne jazz musicians, Christopher Hale and Anthony Schultz, to accompany her on what became her 2006 album, Farewell To Old England Forever. It features reworkings of old chestnuts like Waltzing Matilda and Bound For South Aus- tralia as you’ve never quite heard them before, and an entrancing version of the lullaby, Little Fish. The trio toured for a while but by 2009 Jenny wanted to try something new and experimental, and the ‘bush band sessions’ began.
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