This year’s theme is Notes From The Hard Road And Beyond – A Musical Journey From Revolution To Redemption with an astounding lineup: Mavis Staples, Joss Stone, Emmanuel Jal, Paul Dempsey and Rickie Lee Jones is back again, with The Black Arm Band reprising their stint as backing band. While they are not giving away the setlist just yet, expect a night of soul and protest music, never to be repeated. “I want people to be entertained,” says Melbourne Festival Artistic Director Brett Sheehy. “I want their hearts to be lifted up into their throats. Over the past year and a half, putting this year’s festival together all these threads of protest and revolution have emerged, the big pro-democracy movement right across the Middle East and North Africa, it seemed all around the world people were coming together to affect change for good. That became the theme and thread for the main program of this year’s festival. Tackling it chronologically, music and civil rights first really came together in the United States in the ‘60s, where the gospel music was closely tied to Martin Luther King and all Civil Rights protests there.”
The link to the Civil Rights movement was what kicked the artist selection off. “A woman who was actually called the voice of the Civil Rights movement was Mavis Staples,” Brett explains.“She is a great gospel singer and was a friend of Martin Luther King’s. She is still alive and still singing wonderfully, so we thought it would be great to draw the arch from her in the 60s right through to the 21st century were have people like Emmanuel Jal, the hip hop and rap star, singing about revolution and war, hopefully in a redemptive way, pulling people out of the abyss of that. The Black Arm Band were really keen to work with Ricky Lee Jones again, they loved the collaboration last year, I did too. Emmanuel I have always wanted to work with, to present his Australian debut, he has never performed here before. Joss Stone, Paul Dempsey came on board and it just grew from there. It’s a great finale, pulling together what has been on stage for the previous two and a half weeks of the festival. What I love about this, it’s not often on a festival where you can do something that is only ever going to happen once in history. It’s never happened before and it will never happen again. To be able to do that for Melbourne is a thrill and I hope it is a thrill for the people of Melbourne as well.”
The Black Arm Band are a driving force in getting these concerts off the ground. “When I got this job a few years ago, one thing I said I wanted to do was work with The Black Arm Band as much as possible,” Brett says of the inspiration for the concert.“In terms of indigenous contemporary music there is nothing like them. We did a piece in my first festival called Dirt Song, which was about preservation of language. It was fantastic so I wondered if we could do something as an international collaboration. We talked through the themes of the festival last year, which were spirituality and mortality and came up with the concept of Songs to Leave Behind, which was a terrific success. So we thought it would be good to do another finale concert in the bowl, which has capacity for 10,000 people.”
The success and reception of the concert is a goal that Brett is looking to replicate. “Last year when they all sang Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, it was phenomenal,” he says.“We are certainly going to finish this year like that again, with another amazing number that will bring all the people in the audience to their feet. Just seeing the bond that had developed between the international artists and our artists, that was a real kick. What has been great about Joss, Mavis, Ricky, Paul and Emmanuel is their excitement about working with The Black Arm Band and wanting to do the concert for that reason. This is not a massive, commercial gig, we cant begin to compete in that area, but the integrity of what we are trying to do musically we have been able to get some major, major stars on board, because they want to be part of it.”
The Melbourne Festival has plenty of other gigs on during its run with Mono, Black Dice, Okkervil River, Aesop Rock, Kimya Dawson, Konono No 1, Jello Biafra, Sulumi, Will Sheff, Lucky Dragons and Bacholorette all playing as part of the program.
“Great art has the power to inspire, to challenge, to illuminate, to answer questions about ourselves and the world around us, to shift us and move us in some way,” Brett says of the Festival. “So we come out at the end of the experience, we are altered, and altered for the better. I hope people walk away from the Notes concert being inspired at their own potential of when it’s needed to protest, to speak up, to not be quite, to gather together with other members of their community to affect change for the good when that is required. I hope anyone that comes into contact with the festival comes out the other end with the capacity to do that, or at least the idea in their head that it is achievable.”
