These were announced this morning, with the 11 categories covering contemporary classical, jazz and experimental music.
It is Kelly’s first tilt at these awards. He is up for the Work of the Year: Vocal/Choral for Conversations With Ghosts, his collaboration with Western Australian composer and classical pianist James Ledger. These were performed around the country with virtuoso Genevieve Lacey and the Australian National Academy of Music orchestra, and released as an album.
The piece puts music to the poems of Emily Dickinson, Kenneth Slessor, Tennyson and Les Murray. After taking time off from songwriting to work on his book How to Make Gravy, Kelly felt rusty so he found poems and tried to sing them to spark his creativity again. The similar themes of Slessor’s Five Bells about a friend who jumped /pushed off a ferry in Sydney Harbour in the 1920s and Tennyson’s Ring Out, Wild Bells about a dead friend, saw him contact Ledger about finding more similar poems. The two had met backstage at a Kelly show at the Astor Theatre in Perth.
