Chris Johnston

1 month ago | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Chris Johnston

In the final weeks of 2023, the celebrated British jazz musician Shabaka Hutchings put down his saxophone after a live show playing John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme with four drummers at a heritage church in Hackney, London. He knew it was a goodbye. He used the sax just once more over Christmas, to finish parts of the astonishing Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, the second album under his own name, released last year.

2 months ago | themonthly.com.au | Chris Johnston |Paul Barry |Margaret Simons |Louise Milligan

The Chicago indie trio’s new album of infectious weird pop unaffectedly wears its ’80s and ’90s influences on it sleeve Horsegirl is a three-piece indie band from Chicago that formed in 2019 when they were just kids, around 17. A high-school band. It all grew pretty quickly, as history dictates when cool young things with a familiar, super-catchy sound and the right backers start getting written about.

Oct 30, 2024 | themonthly.com.au | Chris Johnston |Don Watson |Anna Krien |Jason Koutsoukis

Sarah Davachi is a storied composer and musician from Canada exploring classical and chamber music, and the art of the ambient synthesiser drone, in extraordinary ways and in amazing spaces. Pipe organs in churches are her thing: she abstracts, retunes and reinvents them in her recordings and residencies. There is a certain gravity she brings to her recorded music – 12 albums or doubles since 2015.

Jun 18, 2024 | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Chris Johnston

Love Changes Everything is Dirty Three’s new studio album, the first from the Australian trio in 12 years. Out this month, it consists of six songs/compositions/outré jams titled “Love Changes Everything”, from “I” to “VI”. The record has no words, no literal indicators – just 40 minutes of extraordinary musical freefall. I say “freefall” because there’s no tether attaching the band to what we might call rock music, no line between Dirty Three and convention.

May 10, 2024 | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Chris Johnston

We get in at night from Los Angeles in a black Ford Mustang with a deep rumbling undercarriage and enough thrust to throw us back in our heated seats. All those roadside taco vans on the way out of the city, along the underside of the San Bernardino National Forest heading east, passed by in a blur of colour. Dusk, then dark, in California. The cold sets in quickly in the spring.