Paul Grabowsky and Brendan Joyce have a few things in common. For a start, they are brilliant musicians. Joyce is a violinist of renown and artistic director of Camerata – Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra. Grabowsky is a pianist, a renowned genre-crossing musician and composer and currently a professor at Monash University and director of the Monash University Academy of Performing Arts and Monash Art Ensemble.
Both men are at the top of their game, although Grabowsky is the older of the two and something of an icon.
The fact that the ARIA Award-winning Grabowsky is tickling the ivories with Camerata at upcoming concerts in Toowoomba and Brisbane is something delightful and a tad daunting for Joyce.
“I’m both thrilled and not just a bit intimidated to have Paul Grabowsky as our guest artist,” Joyce says. “What an insightful and thoughtful human being and those qualities shine through in his music making. Artists like this are truly good for the world.”
Grabowsky is a fan of Camerata and has especially come to know them over the past year during his tenure as QPAC’s Art of the Possible artist.
As well as being part of a mutual admiration society, these blokes have something else in common – and it’s something that’s a bit surprising. They both have deep connections to North Queensland. Joyce grew up in Ayr. He has made sure Camerata has a strong regional reach, with the company touring country Queensland again this year.
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Grabowsky, though, seems like the quintessential Melburnian. We all first came to know him through his time as musical director of the 1990-92 TV show Tonight Live With Steve Vizard. It was a national show out of Melbourne with a Melbourne flavour. Melburnians can’t help that.
Grabowsky’s intellectual rigour and his cool jazz style make him even more of a Melburnian, but when we chat ahead of his collaboration with Camerata he reveals his Queensland connections and they go way back, long before he was artistic director of the Queensland Music Festival from 2005 to 2007.
First of all, he reveals that his brother was born in Mount Morgan, just west of Rockhampton. And that his father, an engineer and musician, spent time in Townsville during World War II.
“Dad built airfields there around the time of the Battle of the Coral Sea,” Grabowsky recalls. “And he had a swing band in Townsville that included Americans stationed there at the time. The band was called Grabowsky and his Hot Shots. Dad played the drums and was a crooner.”
This may explain what is a nice surprise in the program of Camerata & Paul Grabowsky: The Art Of. As well as Bach, Ravel and music by Jamaican composer Eleanor Alberga, Grabowsky will be premiering a new work, Elegy and Caprices. He’ll also be playing the 1939 song, I Get Along Without You Very Well, a song that would have been popular in his father’s day and one his dad most likely sung, being the crooner that he was. It has been covered by everyone from Chet Baker to Frank Sinatra and it’s a favourite of Grabowsky’s.
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‘It’s a heartbreak ballad and every word is laced with irony, a series of denials’
The song was composed by Hoagy Carmichael in 1939, with lyrics based on a poem written by Jane Brown Thompson. Some of us got to know the version by Lew Stone and His Band, which was featured in the soundtrack to the popular British television series The Singing Detective, starring Michael Gambon.
“It’s one of my favorite songs,” Grabowsky says. “I have arranged my own reharmonisation of it. It’s a heartbreak ballad and every word is laced with irony, a series of denials. The payoff comes at the end.”
The song begins like this: I get along without you very well / Of course I do / Except when soft rains fall / And drip from leaves that I recall / The thrill of being sheltered in your arms / Of course I do / I get along without you very well.
The song was a hit when his dad was crooning, so there may be a bit of nostalgia involved there. Grabowsky’s newer work is a 20-minute piece with some improvisational sections. Well, he is a jazz musician.
“We have already rehearsed it and we prepared the ground with a workshop beforehand,” Grabowsky says. “I delivered a draft weeks ago and we played though it. It is improvisational in parts but it’s also tightly structured. It makes life interesting.”
Grabowsky says he loves working in Queensland, a state he describes as “the gift that keeps on giving”.
He is a busy man. So busy, in fact, that when I ask him what else he is up to he refers me to his website – paulgrabowsky.com.au There are so many gigs and other things going on in his life that it’s hard to keep track. But there’s always time for us.
Camerata & Paul Grabowsky: The Art Of will also feature the chamber orchestra’s well-loved Wild Card Mystery Segment. As always, Camerata welcomes audiences to join them in the foyer after the show to meet the musicians and have a chat.
This event is part of QPAC’s The Art of the Possible with Paul Grabowsky residency and is supported by the QPAC 40 program, celebrating 40 years of curiosity, inclusion, gathering and stories.
Camerata & Paul Grabowsky: The Art Of (presented by Camerata and QPAC) plays the Armitage Centre, Empire Theatres, Toowoomba, May 6, 7pm; and Concert Hall, QPAC, Brisbane, May 7, 7pm.