Melbourne jazz saxophonist and M.D. of the RAAF Big Band, Ralph Whiteoak, has been commissioned by the Berlin government music organisation, Landesjugendensemble Neue Musik, to provide an Australian jazz composition to be rehearsed and performed at the Berlin Opera House later this year, along with two other recent Australian (non-jazz) orchestral  works and new works by German composers.  Ralph is also completing a PhD in jazz composition in Zelman Cowen School of Music at Monash University under the composer and composition lecturer, Professor Thomas Reiner.

The commission composition, ‘Two Staring Eyes Out of the Fog’, is a section of his  pre-existing composition, ‘Frank Smith Suite’ for jazz orchestra, but re-imagined for a German chamber orchestra with jazz soloists. The Suite, itself, is partly based on musical concepts drawn from the studio tape archive of the legendary Australian jazz saxophonist and experimentalist, Frank Smith and, in performance, the Suite includes interpolated snippets of Smith’s voice instructing his studio band of jazz musician how to collectively improvise imaginative musical textures he needed for particular radio or film sound-tracks.

Musical ideas for the Suite were also drawn from Ralph’s academic research into the legend and music of Frank Smith, some of which is discussed in a chapter by Ralph in Bruce Johnson’s recent book, Antipodean Riffs: Essays on Australasian Jazz (Equinox 2016). ,

He has to be in Berlin for a series of rehearsals beginning on November 5 for the concert on November 14.  After Berlin he hopes to attract Australia Council funding for a recorded performance of the entire ‘Frank Smith Suite’.