Collaborations

Collaboration lies at the heart of music making, not least in the improvisatory tradition of jazz. The distinguished jazz pianist, composer, conductor and festival director Professor Paul Grabowsky AO, who is currently Professorial Fellow in the School of Music at Monash University, has also explored collaborations across musical and cultural boundaries.

The Australian Art Orchestra (AAO), an improvisational ensemble, was founded by Grabowsky in 1994 to explore links between traditional and avant-garde, art and popular music, electronic and acoustic media, and improvised and notated forms. In a fusion of jazz improvisation and Indonesian gamelan, in 2000 the AAO collaborated with Balinese musicians and pupeteers in a production of the Theft of Sita. More recently Grabowsky and the AAO have collaborated with Indigenous musicians from Ngukurr in Arnhem Land, in a fusion of the Indigenous manikay tradition and jazz.

Professor Paul Grabowsky AO, with the Australian Arts Orchestra and the Young Wagilak Group, was the recipient of the ANU HC Coombs Creative Arts Fellowship in 2010. He has won five ARIA awards, two Helpmann awards, several Bell Awards and a Deadly award. He was the Sydney Myer Performing Artist of the Year in 2000, and received the Melbourne Prize for Music in 2007. He is currently a Professor at Monash University, and director of the Monash University Academy of the Performing Arts and the Monash Art Ensemble. In 2014 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for services to music and arts administration.