Words Ian Bevington / Image Colin U’Ren
The Necks – Meeniyan Town Hall, Saturday, May 20, 2023
Having previously experienced The Necks at venues as diverse as the Corner Hotel, The Myer Music Bowl and more recently Womadelaide, I eagerly anticipate seeing them here tonight, in such a unique intimate environment. An avant-garde jazz trio formed in 1987, The Necks consists of Chris Abrahams on piano and Hammond organ; Tony Buck on drums, percussion and electric guitar, and Lloyd Swanton on bass guitar and double bass. The band has gained recognition as one of Australia’s most distinctive and pioneering musical groups.
Blizzard-like weather has hit Gippsland. It’s cold outside. There are howling winds and battering rain. Trees are down over roads. It’s a fitting prequel to the mystique of the night.
The Necks improvise on stage every night. This in itself is a rare delight—a blank page awaiting a new beginning from one of ‘the Necks’. A very exciting prospect – the alchemy these three musicians share is mind-boggling!
The music varies from room to room, but like the weather outside, the Necks are oblivious to what will happen next. Their mass consciousness can create a storm like the one in Gippsland tonight.
As the lights go down the audience at Meeniyan enters its own mass-conscious transcendence. Meeniyan audiences are always respectful of the artists on stage, like there’s a hidden sign out front ‘Beware geniuses at work!’
The two improvisations performed tonight by Abrahams, Buck and Swanton are exquisitely intricate and possess a haunting quality that can soothe the soul and penetrate the heart. The first set opens with light notes from the piano and grow into a storm to match the storm outside, filled with tension and unease. Resonances and overtones collide in hallucinatory clouds before Swanton’s bass (sounding uncannily like a didgeridoo) awakened us from the fever dream.
At times, the sound is overwhelmingly majestic, it grows as the meshing of instruments lifts the performance ever higher until the performance and the Necks have gone beyond the clouds and turn to come back to light-plucked strings, heartbeats and gentle keys.
The piano sounds like bells. The bass sounds like percussion. The percussion instruments sound like a cello. One could even close their eyes and believe a whole orchestra was present on stage tonight. However, the necks can also be as delicate as the buzzing of a swarm of bees. During the performance, Swanton broke out into bowed harmonics that mimick the sound of birds, which is quite striking.
The music’s melody, harmony, and rhythm evoke a sense of joy. Nostalgia for something unknown.
The performance is captivating, with Tony Buck’s cymbal playing, and Chris Abrahams’ beautiful keyboard melodies. The mood intensifies with Lloyd Swanton’s pulsing bass line, as Abrahams became more experimental, using the piano as a percussive instrument. The focus was on the Neck’s space and mass.
The essence of The Neck’s music is reflected in Miles Davis’ 1959 recording ‘Kind of Blue’. The empty spaces crafted by Miles’ opus many years ago still linger like apparitions in the atmosphere of the historic venue.
Despite a certain language between these three skilled artists, there are no words tonight.
There is silence at the end of their set, then a standing ovation.