LIZ MARTIN

With a who’s who of the Sydney music scene at her disposal, Liz Martin releases her latest album Dance a Little, Live a Little as a versatile songstress with her fingers in many pies. We get the run down on the making of the new record.

How would you describe the sound of Dance a Little, Live a Little?

There’s a bit of everything in there, I wanted to cover a range of sounds. There’s a sort of electronic feel to a couple of the tracks, some more jazzy kind of ballads as well a little bit of… well some people have compared it to Tom Waits, so there’s that in there, too.

What role did bass player and producer Dave Symes play in the making of the record?

I’d written demo versions of all the songs and I was looking around for someone to co-produce with me, someone who could talk the music talk to the other musicians and help write parts for the strings and so on. Someone who could help kind of push some of the songs and shape them in a way, and so I was recommended Dave. We had lots of chats about direction of the album and basically the main thing was that it was playful – both in the end result and along the way, I wanted to play with real musicians.

What can we expect form the live show?

It’s going to be huge! We’ve got pretty much all of the players from the album, so it’s a ten piece band: four piece string section, a couple of horn players… Some of the big names in Sydney, lots of Dave’s mates like Hamish Stuart on drums, Matt Ottingon on sax and James Greening on trombone, and lots of my mates, who are a bit more folky and gypsy, like Veren Grigorov on violin and Dirk Kruithof on guitar. It’ll be a full reproduction of everything we did on the album.

Apr 9^, 7pm, Notes Live, 75 Enmore Road, Newtown, $23.50, noteslive.net.au