THE NAKED CITY: BIG BAND BLISS

Talk to most small band leaders these days, across a wide variety of musical genres, and they will often tell you keeping a quartet or quintet of musicians together is often fraught with problems. Juggling artistic preferences and individual egos is not an easy task and bands often break up when social harmony cannot be achieved. Why then, as Sydney musician, composer and arranger Jenna Cave has done, would you assemble an orchestra of some twenty musicians, united under the title of the Divergence Jazz Orchestra?

It’s a project that Jenna started back in 2012, along with co-leader Paul Weber, and has since grown into one of this country’s finest and most respected big band ensembles. Assembling and organizing such a large group might seem a herculean task but Jenna takes it all in her stride as she explains:

“We’ve been doing it for eleven years now and we’ve kind of developed a bit of a system. I’ve learnt to prioritise the availability of key ensemble members including our drummer Mike, our lead trumpet, our singer (if it’s a gig with vocals) and my co-bandleader Paul. You are never going to get the exact same personnel for every gig, we but have a good pool of regular deps who are basically part of the band too.”

Whilst the band now features a large number of women players, that was not always the case and Jenna remembers:

“When we started the band I was twenty eight and everyone else in the band was male, most in their early 20s. They were lovely and hilarious young blokes, but I did often feel a bit like the exasperated school teacher trying to manage the behavioural problem class at the local boys school.”

The early days of the band were somewhat of a struggle when it came to finding venues at which to play. Jenna recalls:

“We basically played at whatever venue would take us when we started. The first gig we did was at a pub at The Bald Faced Stag in Leichhardt, which had a performance room attached that was mostly used by heavy metal bands at that time. We ignored the stage and stage lights and just set up on the floor, playing acoustically and with amps, and got a good crowd of friends and people from the jazz community. The people who booked out the performance space were not the bar management, and the night of our first gig the bar had also booked a very loud blues/rock band in the next room, with only a curtain dividing the rooms. I think we mostly ‘won’ the sound battle, except during our ballads which were over powered in certain sections.”

It wasn’t long before the word began to spread about this young, dynamic orchestra, and Divergence was soon invited to play at jazz clubs like the Sound Lounge and Foundry616 as well as major events such as the Sydney International Women’s Jazz Festival. Jenna also undertook the somewhat daunting task of assembling the band in a recording studio. The  debut release “The Opening” came in 2013 followed by “Fake It Until You Make It” in 2016. Finding a studio in Sydney capable of recording such a large band was not easy with the first album recorded in a huge film scoring studio, Trackdown. Jenna recalls:

“The engineer, Dan Brown did an amazing job tucking us in a corner and reducing the natural reverb as much as possible, with rhythm section in their own booths. For the second album  I took the lead of our engineer Christo Curtis (who edited and mixed the first album) and we recorded at Studio 301, which was a very big room with a high ceiling, and everyone was in the room together.”

The current release ‘Shadows and Light’ was recorded at Rancom Street Studios in Botany over two days in February 2022 with renowned engineer Ross Ahern. It came about when Paul Cutlan approached Jenna about co-producing a studio recording of Divergence performing his composition “The Darkness of Silence”, originally commissioned by the orchestra in 2016.

The jazz and music scene in general was once peppered with big bands but the economics of today and performing opportunities make that difficult. This has not deterred Jenna and she has done a remarkable job with the Divergence Jazz Orchestra as a band leader, composer, arranger and conductor – not to mention providing an outlet for the works of other composers and fostering up and coming musicians. She reflects:

“When I’m in the depths of composing and orchestration, I’m just in a magical place far removed from the room I sit in. Developing and then performing that music with the band is just an extension and essential part of that process for me. As impractical as it is, once I found something that made me feel that good, that allowed me to express myself so well, I was determined to never stop doing that thing.”

Download the new album Shadows and Light or buy the limited edition CD at:

divergencejazzorchestra.bandcamp.com/album/shadows-and-light