Vanessa Tomlinson

Expect to see and hear Clocked Out Duo touring their recent CD-length concert, Foreign Objects throughout Australia in mid-2010 thanks to the generous support of Sound Travellers.

From June 25th - July 5th except to find Wide alley touring to a Canadian city near year.
The Wide Alley is Clocked Out’s most ambitious intercultural collaboration bringing together five leading Australian improvisers and five Chinese musicians in an innovative fusion of contemporary, traditional and jazz styles. Commissioned by Paul Grabowsky for the 2007 Queensland Music Festival, The Wide Alley is the culmination of ten years of intercultural exchange among the key artists (Vanessa Tomlinson, Erik Griswold and Zou Xiangping). This process was funded through 2 Asialink Residencies, assistance from the Australia-China Council and extensive support from the Sichuan Conservatorium, Sichuan University, Chengdu Centre for Performing Arts and Totally Huge New Music Festival.

The Wide Alley is the product of an in-depth exploration of Sichuan street music, Chinese Opera percussion and other traditional styles set in the context of sweeping modernisation and globalisation. Griswold and Tomlinson’s work in Chengdu has introduced Chinese audiences to innovative contemporary music, improvisation, and new media, while their performances in Australia have introduced audiences to traditional Chinese styles, instruments, and ideas. Jinqian Ban master Zou Zhongxin credits their collaboration with him for bringing about an increased awareness of his artform – he was recently named a Chinese national cultural treasure.

Rosemary Sorenson of The Australian described The Wide Alley as “an experiment in inclusion” in her feature article of July 2007. Scott Spark of ABC Online wrote “while these compositions owe a great deal to Sichuan Opera and regional folk music traditions, they’re not strictly representations of particular styles of Chinese music. They’re a lot freer than that. There are moments when the music resembles jazz more than anything else. The course of the performance, which lasts for about 80 minutes, is an incredible pastiche of genres, and the breadth of dynamics is astonishing. The variety certainly works to the performance’s advantage – evoking the sense of narrative, introducing us to the sounds, sights and characters of Chengdu…”

“The Wide Alley includes music from the Sichuan Opera tradition, especially the Chuanju Iuogu (Opera Percussion), folk music traditions, high pitched singing style, Western classical music, experimental music, jazz, free improvisation, Chinese classical traditions, story-telling. In fact, the list is so long that the concert cannot be about these different styles as they receive only fleeting reference. Instead it is about a meeting place, a street, where musicians come to play together, express their history, their ideas, and possibly even leave a little of their sound world behind. In our experience living in China a day begins with a plan, and ends up having followed a completely different path. Much of the music in this show does that too. A traditional erhu solo turns into a child’s music box, morphs into jazz erhu which breaks out into an Opera inspired groove – really! Is the music Chinese, Australian, Western? Is that the right question to ask? Or is it a meeting in time, a conversation of roots, and perhaps a chance to share thousands of years of history in a context where people might listen?” (excerpt from Directors Notes, Queensland Music Festival Production, Wide Alley)