Lockdown chats with Nick Yates.
This week I was delighted to chat with my good mate Nick Yates. Nick played saxophones with Forest Collective from 2015-2018.
Tell us about your involvement with Forest Collective, how long had you been involved and how it all started?
I don’t really remember how I got my first gig with Forest - I was friends with Evan and had seen Forest performances, and I think I might have mentioned that I was learning some Luciano Berio for my Master’s recital when Evan told me that they were planning a program featuring Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs.
So I was added to that program, Sunrise, and it was a particularly hot weekend in December 2015 at The Richmond Uniting Church. It was not air-conditioned, there were no fans, and I performed Luciano Berio’s Sequenza VIIb for solo soprano saxophone and fixed-pitch drone (Josie played the drone). One of the two performances was in the late afternoon when it was still about 40 degrees, and that was a unique experience. Anyone who has heard or played any of the Berio Sequenzas knows how physically demanding they are of the player even under ideal conditions. I often think that it’s impressive how well we manage in difficult circumstances when we’re faced with them in performance - if you’d asked me a month earlier if I would be able to perform that piece in 40-degree heat, I probably would have said ‘No, what kind of sadist are you?’. But I did it and was pretty happy with it, and then I showed up the next day and did it again!
Can you name your highlights from working with Forest Collective?
The collaboration with the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music New Music Studio to perform Gerard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil was a real highlight for me. We had a killer group of musicians, a great soprano in Justine, and Evan doing a fantastic job conducting this huge, intimidating, seminal piece of spectral music, which was a very new aesthetic to me at that time, but a great learning experience.
The saxophone parts require the player to sometimes detune the instrument by a quarter-tone and then play normal fingerings (sounding as quarter-tones) and quarter-tone fingerings (sounding as normal chromatic pitches). So the transposition of the tenor saxophone in B flat becomes tenor saxophone in B 3/4 flat. So, lots of time with the tuner. Hard but good.
I also really enjoyed my most recent performance with Forest, the collaboration with singer-songwriter Addison fluttering hearts // thinking machines at the Abbotsford Convent, just before I moved to Darwin in mid-2018.
What's keeping you occupied during the madness of 2020-2021?
I always feel a bit self-conscious talking about this knowing that so many musicians are suffering in lockdowns and unable to perform right now, but this year and last have been very busy and musically satisfying for me. Usually, when I talk to people in Melbourne about this they’re keen to hear that gigs are happening somewhere, so I hope that’s the case here too! We’ve been lucky in the NT to dodge Covid for the most part, and aside from a couple of short lockdowns this year, we’ve been back performing live since about May 2020.
I started a new music ensemble of my own last year, Whistling Kite New Music, and we debuted with two concerts at last year’s Darwin Festival and presented a program of music with electronics in June this year. I feel fortunate to have put together this group of all my favorite musicians in the NT, it’s such a treat to be able to play with and write music for them.
I also play regularly with The Djari Project, a collaboration between composer Netanela Mizrahi and Galpu clan songman Jason Guwanbal Gurriwiwi from Galiwin’ku, Elcho Island. We recorded an album last year just before the start of the pandemic with the amazing Aurora, the senior choir of Young Adelaide Voices. Whilst we performed several times since making the record, we weren’t able to launch the album properly with the choir from Adelaide until August this year at Darwin Festival. It was a very special gig, made more so by the fact that Darwin went into lockdown the following day.
I have a jazz quartet (drums, bass, guitar, tenor sax) called The Changes, and we play club/pub gigs in Darwin as well as doing some corporate/events work with vocalists. It’s nice to have a regular working band and grow together as improvisers.
What's on the musical horizon for you at the moment?
I participated in the Australian Art Orchestra’s Creative Music Intensive in December last year, where I met and played with a fantastic group of people from diverse musical backgrounds.
One of them was composer/electronic musician/sound artist Iran Sanadzadeh, who plays the pressure sensitive floors, continuing the legacy of Australian dancer and choreographer Phillipa Cullen.
Iran and I gave our first performance as a duo at the CMI, and made plans to do some playing together in Darwin in July. Sadly Darwin went into lockdown just a couple of days after Iran arrived, and all of our performances at Darwin Fringe Festival were canceled. We had a weird, stressful week of living together in lockdown and rehearsing intensively while Iran worked out how she was going to get home to Melbourne. We recorded an album of original, mostly improvised music the day before she left, and after letting it rest for a while, we both really loved it when we listened back! It’s now being mixed by Theo Carbo, and we’re looking forward to putting it out soon. We hope we can perform live together in Melbourne, Darwin, and Adelaide next year.
More broadly, I’m of course hoping that I’ll be able to see friends and family in Victoria by the Christmas holidays. ‘Travel to Victoria forbidden for most of 2020-21’ obviously wasn’t a consideration when I was tossing up the pros and cons of moving to the NT. Lots of love to all of the Forest Collective extended family - I miss you all, and I hope you and we get to play music together soon.
