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It’s 6pm minus 25 on Friday. My Uber arrives in four minutes: $30.07 for a 6.9-kilometre ride. It’s 12.6 degrees but feels like 8.1, with 60 per cent chance of rain and 25,499 active COVID cases.
Happily, only one number matters tonight: 78.8 per cent (the proportion of Victorians aged over 16 who are fully vaccinated). Close enough for jazz.
All smiles: Music lovers express their delight as Al Matcott plays the Brunswick Ballroom on Friday night.Credit:Chris Hopkins
At the stroke of six, in the front bar of the Charles Weston Hotel, one guy with six strings leans into the microphone like a man released. It’s Hugh McGinlay’s first gig in three months. The Ambassador is “a love song for someone I’ve been through six lockdowns with”.
Most diners have only one ear on his fingerpicked stories of love and other human foibles, but the way he changes the energy in the room is beyond calculation. Intimate communion, real time, live electricity. After each song every stranger stops, recognises each other, and gives thanks. That’s right, that’s a thing. It might actually be everything.
Over at Wesley Anne, four musicians crowd the open doorway. There are drums, guitar, alto sax, upright bass, lots of smiley-eye and quiet laughter about things only jazzers understand. People Get Ready and Fly Me To The Moon cast comforting shapes, then morph and meander like the people passing by, many gleefully unmasked. Wow, that’s a thing too.
Bassist Stephen Hornby says he’s been “trying to focus on the positive” during lockdown, instead of the two or three gigs per week he’s missed. “I’ve written a ton of music. So watch out 2022.” With fantastic panache, a waitress trips and smashes a plate loudly at the band’s feet. Try downloading that from Bandcamp.
Al Matcott’s Brunswick Ballroom set “was brilliant”. “Great songs. Tells a good yarn.”Credit:Chris Hopkins
Jimmy Hornet is full. All lounges, lampshades and pop art, the plush Richmond bar only fits 25 at the best of times but luckily one couple is late, so I snag a bar stool. Owner Anthea Palmer introduces old-time blues guy Dan Dinnen, then he introduces her right back. “Do not take it for granted that places like this exist,” he tells us. “I can’t tell you how good this feels.”
It’s mutual. Jimmy’s audience comes to listen. Dinnen’s blues is more feelgood ragtime than Mississippi moan and drummer Anthony ‘Shortie’ Shortte brings extra propulsion and off-mic comic relief. He’s the only other guy who’s heard that song before, Dinnen tells us, like a proud father showing his newborn. “And I don’t remember it,” Shortie shrugs.