Published in The Weekend Australian, December 29, 2018

Review  by Eric Myers

Personnel: Sandy Evans, Sirens Big Band & Indian Musicians

Label: Rufus Records

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This ambitious album, the culmination of Sydney saxophonist Sandy Evans’s musical career so far, is a dignified and satisfying melding of Indian music and Western jazz. It’s a complicated collaborative project brought to fruition over several years. The music is original, the compositions shared by Evans and two Indian artists, Hindustani classical music singer Shubha Mudgal and her husband Aneesh Pradhan. The album is dominated by Mudgal’s haunting vocals. Her lyrics are in a number of non-English languages, but non-Indian listeners will hear them simply as wordless vocals. Other soloists are Pradhan (tabla), Sydney’s Bobby Singh (tabla), Sudhir Nayak (harmonium) and Evans herself (saxophones). Evans’s solos are a highlight, particularly on soprano saxophone, with a sensitivity reminiscent of Wayne Shorter. The Indian musicians were recorded in Mumbai in June 2017. A year later in Sydney the Sirens Big Band and Evans overdubbed their contributions. Evans’s arrangements are a real work of the imagination, pure jazz-oriented writing which is highly sympathetic and respectful towards the Indian contributions, enhancing and commenting on their music. Evans’s charts are played beautifully by the largely female Sirens Big Band. Indian music, without the harmonic changes found in Western music, can often sound drone-like and repetitive. On Bridge of Dreams that tendency is leavened by the jazz sensibility in operation, giving the music welcome variety. Also, the great strength of Indian music – rhythmic subtlety – survives here, never smothered by the Western drum-kit. Future musicologists will no doubt deconstruct the complicated scales and rhythmic patterns explored on this album. For the moment I hear it simply as splendid art music at a high level of achievement, and also it is accessible and very moving.

Sydney Morning Herald, 13 January 2019

“Not only was the dream exquisite, it came true” ★★★★½

City Recital Hall, January 12
Reviewed by John Shand

View this review on the Sydney Morning Herald website

For some artists it happens when they’re very young, fostering only disappointment thereafter. For others it never happens, leaving a uniform career trajectory of relative mediocrity or unacknowledged genius. For Sandy Evans it happened here: everything she has poured into the previous four decades as an artist, saxophonist, composer, improviser and collaborator culminated in this one night.

Evans has worked with both Indian musicians and jazz big bands before, but never like this in terms of the scope of the ambition or the fullness of its realisation. The foundation of the overwhelming success of Bridge of Dreams lay in the compositions, on which she collaborated with tabla player Aneesh Pradhan and singer Shubha Mudgal. Coming from the elite of Hindustani music, they, like Evans, saw a way to span the divide between two musical cultures so that they melded, but, crucially, with their own identities intact.

Compositional triumphs included Tabla Spiral, in which (beyond the thrilling tabla dialogue between Pradhan and Bobby Singh) Evans had composed parts for Sirens Big Band that replicated and harmonised the tabla figures. Another was Deepening of the Red Sun, in which Pradhan’s hypnotic rhythm, Evans’ melodies and Mugdal’s singing (of a text from the mystic poet Kabir) combined in a manner that seemed preordained.

Mugdal’s singing was spellbinding throughout, with her range, beauty, instinct for truth and thorough intertwining of ethereality and earthiness. Similarly Pradhan’s playing combined virtuosity, humility and warmth in equal measure, to generate some of the most moving tabla playing I’ve encountered.

Sudhir Nayak was just as remarkable a soloist, his harmonium’s accordion-like sound ranging from brawn to fluttering whispers. Then there were the locals: the brilliant Singh, Evans soloing as if her life depended on it and Sirens’ leader Jessica Dunn proving again what a special bassist she is. Dunn’s 18-piece band executed the sometimes extremely challenging music with panache, including notable contributions from pianist Zela Margossian and drummer Ali Foster. The sound was also exceptional, presenting the 23 musicians with warmth, clarity and finesse.

The Australian, 15 January 2019

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When India’s rich classical music collaborates with Australia’s finest jazz, the composition has to be magical. Internationally renowned Indian singer Shubha Mudgal came together with Australia’s top jazz saxophonist and composer Sandy Evans in a sold out concert ‘Bridge of Dreams’ as part of the Sydney Festival.

BRIDGE OF DREAMS, City Recital Hall in association with SIMA and Sydney Festival, 12 January 2019. 

Read the full review by Diana Simmonds at StageNoise

The one-night-only, world premiere at City Recital Hall of Bridge of Dreams has to be among the best and more memorable events of this January 2019 in Sydney. For me, dramatically, musically and creatively it was the most exciting and rewarding evening in a long time.

For a couple of hours, the sold-out house was enraptured by an astonishing collaboration between creator-composer-saxophonist Sandy Evans, the Indian virtuosi singer-composer-lyricist Shubha Mudgal, her husband, tabla-player-composer Aneesh Pradhan and harmonium player Sudhir Nayak; Sydney’s own Sirens Big Band led by Jessica Dunn and pianist-composer Zela Margossian. 

Bridge of Dreams began, one brick at a time, some years ago through Evans and her friend Melbourne’s Bobby Singh (tabla) riffing on the idea of a bridge between Australian jazz and Indian music. Bit by bit it brought together, virtually and in person, the key personnel and slowly their various approaches and emerged the basis of what is now available on Rufus Records and in all formats, if you missed the concert.

Bridge of Dreams is wonderfully unusual in that there is none of the awkwardness so often found in attempted “East-West” fusion works. Rather, there is a soaring meeting of minds and sounds in, for instance, the ostinato facility of the harmonium, on one side of the stage, melding with the brass and saxophones on the other. 

In Tabla Spiral, Zela Margossian begins with a meditative piano solo into which Bobby Singh and Aneesh Pradhan add a conversation of the sounds and rhythms of the tabla. They bring their instruments into the mix to repeat the dialogue before the trumpets, trombones and saxes of Sirens Big Band join them in a thrilling, mesmerising exploration of similarity and difference.

Similarly, there are passages of exquisite balance and melody when Shubha Mudgal’s richly sonorous voice duets with Sandy Evans’ lilting soprano saxophone in written and improvised pieces based in the poetry and traditions of north India.

The nine pieces that make upBridge of Dreams range across history – of ancient India and early jazz, through Western improvisation, Indian poetry and song and contemporary composition. With the idea semi-fledged, Evans used a Churchill Fellowship to go to Mumbai and spend time with the musicians. From then and over a period of two to three years, Skype, MP3s and other technology – musical and computer – became integral to the growing partnership, as did such diverse inspirations as Louis Armstrong, the 1430 Chagzam iron chain bridge and mystic poet Kabir. 

All this also coincided with the then upcoming occasion of Sirens Big Band’s tenth birthday. Leader Jessica Dunn had asked Evans if she’d come up with a work to celebrate such a momentous anniversary and thus the band was drawn in to Bridge of Dreams. (The off-stage social activism of both the Indian stars and the Sydney big band add yet another heartfelt if unheard layer to the foundations of the project.)

Dunn’s magnificently flexible double bass underpins the entire work as well as highlighting the melodious qualities of tabla and the possibilities for synchronous partnering with the western drum kit and percussion (Ali Foster and Claudine Field). On the night, at City Recital Hall, the 23-piece ensemble – and audience – were very well served by sound engineer Ross Ahern, with the uncommon range of voice and instruments reaching every part of the auditorium with clarity and precision.

All in all, Bridge of Dreams is the kind of human alliance, musics and outcome that audiences and (most) Festival directors fantasise about. That the work is already publicly available as a recording is a miracle (at $24.99 on disc and $18.99 download from Bandcamp). Yet it doesn’t quite cancel out the thought that, at another time and budget, the ABC would have been in the house recording it for live and subsequent broadcasting. Let’s hope the ensemble will be gathered together again on a stage before long – Adelaide? Mumbai? Edinburgh? We can dream.

Read on the Daily Telegraph website $$

Sydney Festival’s sold-out concert Bridge of Dreams featured top female Hindustani singer Shubha Mudgal alongside Australia’s finest jazz saxophonist and composer Sandy Evans in an uplifting collaboration.

Listen to an interview with Sandy Evans on Radio National’s ‘God Forbid’ 

Sunday 9th and Monday 10 December 2018