4th September, 2006

DAVID ADAMS

Gospel has always been part of The Idea of North’s repertoire - both in live shows and on their recordings - and there’s never been a shortage of requests for the group to do an entirely Gospel album. But, says Trish Delaney-Brown - the group’s soprano, the timing just never felt right for a solely Gospel work. Until now.

GOING GOSPEL: The Idea of North are Nick Begbie (tenor), Naomi Crellin (alto), Andrew Piper (bass) and Trish Delaney-Brown (soprano). “We are a jazz-based group but part of what we do is keep our material extremely varied and the Gospel album's no different really," says Trish Delaney-Brown. "It’s got everything from traditional songs or songs people would be very familiar with through to crossover material, like the Van Morrison song, 'Whenever God Shines His Light On Me', and original material as well."

The group have just produced The Gospel Project, a mix of some classic and some not-so-well known Gospel tunes including a number of original tracks.

“We wanted it to be really representative of us...” says Delaney-Brown. “We are a jazz-based group but part of what we do is keep our material extremely varied and the Gospel album's no different really. It’s got everything from traditional songs or songs people would be very familiar with through to crossover material, like the Van Morrison song, Whenever God Shines His Light On Me, and original material as well. So it certainly doesn’t stay true to what some people think of as Gospel music...it does the gamut, like all of our albums.”

The Gospel Project is the The Idea of North’s fifth album. The group - whose name comes from the title of an radio show - started singing together in 1993, produced their first, self-titled, album in 1997 and went full-time in 1998 on the back of its success.

They have since gone on to take their award-winning sound across the world, performing in the United States (they won the Harmony Sweepstakes Competition in 2003), Europe and Asia as well as studying with a number of a capella groups around the world (they were awarded an Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust study grant).

Having come from various parts of the country, The Idea of North met through the Canberra School of Music at the Australian National University where Delaney-Brown, bass Andrew Piper and Meg Corson (the group’s original alto, replaced by Naomi Crellin in 2002) were studying. Nick Begbie, the group’s tenor, was also studying at ANU and was part of a jazz vocal ensemble.

“We just kind of struck up a friendship and part of that friendship was singing together for fun,” says Delaney-Brown. “We were all pursuing solo musical stuff - Andrew was a trumpet player, Meg and I were singers and Nick was singing in various groups around town - and yeah, we just kind of got a roll on.”

The decision to remain an a capella group - which Delaney-Brown describes as the “core” of the band’s sound - is something she says they stumbled upon, initially because they didn’t want to pay band members.  “Then, of course, it started to get a life of its own and you realise there is an appeal to the purity, I think, of just voices," she says.

One thing you quickly learn about The Idea of North, however, is that they tend to resist labels. Take The Gospel Project, for example.

“For this album, we were really directed by, what does the song need?; what’s going to make it the best possible arrangement?” says Delaney-Brown. “So there were a couple that started out as a capella...that we were working on and just went ‘You know what, it needs a band, let’s bring a band in; it needs a choir, let’s put a choir sound on there’. So it’s just not being precious about the a capella thing which I don’t think we are generally but this just gave us even more license.”

Another distinguishing feature of The Gospel Project is that it is the first album all four members have brought at least one original tune to.

“That was just great; seeing our personalities and where we’re all at reflected through our writing as well,” says Delaney-Brown. She adds that while the project was challenging and stressful in some ways - not only did the group have to grapple with illnesses but the album was recorded in a very short timeframe: recording started around 20th February and was complete by mid-April - all four members of the group felt it was going to result in something “really special”.

THE GOSPEL PROJECT: The group's first themed album is the focus of a national tour running until 24th November. Check out www.idea.com.au for dates and locations under gigs.

“It’s probably the first of the five albums that we’ve recorded that each of us listen to now,” she says. “Normally you need at least a good 12 months to kind of forget all the stuff you wanted to change while you were recording it but there are songs on there that I’ll actually listen to. So it’s kind of cool in that respect.”

As a child, Delaney-Brown travelled around New South Wales before settling in Canberra as the family followed her father’s career in the airforce. She says that while she’s always loved music, she never really started to think of it as a career option until late highschool.

“I was still thinking airforce because that’s what my dad had done and then in Year 12 my teacher - he was doing some personal study at the Canberra School of Music - suggested that I do like a "pre-audition audition" and just get together with the head of classical studies there and just see if he thought there was any potential,” she recalls.

“So I did that - I’m not even sure I was aware prior to that there was a music school. I’d done school productions and knew I loved singing and that was about it. So it was through doing that, I did the prep course of classical but classical didn’t really appeal to me - there was a lot about it that I enjoyed but it didn’t really feel like a true reflection of my voice...I found out there was jazz school and started singing this music. It felt so natural, so then I kind of moved on to studying jazz.”

Delaney-Brown, who cites singer Diane Reeve, guitar and vocal duo Tuck & Patti, and instrumentalists including The Pat Metheny Group and guitarist Mike Stern as among her influences, says it’s the improvisational element of jazz she finds attractive.

“Probably, personally, coming from my church background and getting to sing, to create your own melody and express yourself that way, was (something) I learnt in church, so when I was transplanted to jazz, it was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I know how to do this’,” she says.

“Because it started from that really spiritual kind of point, even when you took it out of that church context and into just a performance context, it’s still such a direct communication. I know there are a lot of great singers who are actually able to approach improvising very technically and nail all of those tensions and know what scales they’re singing over and what particular chords and get it all right as you might do as an instrumentalist, but for me it’s more about just an instant expression of where I’m at at that particular time in the song and what emotion or what thought I’m trying to express without necessarily needing to put words to it.”

The quartet has always resisted being labelled a ‘Christian group’ (the title of the latest album, The Gospel Project, was deliberately chosen to represent the fact the album was a project rather than signifying a new direction for the group).

“Even right back in its formative days when we had very little idea about what we wanted to do with it, one thing we did know was that we didn’t want to be a Christian group," notes Delaney-Brown, who currently attends Northside Community Church in Sydney. "We wanted to just be musicians who were living their life and expressing that through music and so obviously, where-ever you’re at and who you are and what you believe it comes through.”

“That’s not to say that’s the path for everybody. I mean there are some great artists who fulfil what they’re supposed to be doing through being, very obviously, a Christian singer or a Christian group. But for us that wasn’t right so that’s the path that we’ve taken and it comes through everything we do.

“Even with this Gospel project, it’s not being confined to just one definition of what that music is...We kind of thought about what Gospel means and one of the definitions of it is ‘good news’. So, for us this whole album was about ‘OK what’s good news, what’s life-affirming, what’s hopeful?’. I mean, gosh, with where society is at at the moment, we need that. We need that life-giving, hope-giving, joyful expression of what a life can be. So that was kind of the overwhelming desire of this album, to kind of express that though music that we loved and music that we had written.”

As for what’s next? As well as touring around the country to promote The Gospel Project, The Idea of North are currently editing their first live concert DVD which was filmed at the Powerhouse Theatre in Brisbane in June with a view to having it out early next year. In December, they head to Thailand to perform for the King as part of his birthday celebrations (in fact they’ll be performing a song the King, himself a jazz musician, has written). And then there’s the next album.

”We are on to thinking about the next one...” says Delaney-Brown. “There’s a possibility we’ll be recording it in Sweden with a group that we studied with over there called The Real Group - a wonderful, five-piece, a capella group - and one of their members who produces most of their albums has shown interest in producing ours. It would be another huge learning thing because we’ve never worked with an outside producer before. So, that’s a possibility (as well as) other themed albums that we’re tossing around...we’d love to a kids album at some stage and also one with an orchestra. So we’ll just have to see how it all pans out.”

~ www.idea.com.au