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Monday, 15 June 2009
CD by Peter Howe & Tim Gaze
(Bombora Creative)
Available at selected retailers & www.bombora.net.au
Music can transport you from the mundane to the very special moments in life. First love, a special wave, kissing mum goodbye and leaving home forever, the salt spray licking your face as you sail square on the nor-easter pushing for that far headland before dark.
It is this last experience (and many others of a seafaring nature) that Peter Howe assembled as music in his mind as he and wife Janet sailed the Australian east coast these past few years on a ketch called Little Wing. The voyage was a retirement treat after giving up a lifetime of teaching for both, but you might also remember Peter Howe from a different persona – the gentle country troubador who brought light and shade to the original soundtrack of Morning Of The Earth with his magnificent composition “I’m Alive (Delightful Rain)”. I loved the whirly, whirly wind back then, and I loved it even more when Bombora’s David Minear brought Peter into his Freshie Surf Club sessions and borrowed a line from the song.
I also loved that great moment on the DVD of Delightful Rain when Pete and Timmy Gaze face each other like duelling banjo players and just fill the tongue and groove walls of that lovely old clubhouse with beautiful guitar playing from the heart.
So we roll on a couple of years and, nearing the end of their voyage, Pete and Janet sail up the Brisbane River and drop anchor off the Botanic Gardens, where they are picked up by one Tim Gaze and taken to his home studio where the maestro presents the sailor with a galaxy of superb acoustic guitars and says, “So play me your new songs.” The resulting collaboration is quickly recognised by Minear as the stuff of legend, and the Rain team of producer Kerryn Tolhurst and engineer Mick Wordley are wheeled in to finesse same. Voila! Pictures of The Coast, a CD guaranteed to turn every gnarly peak hour shitfight into a cruise you never want to end. I can listen to it three times between Noosa and Brisbane . . . and I do . . . and I never tire of it.
Peter and Tim presented the album live for us at the Noosa Festival in one of those magic moments of live performance you remember forever. Pete talked story between the songs, relating his experiences on the water and in the surf that inspired the works. It was charming and you don’t get that on the CD of course, but in a way, that helps you drift into your own special moments . . . that last paddle-out for one more when you can hardly see the line-up and the moon is overhead . . . pulling in the trollers and cracking a beer as you head inside the reef and make for the red blur of the setting sun.
If you love the ocean you need this album. Say no more.
– Phil Jarratt
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