Albare ...

As he takes to the stage, elegant in a tailored black suit, very obviously comfortable in his skin and toting one of his Gibson Custom Shop hollow-body Les Paul or perhaps his L5, guitarist & producer *Albert Dadon* is every inch the consummate professional, nodding to his fellow musicians who return the compliment, all equals regardless of however many years individuals may have been serving their art. They're all there to serve the music after all, and that music is jazz.

Today, the jazz route Dadon, who creates his musical landscapes under the name *Albare*, is taking is very much the gentler, often introspective but always accessible and melodic one. He first came to my attention twenty years ago when his musical journey was taking him down a more "funk-driven'" route, his first Australian album, 1992's *Acid Love*, an energetic celebration of his musical evolution to that point, fired by the innovative jazz-rock that was very much the currency of his teenage years in the late 1970s early 1980s, yet skilfully understated nonetheless.

Over the next couple of years other elements were brought into Dadon's music, heady elements we tend to define as World, as nebulous as that catch-all term is, but in reality merely other elements drawn from the kaleidoscopic rainbow of sonic colours available to all and as much a natural part of his musical evolution as you'd expect from a man who has lived in a variety of cultural contexts, whether in his birthplace Morocco, in Israel, France or indeed his hometown for the past thirty years, multicultural Melbourne, Australia. After all, jazz long ago embraced those "World Music" elements - Gypsy, Latin, Arabic, Mediterranean, even Chinese - as part of its vocabulary, long before "rock" and "pop" audiences ever did, so how could they not also seep into the jazz of this most cosmopolitan of renaissance men.

Dadon's commitment to the jazz form is obvious not only in the music he makes but in his determination to raise its profile within the wider community in his adopted homeland.

Over the years, I've interviewed several of the younger Australian jazz musicians who have been recipients of a Bell, the prestigious Australian Jazz Award Dadon established back in 2003 to recognise and nurture excellence in the genre, its name a tribute to one of Australia's pioneer jazz musicians and educators, the late Graeme Bell.

It's made a hell of a difference to their careers, raising the profiles of emerging musicians and celebrating the artistry and legacy of some of Australia's "unsung" masters of the craft, from veteran vocalist Judy Jacques and drummer and poet Allan Browne, who were award winners in its inaugural year, to international trailblazers The Necks to pianist, accordionist and composer Joe Chindamo, whose debut album, *The First Take* (*A History Of Standard Time)*, Dadon produced.

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