LIVE: JAZZ SABBATH, Perth – 20 July, 2024

LIVE: JAZZ SABBATH, Perth – 20 July, 2024
The Ellington Jazz Club, Perth, Western Australia
By Shane Pinnegar

The last place we’d have expected to be grooving to Black Sabbath on a wintry Saturday night is in a cozy jazz bar with supper club-style seating – but here we are, Day One, Show Two of Jazz Sabbath’s first ever Australian tour. This show, like all three Perth shows, are completely sold out, and seems like it’s half jazz afficionados, half headbangers.

Their story is a simple one – or should we say, their STORIES.

The Jazz Sabbath concept back story is that Milton Keanes wrote these intricate jazz songs for piano way back in 1968, suffered a serious heart attack, and once he’d recovered a heavy metal band named Black Sabbath had callously stolen them and released two albums, effectively creating the modern heavy metal genre.

The real story is that Adam Wakeman – son of pomp prog maestro Rick, arguably the 70’s finest and most audacious keyboard whizz (and how it shows – the apple does not fall far from the tree in this instance) – member of Ozzy Osbourne’s solo band and touring member of Black Sabbath since 2004, has rearranged Sabbath’s classic metal songs for jazz piano. The spark of the idea came at the completion of Sabbath’s 2017 The End tour, when Tony Iommi nudged Wakeman onto a bar piano after a few drinks, where he improvised a jazz version of one of the band’s songs.

The comedic origin story makes for some entertaining asides and a vague narrative through the show – though Wakeman/Keanes is more than happy to break the fourth wall and slip out of his artificially greyed haired, and aged makeup-ed character, and very funny he is.

It’s the music, though, that brings us here – and Wakeman’s arrangements and playing are simply sublime.

The key (pun intended) in any such reinterpretation is to go all in and Jazz Sabbath do so with ingenious arrangements, leaning into Tony Iommi’s often-present jazz guitar stylings and creating new ones, with double bass player Jonny Wickham and drummer Arthur Neale more than holding their own with some great playing, ensuing it’s not just the Adam Wakeman show.

Wakeman’s playing is virtuosic, at times a blur of notes, intricate melodies teasing and hinting at Sabbath’s original tunes – some more recognisable than others. Rat Salad features a tasty drum solo, before Behind The Wall of Sleep’s jazzy outro prompts one member of the crowd to ask if that was a snippet of Hand Of Doom. No, that was ‘hand of mistake’, quips Wakeman, before explaining (“at the risk of slipping out of character again”) that it was written by “taking one of the guitar melodies and going off on a tangent.”

Joking that Iron Man was originally titled ‘Derrick The Ironing Man’, his arrangement includes a riff of Deep Purple’s Black Night, before Evil Woman brings us to the end of the show.

Almost, that is, because we still have the ‘full’ nine-minute jazz piano instrumental version of Paranoid in all its glory to enjoy.

Jazz Sabbath are an exquisite experience live, a celebration of some of the most timeless, influential and integral heavy metal songs rebooted in a completely different style to immaculate effect, and rumour has it that a third album will appear later this year.

Set List:

Fairies Wear Boots
Snowblind
Rat Salad
Children Of The Grave
Black Sabbath
Behind the Wall Of Sleep
Changes
Iron Man
Evil Woman
Paranoid

Category: Live Reviews