From then on, public performance was a major component of the group’s existence. The three began holding practices at the University of Sydney, where they were overheard by a member of the university’s staff, who offered them a spot in an afternoon concert series. Buck and Abrahams grew up in the same suburb of Sydney Abrahams and Swanton met at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and played together in a small jazz ensemble called the Benders (which sometimes included Buck on drums). The lineup was as follows: pianist Chris Abrahams, bassist Lloyd Swanton, and drummer Tony Buck.Įach of their musical lives had rippled across Sydney’s jazz scene, like concentric circles in a pond-for years, until, ultimately, they converged. The trio was conceived as a behind-closed-doors improv workshop, with no intention of performing publicly.

While that’s sadly not how things happened, the true story of the group’s formation does have its mythic qualities. The Necks have grown to be such a monolithic institution in experimental music, you might be forgiven for thinking they all came wailing out of the womb in the same hospital wing, straight into piano trio format. You feel as if you’ve stumbled unwittingly across something you’re a witness to a private ceremony, a stowaway in the hull of a ship that moves of its own accord, whichever way the waves happen to break.

The performers are vessels for the whim or pulse of the instrument, or perhaps the performance itself. The Necks’ music is improvisational, unplanned-guided by mood and texture rather than composition or pre-ordained shape. Although the content of the music is perhaps impossible to nail down, its form is more or less easily stated. Avant-garde, minimalist, ambient, trance jazz, drone, free improv, classical…the Necks reduce the algorithm to tears. The trio’s music incorporates and defies every genre tag that can be leveraged at them. But assembled together, all those individual moments-stored as physical music or kept in the memories of spectators-make up something monumental.

No single album or performance captures the music’s entirety. To listen to the Necks is to embrace the ephemeral and reject the absolute. Is it possible for an improvisational act to craft a definitive musical statement? Or does the very nature of its art compromise this pursuit? The music of the Necks both transcends any notion of the definitive and renders the question moot.įor over thirty years, the Australian trio has amassed a body of work that is amorphous, always in flux, and changing with each new studio recording or live performance.

Stage tiny piano