It was great while it lasted: Jazz master farewells his ‘second home’

6 hours ago 3

By John Shand and Kate Prendergast

July 1, 2025 — 12.08pm

MUSIC
MIKE NOCK QUARTET
Foundry 616, June 27
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★

So it’s goodnight to Foundry 616, the love child of a man whose passion has been presenting jazz in Sydney for more than 40 years, Peter Rechniewski. People get Orders of Australia for doing much less. This was a hell of a penultimate gig, featuring the pianist who played the venue’s first concert 13 years ago, Mike Nock.

Across a career spanning seven decades, primarily in New Zealand, the US and Australia, Nock has proved himself a composer, improviser and band leader of the highest calibre. This was instantly evident on the opening Not We But One.

Mike Nock on the penultimate night of the much-loved Foundry616 venue.

Nock tells stories in music, and he distils essences of emotion. Here little wisps of melody from the piano provoked response, commentary and elucidation from bassist Brett Hirst and drummer Toby Hall, the latter playing with his hands against Hirst’s groove, while Nock floated lines above them that were, by turns, pensive and supremely lyrical.

Then, as the composition’s title suggests, the three instruments seemed to converge, and the interaction had a profundity like fine poetry, where each word contains a deeper truth. This was music playing the musicians, rather than the other way around, and it stayed at this peak when tenor saxophonist Karl Laskowski joined, generating a gruff sound, and playing short, stabbing phrases that drove the groove rather than riding on it. Nock then reoccupied the foreground, finding typically surprising implications in what the rhythm section was offering.

The band slipped back into a safer place with Foundry Start-Up Blues, although Laskowski grabbed the piece by the scruff and made it raw and real. Much more engrossing was the contemplative Acceptance, which had Nock making little rivulets of melody flow into the gentle, bossa nova-tinged groove, before Laskowski played a solo as languid as floating downstream in a dinghy without resort to oars.

Hall crafted a stonking, bucking solo on the boppish Transitions, and Hirst, Nock’s longest-serving collaborator, soloed with sinewy vigour on a blues in the second set, which also featured Laskowski deploying the brawny sound and loping lines beloved of Texan tenor saxophonists.

Every composition presented different facets of Nock the composer and Nock the improviser. One moment we’d hear his love of rhythmic puzzles and child-like joy in the game of making music, and the next his capacity for crystalline beauty; one moment rhythmic drive and the next flurries of abstraction.

I began listening to Nock in the 1970s via records and an Australian tour when his fabled US career was peaking, and then in 1982 came the mysterious and ethereal Ondas masterpiece. When he returned to Australia permanently in 1985, he didn’t always find musicians who could consistently play at his level of invention. But he persisted. Three of the worthy ones were with him on this night, as he bid adieu to the venue that has been his second home for 13 years.

THEATRE
INSTRUCTIONS FOR CORRECT ASSEMBLY
Flight Path Theatre, June 26
Until July 19
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★★

Grief creates a chasm that nothing can fill. You would go to the ends of the earth to get a loved one back. Or, in the case of couple Hari and Max, you’d order an AI replicant of your dead teenage drug addict son online and put together his body in parts in the garage.

This custom-specified product’s name is Jän: the Swedish version of John, because he was assembled like an IKEA flatpack. His IRL, RIP prototype model was Nick. Jän’s programming is modified by a remote control, which his parents zap him with whenever his learning goes awry.

Nick Curnow as dad, Jane Wallace as mum in Instructions for Correct Assembly.

Which is often and, thanks to actor Ben Chapple, also very funny. Jän is just like a real boy, their real lost boy, until dinner table conversations turn to his new underage Chatswood prostitute girlfriend (zap) / undying love for the demure teen girl seated opposite him (zap) / desire to have sex with both her horrified parents.

From British playwright Thomas Eccleshare, Instructions for Correct Assembly is an absurd dark comedy from 2018, arriving with Clock & Spiel Productions for its Australian debut at Flight Path Theatre. If you remember the Be Right Back episode from the second season of Black Mirror, which also involves a “resurrected man” in a cardboard box, you’ll find yourself in the same neighbourhood of ideas.

This story is less melancholy, however, and far more unhinged. Presenting a bleak vision in falsely bright tones, director Hailey McQueen ushers forth shattered laughter at the insane consumer landscape of our dystopian technocratic future, and the false promises of god-like control it can give desperate people.

The many scenes are short and clipped, with background muzak playing in their blink. Jacob Parr’s set is a literal whitewash of the domestic interior – all shelves, tennis racquets, clothes and picture frames on the walls coated with the same vanishing brush.

Two timelines run (and blur): one leading up to Nick’s final spiral, and the other showing the parallel meltdown of Jän. There’s one fantasy wish-fulfilment scene that is devastating.

With a lesser cast and handling, Instructions might have seemed janky or uneasily offbeat. Thankfully, pitch-black humour often prevails. Jane Wallace and Nick Curnow process their characters’ grief and terrible guilt with a jaunty denial that covers nihilistic despair.

Their friends, who are always irksomely boasting about their children’s glittering futures, are David Allsopp and Jacki Mison, with Kyra Belford-Thomas as their ATAR-topping daughter.

Chapple is the stand-out though, especially as Jän – mining that uncanny valley for comedic gold. His unnatural motions and overly cheery voice; his complete lack of self-awareness; his indecent sincerity; his unnaturally bright eyes. In Nick, he finds a wretched realism.

Neither of his characters’ behaviour is predictable or programmable: there’s too much data overwhelm from the world at large. What healing or harmful role can technology play in the grieving process? How will companies see the void of loss as a gap in the market?

Instructions for Correct Assembly is an imaginative, playfully pessimistic yet compassionate work: a warning of technology’s tranquillising comforts, its faulty solutions and its own dehumanising addictions.