Music review: Big Jazz Day Out, Monash Performing Art Centres

The sun shone, the venues hummed with talent and the crowd – a generational mix– wandered with intent and Frank Sinatra’s age-old question kept humming in the back of our minds (‘How do you keep the music playing?’). How do these young university students learn and live jazz music in this day and age?

According to Monash University’s Head of Jazz, Dr Paul Williamson, you throw a party. The Big Jazz Day Out was a showcase of student talent and seasoned professionals who gathered together to share their love of jazz and all its genres. We had offerings both historical and cultural that were breathtaking and energetic. The Monash University Performing Arts Centres offered a variety of venues that reflected the eclecticism of the program and made it easy to find a spot to sit and relax with food and drink.

The Count’s restaurant included performances of the Cairo Club Orchestra with Dexter Dandy Montgomery Brown (Nichaud Fitzgibbon) flinging us back into the 30s with their radio band stylings, complete with a Chinese Gong. 

MoJO (Mordialloc Jazz Orchestra) presented its long-standing event – Jazz-e-oke – and invited us all to take part; both bands proving that we will never get tired of a big band. The Sound Gallery served up Coco’s Lunch, a jazz vocal group that’s an international phenomenon. Students have been working with this talented group of women for the past three years at Monash, learning the intricacies of songwriting using the melodies and rhythmic patterns of Southern India and Africa. The result was a kind of evolutionary improvisatory jazz joy that would have made the street musicians of the Mississippi proud. 

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Other equally talented students roved from the smaller venues – Speakeasy and the Courtyard to the big stages – in small groups or joining their mentors and heroes to demonstrate how the flame of jazz is passed on, ever eternal. We missed some of the big stage acts – but we won’t make that mistake next year. This is an annual event and is worthy of being added to every Melbourne jazz aficionado’s calendar.

Big Jazz Day Out was staged for one day only, on 3 May 2025, featuring more than 150 musicians at the Monash Performing Art Centres.