Simon Tedeschi

Extraordinary concert pianist, Simon Tedeschi, is one of Australia's best-loved classical musicians, performing everything from Mozart and Chopin to Debussy and Prokofiev for orchestras, festivals, and venues around the world, from Sydney Opera House to Carnegie Hall. With a long-harboured love of jazz, and three celebrated albums of Gershwin’s music to his name, tonight Tedeschi teams up with jazz vocalist and violinist, George Washingmachine - and a cracking 6 piece jazz band - for Gershwin favourites and classic jazz standards by Cole Porter, Count Basie, Ray Noble and more. “A common question about Gershwin’s music is: ‘is it jazz’? Many would say that jazz has to be improvised. But even then, jazz is often defined by its groove and a grounding in the blues, that uniquely American sound and form teetering between happiness and sadness. Based on this alone, it would seem that George Gershwin’s music is more jazzy than jazz, as his music is also the legacy of Russian classical music, Eastern European Klezmer and French impressionism. However, his music has such a sense of harmonic inevitability and flow that jazz musicians - those inculcated in the tradition of the music of Black America, from the south in particular - use Gershwin’s songs (and his brother’s lyrics) to create jazz. George is a jazz musician and I am a classical musician who loves jazz, and so our duo represents everything that Gershwin is and tries to be - a music for all people, in all our complexity.” – Simon Tedeschi