Music
Clapsticks and corroborees carried music both sacred and popular for thousands of years in the Centre. In 2010 the beat goes on.
Hip Hop is his passport
Can hip hop change your life? Alice Springs will have a chance to find out when one its foremost practitioners returns to the Centre for this year’s Alice Desert Festival. Morganics has been travelling the world sharing, teaching and skilling up on this universal language since his own life was changed by hip hop in 1984, as he relates in his soon-to-be published book Hip Hop Is My Passport. Now, in the wake of the London riots and global cultural and economic breakdown, he believes hip hop ca...Read more
Gaol liberated
The jailhouse rocked when Alice Springs community choir Asante Sana had a public rehearsal for its upcoming role as the support for the Soweto Gospel Choir at the Araluen Arts Centre. The old Stuart Town gaol, apparently chosen for its excellent acoustics, was an oddly appropriate place for songs celebrating freedom and spreading messages of hope, meshing synchronistically with both Heritage week and the festival of Easter. Choirmaster Morris Stuart speculated on the night that it may have bee...Read more
Marcic magic
Alice Springs musician Herman Marcic has won much rapt attention over the years for — among many other things, of course — his stunning version of Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale. Now Central Australians have cause to be sad, with Herman and his charming wife Chris Marcic leaving town after more than 30 years around the traps. During this time Herman and Chris both developed considerable followings, Herman for his live performances of blues and rock classics and originals...Read more
Alice Healer Energizes the Russians
From Helen Womack in Moscow As autumn cloaked Moscow in shades of cloud-grey and leaf-yellow, Alice Springs violinist and healer Dian Booth flew in, bringing with her the vibrant sounds and colours of the Red Centre. It was her first visit to Russia since Communist times. “I see changes, obviously,” she said. “But the energy here is still rather heavy.” Dian spent a large part of her trip sitting in Moscow’s notorious traffic jams, gazing at the onion-dome churches and wedding-cake sky...Read more
The January Song
“People in Alice Springs ought to get a life,” the service station man said to my friend Christopher the other day. He was commenting on the hundreds of people who create their own stream whenever the Todd River comes down, pouring out of their homes to watch, sometimes for hours, as the river does what rivers are supposed to. He said he’d been living in Alice Springs for a long time – “two years” – and had already seen the Todd flow a couple of times. W...Read more
Solo Bach Hermannsburg
A western desert Aboriginal community might seem an unlikely location for a live performance of Bach’s suites for cello. But Ntaria, better known as Hermannsburg, has long been home to cultural exchange on a grand scale. The venue for last September’s performance by acclaimed Alice Springs cellist Nic Hempel was Central Australia’s oldest church, built by Lutheran missionaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The church was built in the style of traditional German architecture b...Read more
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