By Larry Schwartz
ABC Radio’s Alice Keath says her parents’ broad taste for music by artists as diverse as Laurie Anderson, the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Modern Jazz Quartet “rubbed off on me”.
Keath, who includes Stravinsky, Lou Reed and Joan as Policewoman among her favourites, was just five when she first heard her father rave about a program she co-hosts that celebrates its 25th year this month.
“He was listening and having no expectations whatsoever and then getting bowled over by these unique and unusual combinations of musicians and musical styles,” she remembers the response to Radio National’s Music Deli, a favorite in the family home on Adelaide’s Fleurieu Peninsula. “…He’d go there to find new music.”
A banjo and guitar player who studied composition at the University of Adelaide’s Elder Conservatorium, Keath, 29, has worked for Classic FM in Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne and at Deutsche Welle in Bonn, Germany. She joined Music Deli co-founder Paul Petran as co-producer and co-presenter just over two years ago. “I think it is an absolute dream job,” she says.
Petran is buoyed by her enthusiasm. “It’s been terrific to get somebody new and young,” he says, “with a different perspective who was aware of the program a long time ago and finds herself immersed in the thing”.
He presented Music Deli with Stephen Snelleman from 1986 and continued when Snelleman relocated to Sydney eight years later. The program has maintained a focus on live performances recorded in the studios and at concerts and festivals including Womadelaide and the Port Fairy Folk Festival.
“Back in the 1980s, we were finding artists from the English-speaking tradition,” Petran recalls. “Then the folk scene started to expand and there were some Chileans around town and so-called Andean bands. They were a bit of a novelty and we recorded some of those. In recent years, we’ve had Sudanese choirs, Eritrean bands, Ethiopian musicians. So we follow as people arrive. They have things to say and music is one of the ways they express themselves.”
One of the earliest on the program was a London-born folksinger who migrated to Australia in the early 1960s. “Danny Spooner was among the first and amazingly he is now…performing as much as ever and has an international profile. He had a job teaching. He wasn’t a professional folk singer in any way. He was playing at small festivals, mainly folk clubs around the town.”
Petran is not sure now who alerted him to Archie Roach. In early 1988 when many in Australia were celebrating 200 years of white settlement he heard of the then little known musician who was singing striking songs about his experience of indigenous disadvantage and invited him into the ABC studio early that year to record a few songs.
“He arrived with his old beat up guitar missing a few strings,” Petran recalls the March 1 recording session in liner notes to the CD, Music Deli Presents Archie Roach – 1988, which was released two decades later. “A quick trip to the local music shop for a few strings and then we sat down and we sound checked for a short time…The first song he did was Took the Children Away and I remember not knowing what to say after he finished the song – it was incredibly moving and emotionally charged.”
Petran regards that afternoon as all the more special because Roach had not yet recorded his music. “I think in the end he sang about eight or nine songs and it was one of the most memorable sessions. It was just Archie with a guitar, very simple. But he just poured out everything into those songs.”
He mentions the Sydney-based Ethiopian singer, Dereb Desalegn, singer-songwriter Kavisha Mazzella and La Voce Della Luna, the Melbourne intergenerational Italian women’s choir she directs. “You work with musicians many times over a long career and they become friends,” Petran says. “A lot of the women in La Voce Della Luna are now friends and it’s a party every time we meet up.”
The son of Czech and Slovakian migrants who would sing European folk songs with their friends when he was a boy, he studied classical guitar at La Trobe University before joining the ABC in 1980. He started in the broadcaster’s music department recording solo pianists and violinists and classical repertoire before putting forward the idea of a program to reflect Australia’s evolving cultural and migrant mix.
In recent years, he and Keath have hosted concerts at Melbourne Recital Centre with Multicultural Arts Victoria including 25th anniversary shows early this month featuring the Bamboos, Husky, Woohoo Revue and J-Azmaris.
“You know, when you are in a great concert and you come out of it and two hours has gone past but it felt like five or 10 minutes?” Petran says. “You were totally absorbed in it. I guess in some ways that 25 years has felt like that. It doesn’t feel like half a lifetime.”
Appeared in Big Issue
Larry Schwartz Writer 