Perth Festival of the Arts: Review of Penguin Cafe at Perth Concert Hall

May 31 2011 by Alison Anderson, Perthshire Advertiser Tuesday

PENGUIN Cafe certainly proved to be one of the many gems on the Perth Festival programme, with 10 top rate musicians on numerous instruments performing a fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable programme of innovative music.

A well-known website puts the Penguin Cafe music into the ‘chamber jazz, folk’ genre, but in fact this ensemble’s sound is impossible to pigeonhole.

Yes, we had strains of folk and jazz riffs, then we bathed in sounds from the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, popped over to Venezuala and then to Japan, soaked up the blues and dropped in to a hoedown.

And all the time there were the two Penguin Cafe trademarks of musical innovation and building a simple melody into a multi-layered musical adventure.

A dip into the aforementioned website explains how the Penguin Cafe Orchestra (PCO) was a collective of performing musicians created by classically trained British guitarist, composer and arranger Simon Jeffes. PCO recorded and performed for 24 years until the world was robbed of Jeffes talents when he died of a brain tumour in 1997.

Happily, though, Jeffes’ son Arthur has inherited his father’s musical clout and in 2009 created the new Penguin Cafe to keep Jeffes senior’s work alive and develop his own talents as a composer, producer and player.

This reviewer was new to the Penguin Cafe sound, but right from the opening number, ‘Dirt’, the senses sunk luxuriously into the Penguin Cafe groove. What a wonderful way to banish the stress of a frenetic week in the office!

Father and son’s musical experimentation came thick and fast. Arthur’s musical talents are undoubted, but he could do with coming out of his shell a little more – admittedly post-interval his nerves were less apparent and he was more inclined to smile and give little introductions to these intriguing, often hypnotic sounds.

It was fascinating to watch the well-oiled machine of the Penguin Cafe in action as the ensemble of talented musicians switched from instrument to instrument.

There was Arthur’s party number playing two whistles simultaneously, the flamboyantly attired violin player, the towering viola maestro, the omnipresent cellist, two busy percussionists and a clutch of ukulele players. A cuatro, melodica, harmonium and dulcitone were among the more unusual instruments contributing to the Penguin Cafe sound.

Stand-out numbers included Air á Danser; Southern Jukebox Music with its lovely intro of piano and cello; a toe-tapping ‘mash up’ of an English 16th century classical piece and Venezuelan folk theme; Harry Piers, Arthur’s appropriately innovative piano composition for his father’s memorial service; and the Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s ground-breaking ‘Telephone and Rubberband’.

This was indeed a class act and hopefully the prolonged applause would have made it clear to Arthur Jeffes that he is doing a very fine job continuing the magical musical journey on which his father embarked some 40 years ago.

Alison Anderson