Published: 17 August 2017
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Deborah Conway: Rock royalty; singer and composer of soaring pop to spiritual ballads; mentor to emerging artists; mother of three; “out and proud Jew”; music festival director and a favourite artist of former Governor-General Dame Quentin Bryce (appropriate for rock royalty).
As director of this year’s Shir Madness festival, to be held in Melbourne early next month, Conway is ideally placed to steer the genre-bending, sweep of soundscapes being offered in the annual celebration of Jewish music.
“In Shir Madness, we have invited people to be part of a Jewish music festival that presents a vast array of genres,” says Conway. “We have invited musicians who aren’t Jewish to celebrate Jewish composers and Jewish musicians to respond to the festival through their own work and interpretations.”
Conway, who is guiding Shir Madness for the second time (after a successful tilt in 2015), says a key vision for the festival is to “challenge”: “The idea behind the festival is that it touches as broadly as possible on where Jews have made a contribution to music. I have tried to create a festival that is as broad as possible to challenge people – I want them to be blown away by people they have never seen or music that presents a new dimension.
“It’s a two-way process. It gives performers an opportunity to perform in front of people they haven’t performed to before and similarly, audiences can dip into a totally different realm to anything they have experienced. It’s a win-win situation.”
Shir Madness, like Conway, defies neat packaging. This year’s program features artists as diverse as New York trailblazers The Klezmatics, world-renowned US clarinet virtuoso David Krakauer’s Ancestral Groove, with its experimental fusion of jazz and klezmer, and “Australia’s First Lady of Soul”, Renée Geyer.
Conway, who is working alongside musical partner and husband, Willy Zygier, the festival’s artistic director, says festival-goers will be “torn. We have such a feast. Unfortunately, when you have 30 acts going simultaneously over one day, people will have to make some tough decisions – it’s the nature of the beast.”
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Organising the festival has been just one of the many projects in Conway’s high-octane life over the last 12 months. Amongst other things, she has mentored young Australian female singers as part of the “Songs That Made Me” mentor program and performed at packed-out concert halls, showcasing the 2016 album Everybody’s Begging, her ninth album with Zygier.
It followed their 2013 collaboration Stories of Ghosts, which was a soulful Jewish stroll through the Bible that attempted to unravel the twisted narrative of life, the universe and everything.
Conway and Zygier have now been together for more than 25 years. Speaking to The Age earlier this year, she said: "I married the right man - he's a good guy and we work together… There's a lot of music in our house; music is our life, it bleeds into everything, into family and domestic life and personal quests."
Conway has been a chronicler of the mundane and mystical and has straddled both popular and cutting edge musical styles on her 30-year path. Her first band Do Re Mi topped the charts. Her solo album String of Pearls won her Best Female ARIA award in 1992 with songs such as the title track, Release Me, and Only The Beginning offering a forthright and irreverent departure from much of the early ’90s conventional pop music.
She recalls the 25-year anniversary performance of String of Pearls at Melbourne’s Arts Centre's Playhouse Theatre in September, 2016, where Conway and Zygier's three daughters sang with them on stage, as a career highlight.
She says the couple “have many strands in our lives – one of the many is being a musician and another one is being Jewish. These two strands became entwined seven or eight years ago in our work and in it we have found a rich vein of material that we’re not ready to leave alone yet”.
The two albums, Stories of Ghosts and Everybody’s Begging, explored Jewish themes. She described Stories of Ghosts at the time as "an unbeliever's examination of Biblical themes from a Jewish perspective, according to a review in The Australian.
Can you be Jewish and an unbeliever? “I think so,” Conway says. “The Jews are a people as well as a religion; there are so many ties that potentially define us, tradition, culture, community, a homeland and a bloodline passed down through the mother. Whether we like it or not, whether G-d is involved or not, it’s so much more layered than that.
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“Antisemitism is on the rise; it’s within the extreme elements of Islamic teachings and has also found a home more recently in the far left of politics. People are blinded by these ancient hatreds and once again, Jews are being targeted for just being Jews.”
“There are all kinds of ways to be Jewish,” she told the Weekend Courier in 2016. “Just because you might not believe in God doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t go through all the emotions, the rituals and all of those things that go with it. And these are fascinating areas to explore.”
Has raising children enhanced her connection to Judaism? “Not really. I think that has come about with age rather than becoming a mother. As a family, we celebrate Shabbat; we have Passover together and my children have been known to skip breakfast on Yom Kippur but on the whole, it’s so far peripheral to their lives. I guess they will come to it when they’re ready, or maybe not.”
Asked how the role of festival director has influenced her Jewish identity, Conway reflects: “I don’t know that Shir Madness has influenced my identity but it has provided me with the opportunity to connect myself to Melbourne’s community in a way that I probably hadn’t before.
“Being Jewish is deep within my DNA and making these connections makes me feel happy and part of something – it’s brilliant to be able to explore and celebrate all this wonderful Jewish music and Jewish musicians. And I’m so proud of the team and what we have achieved in a short amount of time. I’m an out and proud Jew – proud of contributing to an exploration of Jewish music and, more broadly, to Jewish culture.”
Shir Madness was first staged in Sydney in 2010 and is now held alternately between Melbourne and Sydney. Each city, according to Conway, offers its own distinct flavour or environment: “Sydney & Melbourne are very different and I think those differences are reflected in the festivals we have mounted.”
Conway is thankful that this year’s festival is at one venue in St Kilda, which does not present the same logistical issues as the last one she curated. The 2015 festival was staged in a number of venues in Elsternwick and had her "dealing with council, waste-management plans, road closures and security, heating, lighting, seating and fundraising”.
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“We have some extra petrol in the tank now,” she says, referring to the help of a general manager, having steered the festival before and “not having to close roads”.
Offering examples of the breadth of artists appearing this year, Conway enthuses about the contemporary classical Ukrainian-born, Australian-based pianist Sonya Lifschitz, who will take one stage. She debuted with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at age 18, performed in New York’s iconic Bargemusic series and has been praised by the New York Times.
And people will be “blown away” by Yohai Cohen and his “astounding virtuosity”, she adds. Cohen is a native of Safed Israel who specialises in North African/Jewish music. An Oud player, he studied under Zohar Fresco, the internationally recognized master of percussion.
Also performing: Deborah Conway and Willy Zygier, Double Grammy Award winning pedal steel guitarist Lucky Oceans, Indigenous Freedom Fighters, Bushrangers, Pioneer Women and other Early Settlers; Kobi Oved with his Songs of Prayer; Melbourne-born Berlin-based Phia, Galit Klas and Brett Kaye as Chazzan and Chazzanit (cantorial music), Hello Tut Tut with their high energy klezmer, and middle eastern masters, Zourouna.
The festival will close with its now signature segment, Song of Songs, which features the cream of Australia’s music community each singing one of their favourite songs by a Jewish composer.
This year the performers include Russell Morris, Alma Zygier, Angie Hart, Clare Bowditch, Dave Graney, David Bridie, Deborah Cheetham, Deborah Conway, Emily Lubitz, Glenn Richards, Jessie Lloyd, Jess Ribeiro, Kram (from Spiderbait), Paul Dempsey and Pugsley Buzzard.
Conway says this marquee event will provide a distinctive, eclectic and exciting range of music – something close to her heart.
Shir Madness will be held on Sunday, September 3, from midday to 10pm, at Temple Beth Israel, 76 Alma Rd, St Kilda
For details and full program: http://shirmadness.com/
This The Jewish Independent article may be republished with this acknowledgement: ‘Reprinted with permission from www.thejewishindependent.com.au ’
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