The Phillip Johnston Quartet

“Johnston …has a sophisticated and highly personalised compositional language that…. espouses his own quirky, groove-laden ideas."– John Shand, The Sydney Morning Herald

Coming from 2013’s premieres of Wordless! with Art Spiegelman at the GRAPHIC Festival, and his score for Lotte Reineger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) at Randwick Town Hall, Johnston returns to a quartet setting with long-time cohorts Alister Spence, Lloyd Swanton and Nic Cecire.

His upcoming events include Manhattan Moonrise, a new CD from The Microscopic Septet (USA), a performance of Prince Achmed at the 2014 Vivid Festival, and a US tour of Wordless! His recent performance at The Capital Jazz Project (Canberra) with Tight Corners was called “joyous and compelling” by John Shand in the SMH, and The New Yorker called him a “world-class instrumentalist.”

In this upcoming performance, he’ll be playing a mix of new material and works drawn from his many bands (The Coolerators, The Microscopic Septet, Big Trouble, and The Transparent Quartet). It will be an evening combining improvisation and composition, and always, the unexpected.

Phillip Johnston (soprano saxophone) Alister Spence (piano/organ) Lloyd Swanton (bass) Nic Cecire (drums)