Paul Grabowsky is a pianist, composer, arranger, conductor – and one of Australia’s jazz legends. ABC Jazz is proud to present his new album: The Bitter Suite.

Playing with a largely Sydney- based band for the first time since the late 1980s, Grabowsky has brought together some of the strongest players on the scene – possibly the finest jazz musicians Australia has ever produced. They have all been drawn to the music, he says, for the same reason: that the night beckons.

The album, says Grabowsky, is music of the night – specifically, the Australian night. It was written in an ‘urgent tumble’ in just a couple of weeks, and draws on everything from the Rolling Stones to Rachmaninoff, with fluid, rhapsodic solos and tight rhythmic groove: ‘The process of creating is obscure. I sometimes understand it as a reordering of everything we remember or have forgotten, a series of combinatorial reshuffles done at warp speed. Maybe these pieces are ultimately self-portraits, in which the spirits of spectral companions hover; if so, then I must count myself lucky to be indulged by the generosity of the superb musicians.’

‘Bittersweet’ as the title suggests, adventurous, bursting with energy, intense, richly complex yet smooth as silk, this is a contemporary jazz album you’ll want to hear again and again.