Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 25 July
6:30 PM - 9:15 PM
Location
The Toff in Town
Level 2, Curtin House, 252 Swanston Street, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Get directions
Hallucinatory, chaotic and confronting, Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 poem Howl sits with On the Road by Jack Kerouac and Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs at the very centre of the Beat literary canon.
With its wild, visceral depictions of sex, drugs and madness, Ginsberg’s poem is perhaps as famous for the obscenity trial that followed its publication as for its disturbing and much-parodied opening lines. Like the other Beat writers, Ginsberg was influenced by jazz music and aimed to capture in his writing something of the rhythms, spontaneity and subversive undercurrents inherent in jazz traditions.
At two very special performances at the Toff, Maxine Beneba Clarke will read Howl to modern music by jazz composer Darrin Archer. Archer’s composition, called Drunken Taxicabs of Absolute Reality: Howl to Music, features a seven-piece jazz band and aims to create a sonic landscape that accompanies and interacts with Ginsberg’s seminal poem.
Ginsberg himself described Howl as a ‘tragic custard-pie of wild phrasing’. Join Archer and Beneba Clarke as they bring that wild phrasing to life, more than 60 years after Ginsberg’s first reading.
Featuring
Darrin Archer
Darrin Archer studied Composition and Theory at Latrobe University, and Jazz Piano at The Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Since then, he has been performing in Sydney and Melbourne with various bands, touring, recording, composing and teaching.
He has released 3 albums of original music as a bandleader and composer, and recorded with many great Australian artists including Tim Wilson, Gianni Marinucci, Grace Knight, ATM15, Gideon Brazil and James Mustafa.
As a performer, Darrin performs regularly at Melbourne’s Jazz clubs and festivals with bands such as ‘Cannonball’, ATM15, and Gianni Marinucci’s Nonet, and has worked with a variety of artists such as Hetty Kate, Emma Gilmartin, Michelle Nicole, Hugh Stuckey, Eugene Ball, Paul Williamson, Rita Satch, Olivia Chindamo and Gian Slater. He has played at all the major Jazz festivals including Wangarratta, Stonnington, Eltham, MIJF and the Adelaide Fringe. He has also toured nationally with the Black Arm Band.
Darrin has taught piano privately, delivered piano master classes, and lectured at Monash University. He currently lectures, teaches piano, and takes ensembles and masterclasses at the Australian Institute of Music.
Maxine Beneba Clarke
Maxine Beneba Clarke is the author of the acclaimed memoir The Hate Race, the award-winning short fiction collection Foreign Soil, the poetry collections Carrying The World and How Decent Folk Behave, and many other books ...