“In Australia, it’s really different. When you’re a musician, you do a lot of different things. You don’t just do improvised music, or jazz. So I played in rock groups, in hip-hop groups, in jazz groups, with a Flamenco dance company, a lot things like that. And then I went to conservatory to study improvisation.”* For American ears, it is hard to comprehend how Australian expat percussionist Will Guthrie’s improvisations manage to make so much sense in so many different contexts. Last year, between one-off collaborations with members of the European electro-acoustic and free jazz community (Jérome Noetinger, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Clayton Thomas, Ferran Fages), he took to the French autoroutes with banjo player Scott Stroud and smashed old bluegrass standards like “Pretty Polly” and “Cripple Creek” into a shower of wooden splinters–while still leaving his listeners longing for the Appalachian mountains.
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