Description
Songwriter, singer, producer and guitarist with the Tea Party, Jeff Martin brought grandeur, majesty and mystique back to rock music at a time when his peers and contemporaries were either revelling in all things punk rock, dumbing down the music for quick commercial gratification, or generally showing a lack of concern for melody, dynamics, musicianship and the manipulation of light and shade. The Tea Party endeared itself to a rabid fan base on the strength of its manic, marathon live shows, the smoky sensuality of Martin’s voice, the musical expeditionary nature of the group’s evolving palette of musical colours, the sheer ambitious scope of its studio recordings. But above all, the band soared on the strength of Martin’s songs. Not surprisingly, Jeff Martin the solo artist is able to draw from this same well of inspiration. It is, after all, a well he dug himself. « Exile and the Kingdom » the first batch of Martin solo songs bears the same markings of greatness as do the songs he penned and lovingly recorded with his friends Jeff Burrows and Stuart Chatwood, as the Tea Party. This DVD captures an amazing night at Sydney’s Enmore Theatre in September 2006 when Jeff Martin was joined onstage by very special guests the Toronto Tabla Ensemble. The Toronto Tabla Ensemble is an ever shifting aural experience which has, in its past, fused with great success; music from the west and the east. Together with Martin they reinvent and re-evaluate songs from Jeff’s past and present, with a tangent toward the future.
