SOLO PIANO

Peter Dasent
SONGS FOR SOLO PIANO (ARM)
★★★★½

In his liner notes Peter Dasent says that when he lets his fingers fall on a piano keyboard "sometimes it's rubbish, and sometimes a bit of magic happens". There's only magic on this first solo album from the leader of beloved Sydney band the Umbrellas. A lifelong Beatles fan, Dasent recorded it at London's Abbey Road Studios. But the real wizardry lies in the way Dasent's mind works. He composes with the same absence of artifice with which a child builds sandcastles. His pieces are playthings and the improviser in him delights in toying with them as the moment dictates, whether expanding on a composed idea, or taking puckish right-angled turns. His oeuvre lends itself to the latter, embracing everything from ragtime, blues and jazz to more contemplative pieces that carry echoes of Satie and are about investigating a mood, whether pensively or by warping it into something marvellously misshapen. Always an aura of enchantment and veiled humour hovers nigh, so one is drawn into a world of musical make-believe as surely as Alice was into Wonderland. JOHN SHAND