If you’re taking a bush walk near Mount Ousley, you might hear multi-award-winning jazz musician and Illawarra local Phillip Slater practising on his trumpet.   

Slater has received significant recognition for his contribution to jazz, including the Bell Award for Australian Jazz Musician of the Year and Best Australian Contemporary Jazz Ensemble, but he continues to develop his practice by playing outside.  

“It, like, increases that variability of what I have to pay attention to and what I’m sort of intending to do and how my body has to adjust to the different sort of sonic possibilities of the spaces that I’m playing in,” he explains.   

This impact on music is something he learned from jazz greats like Dizzy Gillespie, Freddie Hubbard and Louis Armstrong. 

 “They were playing of their place and of their time and of the people that they were playing with,” Slater explains.  

These African American musicians were at the vanguard of jazz as an emerging and evolving genre in times of social and cultural upheaval in the United States, and this was reflected in their music.  

For Slater, the context of time and place is important not just for the creation of an authentic sound, but, as an Australian, it’s about finding jazz the sound that speaks to the spaces he is playing in and not just echoing styles of popular American jazz musicians.   

“And I think that if you’re interested in jazz music, then that has to be the priority. You have to pay attention to where you are and to who you’re playing with. And what spaces you’re playing with. What sort of economic conditions are available to you. So, jazz music is really an interesting art form to me in that it can accommodate all those things, and in fact, it sort of celebrates all those things, Slater explains   

Phillip Slater has released four albums, with Immersion Lure being the latest release and teaches at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.