Lance Ferguson Wants To Make Stonnington Jazz Festivalgoers Dance

If you've not yet heard of Lance Ferguson's Black Feeling recordings, you've got some catching up to do, because he's just released Volume 3. "The whole concept behind them is that they're kind of cover versions of classic funk, soul and Latin tunes," Ferguson explains.

On the inspiration behind his Black Feeling series, Ferguson reveals, "Some of these are my favourite songs and I just wanna kind of get inside them and reverse engineer them and see what makes them tick from my producer kind of head. But then sometimes there are tunes that, as a DJ, the originals are maybe a little bit thin, or a little bit mashed, or a little bit harsh through big systems; so sometimes I'm trying to make these songs more kind of DJ-friendly by doing versions of them that are maybe a bit more expansive sonically. And the other thing: it's just a whole lot of damn fun."

Ferguson is presenting material from Black Feeling: Volume 3 live in a Stonnington Jazz Festival premiere and will call upon "a bit of an all-star band" comprising members of The Bamboos, The Putbacks and "people who've played in Hiatus Kaiyote".

He's particularly pleased to be performing this show at Revolver since "this music is really designed to dance to". "One of the very first Bamboos gigs, ever, happened there and some of [his] first-ever DJ gigs where there as well so I've got a real nostalgic soft spot for Revolver," he admits. Ferguson "reached out" to the festival organisers to request this space, saying, "This music is really designed to dance to," and praises, "It's a credit to them that they were open to that, I think."

Last year Ferguson brought another of his projects, Menagerie, to Stonnington Jazz Festival and admires "the people who are curating [the festival] and putting it together" for being "really open minded to different permutations and incarnations of what jazz might be".

When asked what turned him onto jazz in the first place, Ferguson recalls, "My dad was the first person to ever play me a tape of Miles Davis' Kind Of Blue". Then hip hop bands such as A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul prompted him to discover "funk, soul and jazz". "And then I eventually studied jazz at [Victorian] College Of The Arts in Melbourne, on guitar, and that was like diving in the deep end," he explains.    

On whether he's still in touch with any of his VCA buddies, Ferguson extols, "The best thing about music school is the people you meet and, I mean, I'm still playing with people that I went through that course with. We graduated in, like, '98 and I'm still playing with some of these people and, you know, they're friends for life so it's really cool like that."

So as well as his excellent weekly radio show, Sky High on Double J, what does the rest of the year hold for Ferguson? "I'm finishing up a solo record at the moment that will probably, hopefully come out before the end of the year. And the second half of the year I'm pretty much devoting to working on a new Bamboos record; I want to make the greatest Bamboos record we've ever made. And that will probably - no, that will come out in 2017 at some point."