In 2015, Adelaide joined sixty-nine other cities around the world (including Belfast, Glasgow, Havana and Seville) to be titled UNESCO City of Music. This title celebrates Adelaide’s vibrant music culture and history. Ten years later, we still proudly wear the badge as Australia’s only city with this international title.
Adelaide Festival Centre is proud to join global celebrations for UNESCO’s International Jazz Day 2025 on Wednesday 30th April. This special event at Dunstan Playhouse will feature performances by ARIA-nominated Zela Margossian Quintet and acclaimed local artists Ciara Louise Ferguson and Mark Simeon Ferguson, celebrating the power of jazz that transcends boundaries.
Composer/pianist Mark Simeon Ferguson was born in Whyalla, South Australia on Barngala land, raised in Clare on Ngadjuri land and lives in Adelaide on Kaurna land. He is rooted in the jazz tradition but lives in multiple musical worlds. He composes and arranges for organisations such as the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, the Australian String Quartet, SA Primary Schools Festival of Music, The Mike Stewart Big Band, the JazzSA Superbands and his own groups, including Marmalade Circus.
Music has been a huge part of Mark’s life, which he shared with Glam Adelaide.
“I was very blessed to grow up in a musical family. My dad was a singer-songwriter. One of my fondest, earliest memories is of my dad sitting and playing his nylon string guitar and creating songs. My mum was a piano player, also, and they both still play. But going further back, my dad’s mum was an organist at the Methodist Uniting Church in Semaphore, and on the other side, there were musicians as well. Most of them were amateur, but music was just something everyone did and still does.”
We asked Mark if there was a moment where he knew that music was the career path he wanted to take.
“It’s an interesting one. It always amuses me because I actually made a financial decision to be a musician. I was actually more interested in art. I was really into sculpture all the way through school. I loved music, but it’s just what I did. It was art that I wanted to do. I did art history and I did music history and I saw that musicians might actually make a living when they’re alive where artists tend to make a living when they’re dead. So it was a financial decision to be a musician.”
Ciara Louise Ferguson is a pianist, composer, singer and teacher living on Kaurna land in Adelaide, South Australia. She recently recorded albums with her own quartet. Ciara works in varying genres including jazz, classical, music theatre, cabaret and pop, and has been a backing vocalist, pianist, and/or vibraphonist for artists including Tina Arena, Lior, Eddie Perfect, Paul Grabowsky, Joe Chindamo, Thando and Wendy Matthews.
Ciara grew up in a very musical household, so we asked if she has always known that she would follow in her father’s footsteps and make music a career.
“Music as a career was never forced upon me. My parents were very happy for us to do whatever we wanted, but it was just so much part of the fabric of our lives that I didn’t really want to do anything else. I love playing music with my family so much. It just felt like the natural progression of what I should do with the skills that I have and what had been fostered by my family and then by my schooling.”
Both Mark and Ciara are exceptional musicians and composers and they each shared their approach to writing new music and where they draw inspiration from.
MARK:
“It really depends on the project. There will be moments where I just have an idea, and I sit down at the piano and I just write. Sometimes it’s just from improvisation. So a lot of that stuff goes on. But when it comes to writing, when I’ve got a project that I’ve really got to work on, it’s actually a lot of research. A piece I wrote for the Australian String Quartet last year, about the hooded plovers, took months and months and months of research, of studying the birds themselves and recording the sounds of the beach and then trying to figure out how to incorporate that into a piece of music. So it depends on the project. But for a large portion of what I write, it is based on research.”
CIARA:
“I guess I haven’t done as many large-scale works as Dad, but I have a very similar approach to him. When I’m writing pieces for fun or just to play with my band, I’ll often just be walking the dog and then I’ll be humming or singing something to myself, and I get out my voice recorder and my voice memos and record those thoughts. They also can emerge from improvisation as well. I’ll sit at the piano and just keep playing until I feel like I’m onto something good. If there’s a specific work I’ve been asked to write, I will also be doing a lot of research and writing down pages of notes – especially with lyric writing. We’re both quite nerdy and like doing homework.”
This year marks the 10th anniversary of Adelaide’s UNESCO title. Mark shared his thoughts on how important this is for our city.
“It’s a wonderful thing and I’ll have to admit it’s something that we haven’t really embraced very much. It’s something that a lot of us don’t really know much about. Honestly I didn’t know very much at all about it. But Joe Hay, from the UNESCO City of Music, found out about these jazz relays, where musicians from different UNESCO Cities around the world all perform a take on the same set piece, he thought it was a great opportunity for us to really get stuck into this concept and start to meet some of the people from overseas who are doing these things. It has been really wonderful to be involved with this and it’s a real honour that Adelaide has been recognised for its musicality.”
Ciara was recently awarded the COMA Emerging Jazz Writer’s Award.
“I felt so honoured and it’s really exciting. My sister also won it a few years ago. COMA is an organisation that does such fantastic work in the music community and in supporting everyone from upcoming musicians to established ones. I had some amazing mentoring sessions and I’ll get some studio time to record too,” Ciara told Glam Adelaide.
This coming Wednesday, both Ciara and Mark will feature as part of the Adelaide Festival Centre’s UNESCO Jazz Day.
Ciara shared with us what her set will include.
“I am doing mostly original music. A lot of my music is inspired by nature and environmental themes. I’m playing with Bonnie Grynchuk on double bass, who I’ve known for many years and Zed Crawford on drums. My project is focusing on choral jazz, because I think schools who have choirs, especially jazz choirs, should be looking at music by local composers. A lot of schools are really trying to get more local female representation as well. So I wanted to be writing things that actually have legs beyond this event. We’ve got lots of three-part harmony going on with my sister Jasmine and Stacey Theel. We’ve been having some rehearsals for that. It’ll be kind of earthy, folky, jazz, a bit funky sometimes, lots of nature.”
Mark has composed the Jazz relay piece for this years’ UNESCO celebrations which will be performed by Adelaide Edition and himself.
“The piece that we’re playing is the piece that I was asked to write for the UNESCO Jazz Relay. The concept behind the relay is that one person writes a piece of music and then jazz musicians from every UNESCO City of Music have the opportunity to write their own version of it or arrange their own version, and then everyone then performs those pieces in relay and it’s recorded and pieced together. So because this year is our 10th year of being the City of Music, I was asked to write the piece for the relay. It’s called 3.23am, which is the time I opened my computer to start writing it while I was on tour in Port Augusta with a group of university students. On this tour we did 13 workshops and concerts within two and a half days, which was full on. There was this incredible sense of empowerment of the young students when they got to workshop alongside our students, as well as the empowerment of our students learning how to educate, by observing the way I do it, and then they had the opportunity to do that. There were some beautiful connections with education at that moment. So that’s when I wrote the piece of music and then put it together.”
The evening will also feature music from the Zela Margossian Quintet. They are an ethno-jazz band based in Sydney, performing original works and arrangements carrying influences from Armenian traditional music. Comprised of talented and multi-cultural musicians from Sydney, Zela Margossian Quintet creates an exotic musical atmosphere that is sure to take you on an emotive and pleasurable journey.
UNESCO International Jazz Day 2025
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre
Wednesday 30 April at 6pm
https://www.adelaidefestivalcentre.com.au/whats-on/unesco-international-jazz-day-2025
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