Pharos + Tymbal Echoes - SIWJF 2025

Pharos (The Sydney Women’s Jazz Collective) is a 10-piece powerhouse showcasing some of Australia’s finest emerging and established jazz artists — including multiple winners of the Jann Rutherford Memorial Award and Art Music Awards.

With a dynamic six-piece horn section and four-piece rhythm section, Pharos blends the drive of a big band with the creativity and genre-defying spirit of today’s leading ensembles.

They have collaborated with an extraordinary array of local and international artists including Dr Sandy Evans, Ingrid and Christine Jensen (USA/Canada), Silke Eberhardt (Germany), Helen Sung (USA), and Lakecia Benjamin (USA), and performed to sold-out audiences at the Sydney International Women’s Jazz Festival and Sydney Con Jazz Festival.

Their vibrant repertoire features works commissioned or arranged especially for the group by Australian composers Andrea Keller, Sandy Evans, Jenna Cave, Rafael Karlen, Glen Doig and Ellen Kirkwood, alongside international luminaries Silke Eberhardt, Christine Jensen and Helen Sung.

Tymbal Echoes emerged from thoughts about mesmeric experiences such as listening to cicadas and gurgling creeks, or sitting in front of a campfire. Says drummer Simon Barker, "I find these sensory experiences that are rapid, changing, and highly granular sonically or visually a great source of inspiration when asking drumming questions. Over the past year or so I’ve been thinking about these themes whilst creating new drumming materials that have ever-shifting levels of granularity and overlapping knottiness (in conjunction with the granular possibilities of the Lyra 8). It was a great pleasure to explore these thoughts, themes and materials with Hinano Fujisaki (saxophone) for this recording.