Recording: The Ryan Driver Sextet

Artist: The Ryan Driver Sextet

Song: She Was Too Good to Me [composers: Richard Rodgers/Lorenz Hart]

Recorded at The Tranzac (Southern Cross Lounge), November 24, 2023.

The Ryan Driver Sextet - She Was Too Good to Me

This outing of the sextet saw keyboardist Tania Gill sitting in for absent guitarist Martin Arnold, and to some extent, she filled his frequent role of being a wibbly-wobbly disruption to the straight lines of the ballads the group was essaying. Her methods, however were more akin to her work (also alongside Ryan Driver) in The Titillators, where she'd occasionally pick a synth setting seemingly at random and lean into it with gusto — one track in this set received what sounded like a woozy pan pipe solo. It also allowed her to switch over to piano, allowing Driver to take the mic and go Full Crooner. "A mystifying experience," Gill was heard to comment to drummer Nick Fraser after the set — if listening to this band is such a singular thing, being in the middle of it all must be even moreso.

[The Ryan Driver Sextet, in one of its variations, will be back at The Tranzac on Friday, December 29th.]