ANNALIESA ROSE | INTERVIEW + TRACK REVIEW
Annaliesa Rose has been singing her whole life and performing professionally for 27 years, and it shows in the way she talks about her voice. She doesn't overthink it. She learned technique from her mother Marjorie Shepheard and tone from the late Kerrie Biddell, and after long enough it stops being a set of choices and becomes something closer to breathing. What she has done deliberately is build a life. Between Canberra and Wollongong at home, Prague and Brno and Edinburgh abroad, and a musical family that now stretches from Australia to Central Europe, Annaliesa has spent the last few years quietly stitching together an international career on her own terms.
Home Is Where The Heart Is, released on the 4th of September, arrives as her first internationally recorded album, laid down at Czech Television Music Studio in Prague with Emil Viklický on piano, Andy Schofield on saxophone, Petr Dvorský on bass and Tomáš Hobzek on drums. It's a record about feeling at home within yourself no matter where you are, born out of years of travel and a difficult chapter that finally moved her into something like self discovery. The title track is the anchor. Written after her 2024 European travels, sung in a Czech language she's been learning for seven years alongside her English lyrics, and now heading toward album launches at Smiths Alternative in Canberra on 5 September before landing in Brno and Prague at the end of the month. In the interview below Annaliesa talks about home as a state rather than a place, the piano recordings that pushed her to sing silently in her head to protect the mics, why she doesn't chase comparisons with other jazz voices, and the sound of European rooms leaning in when they realise the Australian singer on stage is delivering the lyrics in their own language.
TRACK REVIEW - Trust In Me
Trust In Me arrives without a moment's warning. Straight in with the jazz, no lead-up, just piano keys ripping along from the first bar. "Trust in me," the opening line, feels like a door quietly opening into the rest of the song. From there the whole piece flows, generous and unhurried, staying true to the jazz surprises waiting inside the instrumental sections. Structured, but built with real ebbs and flows.
The saxophone is music to my ears, smooth end to end. Underneath it, the drum kit sounds beautifully vintage and roomy, a woody tone that feels like it was captured in a room where every microphone was placed with purpose. Whoever produced this clearly walked in with the whole thing already in their head and knew exactly where each element needed to go.
"Home is Where the Heart Is" is a title that could easily read as sentimental, but you've made an internationally recorded album titled that way with musicians from the other side of the world. What does home mean now that you've built a musical life split between Australia and Europe?
So with regards to Home Is Where the heart is, I wanted to create a song that signified my love of Czech and my love of travelling no matter where I am incl UK and other parts of Europe and USA and Canada. So after my time in 2024 overseas I wrote this song. However the song is not just about my love of travelling or passion for specific places although I've been learning Czech for 7 years now and I do love the country and language and people. But this song is about more than that. This song is about how if we feel whole within ourselves we can feel a sense of being at home no matter where we are as long as we are grounded and safe and feeling free.
So I guess for me, I love travelling and I'm a free spirit and I finally have come to a place although it took a difficult situation in the past and me having to deal with that, in order to move forward into this place of self discovery and really to a place of finally finding myself. So overall that's what home is where the heart is, is all about, feeling at home within yourself no matter where you are, but also dialectically being able to know where you feel most at home in the world and also who you feel most at home with.
Recording an album at Czech Television Music Studio in Prague with musicians of Emil Viklický's stature is a significant step for any jazz artist. What did working with him teach you about your own voice that you couldn't have learned in Sydney or Canberra?
Yes, I met Emil in Canberra back in 2018 as he was performing for the Czech and jazz community. I then contacted him at a later time a few years later to ask if he would be able to work together which I'm thrilled to be able to call all these musicians colleagues. These musicians, all of them are fabulous and I'm blessed to work with some of the best players in the business in Australia and overseas, so I cannot compare their talents because they all are unique in their own way. I don't really think however that the question here is relevant. I guess I've been singing my whole life, performing for 27 years professionally and I already know what my voice is capable of.
Your debut album carried a question mark, "Is That Jazz?" Now, four years later, do you feel like you've answered it, or is the uncertainty itself part of what keeps you making the music?
The reason for the question mark is because it's part of that specific song title, song written by Tony King. The song is questioning jazz and what is jazz. I think in our world now there are so many genres and sub genres of music that it's getting a bit difficult to pinpoint what things are sometimes. There are some people who will say specific styles of music don't fit into what they deem is jazz and then if you look specifically in European music, jazz is very inclusive of so much and Europe to me I feel it's leading the way in Jazz as a whole of what it includes within festivals, venues and albums. So really the ? which is just part of the song title, but also the song title too questions what is jazz and I think that it is very intellectual in it's questioning and very creative lyrics by Tony for that song.
Learning from your mother Marjorie Shepheard and then Kerrie Biddell is a musical lineage most singers would build a whole identity around. When you're on stage now, whose voice do you hear guiding you first?
I learned a lot of technique from my Mum Marjorie Shepheard and then I would say just like all of us who learned from our Australian royalty Kerrie Biddell, you pick up a lot of technical things but also tone as well. So I know when I sing I feel how Kerrie would guide you in regards to all contemporary music and learning the lyrics, the story of the song, acting out or having emotions for the song, technical things with how to sing the song. But I think now I just sing. I think really it's just I've been doing it so long now that it's second nature to just sing and not worry about it.
You're one of very few jazz vocalists carrying a Bachelor of Music, a GradDipEd, and an MBA equivalent. Do those qualifications shape how you approach a song, or has the music always insisted on being felt rather than analysed?
There's a lot of us around who have a BMus in Jazz and a GradDipEd, a few of us have Masters and PhDs, I hope one day to get a PhD. For me I learned so much about improvisation, arranging, composing, harmony, jazz, jazz history, performing, networking etc from my BMus in particular and then my Master of Arts Management as well as my Graduate Diploma of Education when meeting with other musicians at the face to face trainings. None of my qualifications though have really analysed music, my Bachelor was a practical degree that didn't have musicology in it and I only did a little bit of musicology in my Graduate Diploma, so realistically I wouldn't be analysing songs, I would just always be learning them, listening to different versions and then making the song my own or writing my own original compositions and then they already are my own.
Playing alto saxophone at the Sydney 2000 Olympics as part of the Millennium Marching Band is the kind of story most artists would open with. How did that experience shape the sense of scale and audience you carry into intimate jazz rooms now?
Well I need to firstly clarify I did not really play jazz saxophone. All my saxophonist work was done at school for bands backing other singers doing hornlines and then with the Olympic Marching Band (I was in the NSW section of the band the Millennium Marching Band) we were all reading music and memorising it all before doing the performances so I was just reading and learning the dots on the page as written. I've been performing my whole life, that was a very different situation as were all the bands incl lots of performances with MMB (school spec 1999, different outside venues in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2004) and other bands I was in at school when playing alto and also choirs I was in as well when I was young which could be massive events too. I don't think it really relates to various rooms performing in today though, because they are different projects. So if I'm performing jazz music then some venues can fit quite a lot of people and some are much smaller. I feel really that most of the venues I'm performing at fit quite a reasonable amount of people so you are always hoping that the room will be full and that you perform well and then trying to not internalise that too much.
You play Steinway grand piano and sing on this record alongside Emil Viklický who also plays piano. What did it teach you about your own playing to sit next to a musician of that stature, and how did the two of you carve up the piano work in the room?
The two tracks that I am playing the Steinway grand piano are not on the album, they will be separate singles, one is a pop song and one is a folk/jazz fusion. It was pretty thrilling, nerve wracking, daunting to play the piano on these two tracks though because we realised that I could not sing at the same time because it would spill into the piano mics. So I had to sing in my head silently (using different muscle memory) and then do the overdubs of the voice afterwards. I was nervous and thrilled though to see Emil came into the studio so he could watch us record these two songs.
For the actual album, Emil is playing the 13 tracks on the album itself.
I decided to do it this way to keep the sound the same.
Julie Kratz reviewed your Fringe show and called you "a true Lady of Jazz." That's a heavy compliment and a loaded phrase in a tradition that historically wasn't built for women's voices. How do you sit with it?
I was thrilled. Julia is a fellow performer herself and she came to see my show and I was so grateful she was able to come along. Her compliment was well received. I was thrilled she enjoyed it. I guess though if I think about it, I spent a lot of time growing up listening to so much music and now my goal is not to compare myself to anyone else because at the end of the day dialectically we can all exist both in the past and in the present and all have our ability to have our voices heard, really heard whilst all being able to be ourselves and be able to value that. So I'm honoured she had her comments in her review and I thanked her for the comments without really putting too much onto the comments and therefore letting them just be what they are which is a subjective opinion from one person to another of a performance.
Between the Czech Republic, Edinburgh, Prague, and Sydney, you're releasing this album into a world that increasingly rewards hyper local specificity. Do you think a career that lives across borders makes the music richer, or harder to place for listeners looking for a scene to belong to?
I never have thought of hyper local specificity before, from where I am I'm always having to travel from Wollongong, Canberra, Sydney, Newcastle, Adelaide, etc for gigs because there are not enough gigs in one place. So regarding all the places I travel as I live in Canberra and Wollongong half and half at present, I feel most artists are international these days and the world is truly a global place especially when it comes to music. Since everything is social media and website and mailing list focused and streaming/selling music, it's mostly online making it even more global. So I'll be doing my gigs in Wollongong and Canberra and then heading back to Brno and Prague and then Edinburgh for 3 gigs, so a mini tour and then the goal after that is to work on networking and jam sessions as my main focus is getting properly into the European jazz scene amongst all the other projects I'm working on and we will see what happens. Most of my friends in the music scene are constantly travelling around Europe (incl UK) and then in Asia, Australia, etc, it's just that sort of business.
With album launches lined up at Smiths Alternative in Canberra on September 5th, then Brno and Prague at the end of the month, the tour itself plays out the album title. What are you most curious about when the same songs land in a Canberra room and a Prague room?
Well I won't be focusing on the Czech too much in Canberra although I'm hoping some people from the Czech community will be coming along. It will be the same songs I've sung in Brno and Prague and other parts of Czech Republic and Edinburgh in the past. When I do go to Czech though, I'll sing my original I wrote in Czech and the other two songs on the album in Czech as well. It's a trickly language to master to sing in but I've been working on this language for 7 years now. Last year in Prague I had a few Australians there at the venue which was cool. The year before that when I was performing in other parts of the country where they do not speak English, they appreciated me singing some in Czech because you noticed them listening more because they could understand the lyrics.
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