Welcome to Steve Crump Music
Thanks for stopping by! Feel free to take a look around and listen to some tracks from Steve's debut album, Midnight Rain, released in June 2016.
Click here if you would like to purchase Steve Crump's debut album, Midnight Rain. Purchase price is $20 including postage.
It can also be bought at Rocksteady Records, Level 1, 358 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne.
Now also for sale at famous Red Eye Records 143 York Street, Sydney. (02) 9267 7440
Please feel free to contact Steve in regards to live performances or if you have any other questions.
And be sure to check in often as new music and news are uploaded every month or two.
Breaking News!
December 2018
As reported in earlier “Breaking News” (see June 2018 below), Bob Brown, Australia’s most respected environmentalist, used Steve’s music “Tarkine Sunset (takayna)” as the soundtrack for his photo montage for the Bob Brown Foundation 2017 Christmas video message. In March 2018, happening upon a book of poems (In Balfour Street, NewPrint 2010) by Bob, Steve commented that maybe one day he would put some of Bob’s poems to music. Bob unhesitatingly replied, “Then start with “Winter Night at Liffey!”. Fortuitously, this was Steve’s favourite poem but his knees started shaking at the thought. After some false starts, Steve came up with music interpretations for four of the poems and in July Bob and Steve went to Reel to Reel studios in Margate, south of Hobart, and recorded them “live” in just a few takes.
Watch the video here!
Heath Cullen mixed the tracks at 9 to 5 studios in Candelo NSW, using software to mimic the gorgeous sound of Ocean Road Studios in LA (Frank Sinatra, Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, Willie Nelson, Radiohead…) and Mick Wordley from Mixmasters in the Adelaide Hills did his magic thing mastering the tracks for MAD CDs to produce; all under the umbrella of the Bob Brown Foundation.
The result is Winter Night At Liffey, a CD package featuring poetry read by Bob Brown over interpretative piano pieces by Steve. The package includes a physical CD, booklet of the 4 poems, notes from Bob and Steve, and a bonus free unique download code. It’s also available as a stand alone download card, and there is a sheet music and poetry folio available on the “Music” page of this website.
Bob says of Winter Night in Liffey - “The poems were written between the 1970s when I was in my Twenties. “Winter Night..” is at Liffey, under the Great Western Tiers in Northern Tasmania. The original shingles of my 1904 farmhouse had been replaced with corrugated iron. It was unusual for snow to settle long at the house but, often, I’d awake in the morning to find the mountain behind ladden with white.” Steve sees Bob’s poems as vivid, rugged, gentle, funny, brave accounts of various events in Bob’s life in the 1970s. Steve’s musical sketches were improvised by conjuring up what the poems meant to him focusing on key events in each - in this case, the peacefulness of the snow at the end of a night time storm at Liffey under the Western Tiers / Taytitiheeker (Dry’s Bluff) above Bob’s old house he shared with Paul (now cared for by Bush Heritage Australia). The other three poems on the CD are “Katie Kingston”, “In Balfour Street” and “Wynyard Girl”.
Reviews have started coming in with Heather Rose (Award winning author of The Museum of Modern Love etc) observing “What a poignant thing this is. Together, Bob and Steve have created a little bit of wonder. Enjoy!”. Raewyn Connell (Internationally acclaimed author of “Southern Theory”, busy sociologist, obscure poet and ever-hopeful feminist) sees the CD as “Music and poetry – a classic combination, put to new use evoking moments in an Australian life where complex emotions are linked to place, landscape, and mysteries of relationship. Steve Crump’s music works from, and beyond, Bob Brown’s reading of his own texts, creating subtly different pieces that will remain in memory.”
If you would like to purchase “Winter Night At Liffey” please visit the Bob Brown Foundation Online store: https://www.bobbrown.org.au/onlinestore $20 includes postage
June, 2018.
“Tarkine Sunset” Revisited
In December 2017, Steve had the huge privilege of his music being chosen by Dr Bob Brown, Australia’s most respected environmentalist, as the backdrop to a collage of Bob’s photos that formed the Christmas message of the Bob Brown Foundation (click here to view the video).
Steve’s music hoped to capture the beauty and fragility of a sunset from a beach on the wild coast of North-West Tasmania, an area known as takayna / The Tarkine of rare natural beauty and deserving World Heritage protection - though it is not even granted National Park status. Patagonia outdoor company has recently joined with the BBF to help push, worldwide, for recognition of, and legal protection for, this unique and treasured environment, see: http://www.bobbrown.org.au/global_corporation_backs_tarkine
“Tarkine Sunset”, described as “hauntingly beautiful”, and “stunning”, and “impossible to get out of my head!” has been heard by over 1,200 of Bob’s supporters around the world as well as being played at the Cygnet Folk Festival “Earth Celebration” in Tasmania in January 2018. Inspired and proud of this response, Steve decided to “revisit” the music by gathering a few friendly local musicians to tease out some of the underlying melodies and counter-harmonies he could hear in his head, but are impossible to perform solo on the piano.
Under the watchful ear and eye of Steve, with Zarven Kara on the soundboard at his unique “Reel to Reel” studio in the hills south of Hobart, Ben Brinkoff added double bass, Pete Costello added violin and Terry Mead added soprano sax, counterpointing each other as well as Steve’s piano in a luscious and sensitive interpretation, capturing the feeling Steve searched for as he composed the piece.
Steve's piano was recorded by Heath Cullen at Woodstack Studios in 2017, and mastered by Mick Wordley at Mixmasters.
Listen, enjoy and take “action for earth”!!
Photo by Christine Dennis
December, 2017.
Announcing an exciting collaboration between Steve and Australia’s most respected environmentalist, Bob Brown as part of the Bob Brown Foundation campaign to “Save The Tarkine”.
Bob has very generously used Steve's piano piece 'Tarkine Sunset' behind a montage of his photos of the Tarkine as his Christmas message for 2017 from the Bob Brown Foundation.
Steve’s melody is intended to express the fragile and transient beauty of a sunset - something nearly everyone has experienced. In this case, the sunset in Steve’s mind was one from the Tarkine (takayna) coast south of Arthur’s River, on a beach almost buried in huge flotsam logs twisted and tumbled into sculptural forms only Nature could imagine and achieve.
Steve first visited this area in 1978, the second stop on his first trip to Tasmania, when access was rough and ready, but mostly impossible, drawn by the magic that seemed to even inhabit maps of the NW of this special island. There’s now a lookout near Arthurs River called “The Edge of the World” - exactly what it feels like when the Roaring Forties wind strafes your face with sand and foam from the relentless waves travelling from the African coast; you feel there’s nothing else tangible except yourself and ageless Time.
The Tarkinaraa were here for tens of thousands of years and their artefacts, spirit and descendants still shape how one reacts to this country and speak of resilience and formidable courage. Yet all this is now threatened with destruction so the music melody is not only intended to express the beauty of that sunset, but also the danger the sun will set on the Tarkine / takayna as we (and the flora and fauna for which it is home) know it, if the bulldozers and chainsaws move in.
Bob Brown’s photos speak to the same ephemeral and transient beauty, though powerfully portraying renewal and hope through how Earth owns us all and how we should own our responsibility to care for it. It is a huge honour and privilege to collaborate with Bob on this small contribution to saving the Tarkine / takayna and Steve is humbled by Bob’s generous spirit and lifetime of trying to set things right while many of us find it hard to look beyond our daily struggles.
The recording of “Tarkine Sunset (takayna)” was produced by Heath Cullen http://heathcullen.com mastered by Mick Wordley http://mixmasters.com.au. Sheet music will be available soon.
New Album on the Horizon...
Steve's been working on his follow-up album in NSW, once again with producer Heath Cullen at the helm. We'll keep this website updated and give you more details further down the line. If you'd like to stay in the loop via email, join Steve's mailing list at the bottom of this page and we'll send you a message with the album due date and how/ where to purchase it.
In the meantime, here's a clip, and a couple of photos taken in and around the studio.
