Rob Thomsett is an Australian musician and composer who self-released the 1975 symphonic-folk/psych album Yaraandoo on Kubernete. He formed a namesake jazz group for the album Hara, released in 1978 on Glo Audio.
Background
Rob Thomsett was born in Brisbane in 1947 and received piano lessons as a child. He entered a naval college at Jervis Bay in 1966, where he formed a band that played Rolling Stones material. Thomsett moved to Canberra in 1967 and took up bass. He played with Fred Aubrey, Kevin Abbey, and Guy Holden in a jug-band setting at the weekly Folk Blues and Beyond nights in a Lyneham church hall.
Thomsett shifted from bass to guitar in the early Seventies and added flute. He joined Canberra band Astral Plane, which initially played Jethro Tull material. Astral Plane lost the 1971 Canberra heat of Hoadley’s Battle of the Sounds to Salty Dog. The result prompted Thomsett and guitarist Brian Fogwell to compose Child of the City, an hour-long rock opera that the band performed at Australian National University and the Playhouse.
Astral Plane split after the Child of the City performances. Thomsett and drummer John Hovell teamed with Canyon members Danny Goonan and John Socha in Oak. Hovell brought keyboardist Steve Durie into Oak in January 1972, when Durie studied at Canberra School of Music. Thomsett supplied a Mini-Moog for Durie, and Oak developed original jazz-rock material. The group staged self-promoted concerts at Childers Street Hall, with Thomsett on guitar, flute, clarinet, and harmonica.
By 1974, Oak was breaking up as Thomsett developed the Yaraandoo suite from an Aboriginal creation story he found at the National Library of Australia. He also attended the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, N.Y., run by Karl Berger, where he took part in sessions with Dave Holland, Mike Mainieri, Howard Johnson, and Anthony Braxton. Ex-Oak members and other Canberra players joined Thomsett for home sessions on a TEAC two-track recorder under engineer John Gyffyn. Those recordings produced Yaraandoo.
Discography:
- Yaraandoo (1975)
- Hara (1978 • Rob Thomsett Group)
Artist/Album Pages:
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