The Melbourne Sound: Inside One of the World's Most Vital Jazz Scenes

When Gilles Peterson flew to Melbourne in 2019 to put together a compilation for his Brownswood label, he came back with something that sounded like nothing else on the planet. Nine tracks recorded over a week at a share-house studio in the northern suburb of Coburg, made by a tight-knit community of musicians who had spent years playing together in warehouses, backyards, and basement venues. He called the album Sunny Side Up, and it announced to the world what locals had known for a while: Melbourne had one of the most vital jazz scenes anywhere.

"You've got the confidence and swagger of having had international success. You’ve got a very high standard of playing," Peterson told the Guardian. "It’s a bit like when punk rock was coming out of the clubs in the south end of England. You had Siouxsie and the Banshees and some other people, they’re all mates and they all hang out – and then look what happens."

That confidence didn't come from nowhere. It has deep roots. And that swagger is real. Melbourne has one of the most genuinely original jazz scenes anywhere, and the records coming out of it are among the most interesting being made in the genre today. Here is where things stand and why it matters.

Why Melbourne Sounds the Way It Does

The first thing to understand about Melbourne jazz is that it does not always sound like jazz.

Part of the explanation is geographical. Unlike cities with a century of jazz tradition to navigate, Melbourne came to the music relatively recently and without the weight of expectation. The Victorian College of the Arts has been producing technically rigorous jazz musicians since the late 70s, and the Melbourne International Jazz Festival has been a fixture since 1998. But the creative energy of the current scene comes not from institutions but from the inner north: Coburg, Fitzroy, Northcote. Share houses where musicians live together, record together, and borrow each other's sensibilities without hesitation.

“I think Melbourne is very conscious of not wanting to appropriate any sound too strongly … so you’re not being disrespectful to the music,” says 30/70 singer Allysha Joy in The Guardian. “That means that people are coming up with really interesting ideas and new combinations of sounds.”

DJ Bradley Zero, who has championed the scene from London through his Rhythm Section label, calls it "the pressure cooker effect." The logistical difficulty of breaking out of Australia means musicians spend longer inside the local scene, building relationships and skills to a depth that cities with easier international access rarely develop. 

But geography is only part of it. The deeper explanation is demographic. As G_Tano bandleader Stefano Ioele, who moved from Italy to Melbourne, put it in a 2026 Bandcamp interview: “Naarm [the local Wurundjeri name for Melbourne] is probably one of the most multicultural cities on the planet. This diversity deeply shapes the way people communicate, form relationships, and of course, make music. As an immigrant, I’ve noticed that Australian musicians love to experiment with sound and unusual gear. That open-mindedness leads to unique combinations of tones, and a real sense of freedom when arranging music.”

The Melbourne sound is not a genre; it is the product of a city where musicians from Italy, Indonesia, Korea, Panama, Guinea, South Africa, and dozens of other backgrounds end up in the same rooms, absorbing each other's traditions and making something that could only have come from that particular collision.

So is there a Melbourne sound? As Elle Shimada puts it in her interview with Clash:  “I’ve got no clue what Melbourne sounds are perceived from the rest of the world but for me, it’s sounds like a ‘jazz-ish’ joints made in car garages, using milk crate as a mic stand w a real nice vintage mics and semi broken instruments (we call that luxury budget) – healthy dose of hiss and buzz mixed with world class musicians jamming all night till it sounds right.”

“We create lots together so we are all riding the same big wave in our own little universe.”

Hiatus Kaiyote: The Band That Changed Everything

No story of Melbourne's contemporary jazz scene starts anywhere other than Hiatus Kaiyote. The quartet formed around vocalist and guitarist Nai Palm (Naomi Saalfield), bassist Paul Bender, drummer Perrin Moss, and keyboardist Simon Mavin. Their 2012 debut Tawk Tomahawk was released independently and immediately drew attention from Erykah Badu, Questlove, and Prince, who urged his social media followers to seek it out. 

Their second album, Choose Your Weapon (2015), was nominated for a Grammy for Best R&B Performance for the track "Breathing Underwater," and the record remains the defining statement of what Melbourne jazz-soul sounds like at its most ambitious. Eighteen tracks across seventy minutes, it absorbs jazz, soul, R&B, West African funk, samba, and Latin in proportions that shift track by track. The polyrhythmic complexity is serious, the emotional range enormous, and the whole thing holds together because the band thinks and plays as a unit rather than a collection of talented individuals.

Mood Valiant (2021) got the band a second Grammy nomination and reached the top ten of the Australian albums chart. Their fourth record, Love Heart Cheat Code, arrived in June 2024. The band's influence on everything that followed in Melbourne is immeasurable. Many of the musicians on Sunny Side Up share members, friendships, or studios with Hiatus Kaiyote. When Anderson .Paak, Drake, and Beyoncé have all drawn from the well the band helped dig, the scene around it notices.

30/70 and Allysha Joy: The Collective in Motion

If Hiatus Kaiyote is Melbourne's internationally celebrated flagship, 30/70 is the beating heart of its everyday community. Fronted by singer, pianist, and poet Allysha Joy, and built around a rotating cast that includes drummer Ziggy Zeitgeist, bassist Matthew Hayes, saxophonist Josh Kelly, and keyboardist Finn Rees, the band has released five albums since its 2014 debut and operates less like a traditional band than a creative ecosystem. At its core it is a quintet, but it swells to an eleven-piece ensemble when the music calls for it.

Their 2017 EP Elevate on Bradley Zero's Rhythm Section label introduced the collective to international audiences. Their most recent album, Art Make Love (2023), pushed into new territory away the previous markers of nu-soul and jazz. Lead vocalist Allysha Joy talking about the record said: "30/70 began in a deeply DIY, grass-roots nature, with an ongoing desire to explore and express and collaborate without bounds. This record nods to that time, bringing it back into the present in the hope that it reminds others why they create, to go out and do something they love, bring joy, and give back to this world in some way”

Joy's solo output runs parallel. Her 2018 debut album Acadie: Raw on Gondwana Records won multiple awards and the 2022 sophomore album Torn: Tonic, self-produced and released on First Word Records, consolidated her position as one of the most singular voices in the scene globally. She has performed alongside Ezra Collective, The Teskey Brothers, Snarky Puppy, and KOKOROKO, and hosted a show on Gilles Peterson's Worldwide FM Radio.

Ziggy Zeitgeist and Zeitgeist Freedom Energy Exchange: Jazz Meets the Dancefloor

Ziggy Zeitgeist, who sits at the drumkit for 30/70, has built a parallel career as the bandleader of Zeitgeist Freedom Energy Exchange (ZFEX), one of the most distinctive projects to come out of Melbourne's inner north. Where 30/70 operates in the jazz-soul register, ZFEX occupies the junction between live improvisation and club music, built around the spirit of the "bush doof" festival culture that was Ziggy's formative musical environment growing up in Australia.

ZFEX's self-titled debut album (2018) and Zfex Vol. II (2020) document the project at its most focused, with a cast that includes Lewis Moody on keys, Erica Tucceri on woodwinds, Matthew Hayes on bass, and Javier Fredes on percussion. The music draws from house and 1970s jazz-funk, but the resulting sound is entirely its own. It represents one of the clearest examples of how Melbourne musicians refuse to treat genre boundaries as meaningful divisions.

Mildlife: Psychedelic Jazz for the Long Drive

Mildlife operate in a different part of the terrain. Formed in Melbourne in 2013 by four school friends, the quartet of guitarist Adam Halliwell, keyboardist and vocalist Kevin McDowell, bassist Tomas Shanahan, and drummer Jim Rindfleish built their sound from a love of 1970s cosmic psychedelia, electric jazz, Italo disco, and krautrock. They have been compared to Herbie Hancock's Headhunters and Can, which is both accurate and insufficient.

Their debut album Phase (2018) arrived to immediate critical enthusiasm. The Guardian described them as "virtuoso space-jazz magic." Automatic (2020), released through Heavenly Recordings in the UK, was the breakthrough: it debuted at number eight on the ARIA Albums Chart, received feature album placements at BBC Radio 6Music, and won Mildlife their first ARIA Award for Best Jazz Album in 2021.

Their third album Chorus, released in March 2024, continues their evolution into an ever-more-synthesised collective language.

Surprise Chef: Cinematic Soul from a Coburg Home Studio

While much of the contemporary Melbourne scene operates through collectives and share-house recording setups, Surprise Chef represent a slightly different strand: a tight instrumental quintet with an obsessive approach to recording live to tape, drawing from 1970s film scores, library music, and the funkier end of jazz. They formed in 2017 and recorded their debut All News Is Good News entirely in their home studio in Coburg. The album was initially released on their own College of Knowledge imprint in 2019, sold out quickly, and was picked up by Mr Bongo for wider release in 2020. Mr Bongo also released their follow-up, Daylight Savings.

They signed to Big Crown Records in the US and released Education and Recreation in 2022, their most fully realised record, pulling from 70s exploitation soundtracks, hip-hop sample culture, and jazz-funk with the coherence of a band that has spent years in the same room together. Superb followed in 2025. Questlove praised them. Their music was sampled for a track by Rich Brian featuring Ghostface Killah. All of this from musicians who describe the "tyranny of distance" from their source material as the very thing that freed them to develop their own sound.

The Global Classroom: Afro, Latin, and Cosmic Music in Melbourne

The most recent chapter in Melbourne's jazz story is the one that makes the scene genuinely unlike anywhere else: the direct incorporation of South African, West African, Latin American, and other global traditions not as reference points but as living practice, brought by musicians who have studied those traditions at their source.

Afrospace Interchange are the most significant example. The band contains two figures of Cape Town jazz who have relocated to Melbourne: bassist and composer ZEDSIX, who has performed alongside Johnny Clegg, Femi Kuti, and Hugh Masekela, among others; and his mentor, drummer Brian Abrahams, who played with Abdullah Ibrahim and in Chris McGregor's Blue Notes. Both have spent years teaching South African jazz to Melbourne musicians through formal lessons and open jam sessions. 

Mandeng Groove, led by Guinean kora player Amadou Kalissa, take a different approach. The group travelled to Conakry, Guinea to learn Manding music directly from musicians there. They brought what they learned back to Melbourne and continue to teach it to others, supported by the not-for-profit Music in Exile, which gives voice to musicians from across the world who have settled in the city. Their track "Alla La Ke," featuring Amadou's sister Fatou Kalissa, one of the few professional female kora players in West Africa, demonstrates the quality of what this cross-continental exchange produces.

Mount Kujo, whose drummer Max Myland was born in Germany, describe themselves as a space-jazz collective. Following a tradition of communal projects like Funkadelic and the German group Embryo, Mount Kujo travel to isolated locations together, live, jam, and record. Their 2023 album Cosmic Cliffs draws from fusion, Afrobeat, and Latin music, held together by polyrhythmic arrangements, unexpected harmonic turns, and horn sections that hit hard. The title track was inspired by images from the James Webb Space Telescope and Myland described the ambition simply: to translate that sense of wonder into music, the depth, the mystery, the weightlessness. It is an apt description of what Mount Kujo do at their best.

Owelu Dreamhouse: The Newest Voice

The most recent addition to this map arrived in February 2026. Owelu Dreamhouse is the debut album from vocalist Nkechi Anele and multi-instrumentalist Nic Ryan-Glenie, both formerly of Melbourne soul band Saskwatch. Released via HopeStreet Recordings, the record blends cinematic soul, psychedelia, and Afrobeat, with Anele drawing on her Nigerian heritage through the songwriting. Produced and engineered by Henry Jenkins (who also engineered Surprise Chef's debut), it features a large cast of Melbourne instrumentalists. It is the latest evidence that the scene keeps producing new voices even as its established artists reach international highs.

Further Voices Worth Knowing

Audrey Powne belongs in the same sentence as the scene's most internationally recognised voices. A trumpeter, vocalist, keyboardist, and composer who honed her craft in Melbourne, she contributed "Bleeding Hearts" to Sunny Side Up in 2019 and has since built a career that spans continents. Her 2024 debut album From the Fire, released on UK label BBE Music and entirely self-written, self-produced, and self-arranged, earned multiple award nominations and was championed on BBC Radio 6 Music by Gilles Peterson, who called her "the very brilliant Audrey Powne." She has since relocated to London, where she has performed at Ronnie Scott's and the Jazz Café, but the Melbourne scene that shaped her is audible throughout her work.

Horatio Luna (Henry Hicks) is the bassist and producer whose fingerprints are over more of this story than his name recognition suggests. A founding member of 30/70, he appeared on Sunny Side Up and has pursued an equally prolific solo path, releasing Yes Doctor (2020) and Boom Boom (2020) before the 2025 EP To the Tooth, each record navigating the junction between jazz, house, broken beat, and dub with a distinctive bass-led logic. His willingness to blur the line between dance music and improvisation makes him one of the scene's key connective figures.

Clever Austin is the solo project of Perrin Moss, the drummer of Hiatus Kaiyote, who built his debut album Pareidolia (2019) across two years of late nights in his Melbourne home studio. Released jointly by London's Touching Bass and Melbourne's Wondercore Island, the sixteen-track record roams across warped beat music, radical soul, and Low End Theory-style playfulness, with guests including Georgia Anne Muldrow and Jon Bap. It demonstrated, as clearly as anything in this scene has, that the musicians inside Hiatus Kaiyote are each world-class artists in their own right. 

Don Glori is the pseudonym of multi-instrumentalist and producer Gordon Li, whose three albums so far have earned him a strong global following. His 2025 album Paper Can't Wrap Fire, released on Mr Bongo, marks a shift toward vocal songwriting with a large cast of Melbourne collaborators, drawing influence from Azymuth, SAULT, and Jordan Rakei. Li has since relocated to London, but Paper Can't Wrap Fire was recorded at Rolling Stock Studios in Collingwood with his touring band, and is as Melbourne a record as anything on this list.

The Sound of a City

The physical geography of Melbourne jazz stretches from the CBD to the inner north, and the venues that sustain it are diverse in character and commitment. The Toff, Bird's Basement, The Night Cat, Jazzlab and Bar Oussou all serve as essential weekly homes for the jazz community. Beyond those, a whole tier of smaller venues give younger artists the room to develop: the High Note, The Rooks Return, The Evelyn all play a role in keeping the Melbourne scene alive.

Community radio has been essential to sustaining all of it. PBS 106.7FM and Triple R have spent decades building and maintaining audiences for jazz and improvised music, with programmers who understand the music as deeply as the musicians making it.

These are not minor details. They are part of why the scene has sustained itself across several generations without institutional funding as its primary lifeline. 

The record shops are part of the infrastructure too. Northside Records, owned by Chris Gill, has served as the physical gathering point, a record shop whose curation has directly shaped what the community around it makes. Wax Museum, Rocksteady, and Plug Seven each serve different corners of the same community. On the label side, College of Knowledge, Wondercore Island, HopeStreet Recordings and Awake Nu Records all function more as artist development operations than commercial enterprises.

The result is a city where a German-born space-jazz drummer, an Italian bandleader, a Guinean kora player, a Cape Town bassist and a VCA graduate all end up in the same rooms, at the same venues, on the same bills. That does not happen by accident. It happens because of what Melbourne is.

What makes the Melbourne scene genuinely unusual is not any single sound but the city that produces it. Melbourne is one of the most multicultural cities on earth, built by waves of immigration that have never stopped, and that openness is in the music. It is a city with deep liberal instincts, a genuine civic commitment to the arts, and more record shops and live music venues per capita than anywhere in the world. It is also profoundly isolated, sitting at the bottom of the planet. The 'tyranny of distance', as Surprise Chef's Lachlan Stuckey put it, is also its ticket to creative freedom.