Ten Part Invention was formed in 1986 by Sydney drummer John Pochée OAM, debuting at the Adelaide Festival of Arts in a Fez Bar residency that immediately signalled something singular. The band was built around a clear mandate: to perform exclusively the works of Australian composers, with an evolving ensemble featuring the country’s finest jazz musicians serving as both interpreters and creators. That mandate has held for forty years.

The founding compositional core comprised pianist Roger Frampton, trumpeter Miroslav Bukovsky, and saxophonist Sandy Evans, three major composer/instrumentalists who between them generated the bulk of the early repertoire. Pochée’s role was structural as much as musical. He held the ensemble together, commissioned works from composers outside the band.

Adrian Jackson, reviewing the band’s Melbourne debut in The Age in 1989, noted that unlike comparable large ensembles of the period, TPI “sounded like a team of musicians with a purpose and attitudes in common.”

The debut album, recorded at ABC Studios in November 1987 and released in 1990, earned an ARIA nomination for Best Jazz Album. A second album, Tall Stories, followed in 1994 on Rufus Records, introducing Sandy Evans’s “Wind Over The Lake” and Frampton’s “Jazznost Suite” to the permanent repertoire. Both recordings established the ensemble’s characteristic texture: a horn section of significant depth and density, a rhythm section with fierce groove, and compositions that functioned as architecture for improvisation rather than mere vehicles for it.

Roger Frampton passed away in January 2000. His final concert, captured at the Wangaratta Festival of Jazz in October 1999, was later released as Live at Wangaratta: The Music of Roger Frampton and is regarded as one of the most significant recordings in Australian jazz history. Pianist Paul McNamara stepped in, and the band recorded Unidentified Spaces at Sony Studios, dedicating it to Frampton. Pochée later named it his favourite TPI album.

International recognition followed. In 2004, the band performed at the Chicago Jazz Festival to a standing ovation and went on to play the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. By this point the critical consensus was settled. The Sydney Morning Herald called them “the Rolls Royce of Australian Jazz.” The Age wrote that “the virtuosity and musicianship are peerless.”

Pochée retired from the drum chair in 2011, handing the role to Rease Cameron (fka, Dave Goodman), though he remained an active presence until he passed in November 2022, aged 82. The band performed a memorial concert for him at The Great Club in Marrickville in March 2023.

Now led by co-Musical Directors Miroslav Bukovsky and Sandy Evans, Ten Part Invention enters its fortieth year with a new ABC Jazz album, Time Is Moved, and a lineup that carries both the band’s history and its original appetite for forward movement.