Pulling more than 200 people into a converted Marrickville warehouse on a cold Friday night is an achievement for any musical act. Doing it with an evening of wholly improvised music is something else again.

But such is the draw of BELIEVE, the quartet of Peter Farrar, Novak Manojlovic, Clayton Thomas and Laurence Pike, whose long-form spontaneous compositions occupy a space adjacent to free jazz but ultimately resist categorisation.

Before they took to the floor (there is no stage at the multifunctional 21 Shepherd), pianist Mike Nock and guitarist Hilary Geddes warmed up the room with a beautifully judged duo set of understated improvisations that settled the audience before gently nudging it towards more exploratory terrain. After a short break, BELIEVE picked up the thread and ran with to celebrate the release of a new album, Nature’s God.

BELIEVE at 21 Shepherd St. Photo © Kathy Luu

It’s immediately apparent that the quartet functions as a leaderless organism. Rather than responding to one another’s ideas in turn, the four players seems to think and shape the music collectively in real time. Musical focus shifts almost imperceptibly between players; ideas emerge, dissolve and reappear elsewhere in the ensemble before the ear has fully registered a source.

Their individual technical accomplishment is formidable but there is no grandstanding or spotlight-hogging. Farrar’s alto and soprano saxophones produce an astonishing range of colours, from warm, vocal lyricism to bird-like fluttering and shrill yelps. Manojlovic can be classically crystalline at one moment, jazzily fluid the next, while Thomas anchors and drives the music with a double bass sound of great physical presence.

Pike, one of Australia’s most creative drummers, creates shifting waves of texture, rolling around the toms with mallets and conjuring dense shimmers from the cymbals.  

Improvised? Certainly. Chaotic? Anything but. BELIEVE’s music unfolds with remarkable coherence, passages of startling delicacy giving way organically to more muscular episodes before subsiding again. The listener is continually engaged, stimulated and intrigued by music that feels simultaneously spontaneous and inevitable.

BELIEVE return to 21 Shepherd on 27 August, part of the 2026 Inner West Jazz Fest (27–29 August).