This was a one-off concert you wish wasn’t. The gorgeous, repetitive racket of Julius Eastman’s Femenine, played here by The Earshift Orchestra under saxophonist Jeremy Rose, deserves an audience far wider than the exclusive one assembled on this evening at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Presented as a $100-per-seat fundraiser and staged in a space surrounded by nine paintings by Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu – each inspired by Eastman’s work – the elation generated by Femenine is ever-so-slightly tempered by the guilt of good fortune. This is music designed to be heard by everyone.

Jeremy Rose and The Earshift Orchestra. Photo supplied

A composer, improviser, keyboardist, singer, dancer, and Black and queer activist (“Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest,” he said), Eastman is important for bridging minimalism with the spiritual jazz and Afro-logical/Afro-experimental movements of the late 1960s and ’70s. Rediscovered decades after his death in 1990 at age 49, Eastman’s minimalism is frequently compared to that of New York contemporaries Philip Glass and Steve Reich – though Femenine demonstrates little of the austerity you might associate...