The Last Of The Human Troubadours is the fifth and latest album of songs from Jackie Marshall, featuring long-time collaborator Chris Pickering, and new friends, the inimitable Black Square Quartet, performing exquisite arrangements of said songs by renowned composer Robert Davidson.

The title (and also opening) track of the album delivers a coda-like first-person lament on the fate of the imagined ‘last’ organically formed traveling song artist, in the implied face of a fast-moving artificially intelligent takeover of the arts in all its multifarious parts, in equation with the inevitability of the dowsed sentient spirit springing up anew on the planet at some point in the distant future long after life in its present form has been forgotten.

The album and accompanying concert series features songs written by Marshall exploring various aspects of ‘how to get on with things’ in good spirits and maddening times (Nobody Tell The Birds, Chop Wood Carry Water, The Next Right Thing), a song dedicated to Aunty Delmae Barton on owning and expressing one’s sovereign voice (I Am Heard), an obscure Joni Mitchell cover (Nathan La Franeer), an Irish/Scottish traditional (The Parting Glass), a co-write with Greg Cathcart about disconnected friend (Cool, Calm, Connected), a treatise on being-versus-doing (Crickets For Claudia), a poem by Slovene legend Uroš Zupan set to music (A Prayer), and finally, the oldest surviving written musical composition in the Western canon, the 2000 year old Seikilos Epitaph, with its simple lyric “While you live, shine, hold no grief at all… Life exists only for a short while, and time demands its due”.

The pairing of Black Square Quartet with Jackie Marshall is a meeting of soulful virtuosity delivered with intention, supporting an unapologetically rugged truth and tunefulness, resulting in a life-affirming creation even greater than the sum of its parts.

This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.

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