Nicky Bomba is bringing his Melbourne Ska Orchestra to a gig at the University of Canberra early next month. He traces the ARIA-winning orchestra’s evolution with arts editor HELEN MUSA.

It’s been 13 years since we last caught up with Melbourne muso and ska wizkid Nicky Bomba.

It was when he and his six-piece band, Bustamento, were en route to the Perisher Snowy Mountains of Music festival.

He’d just won a Music Fellowship Award from the Australia Council then and a lot has happened since. 

The following year, they provided the musical accompaniment to the Melbourne’s New Year’s Eve fireworks, and together with his ARIA-winning Melbourne Ska Orchestra he has been treading the world stage with gigs in New York, Istanbul, London, Tokyo and Mexico.

When I catch up with him via WhatsApp, he’s just landed in sunny Montreal for a Canadian tour, after which he’ll be back in Australia and coming to the University of Canberra Hub on the band’s Ballad of Monte Loco tour, which gives prominence to the single, Walls of Jericho. 

Bomba has been at the forefront of a modern kind of ska, the music closely associated with reggae, which originated from Jamaica in the ’50s and ’60s.

He traces the musical movement back to Jamaica’s independence in 1962 and the concomitant search for an authentic Jamaican sound. 

Then in 1964, with Millie Small’s hit song My Boy Lollipop, he says, ska really hit the world and particularly the UK with its large West Indian population. A third-wave American ska craze followed in the ’90s. 

“I was fortunate to be brought up in multicultural Melbourne,” he tells me, “where we could create a hybrid of international music – that’s our thing.”

With strong support from his dad and musical siblings – his brother Michael Caruana has been playing with him all along, exploring how to “raise the vibrancy of a room”.

He puts that vibe down to his Maltese ancestry (Bomba was born Nicholas Caruana) and once read a survey on the relative benefits of affluence versus happiness, which concluded that the happiest people in the world are the Maltese.

Caruana being a well-known Maltese name, their band was embraced as the official Maltese band and played at community events, where his sister did the vocals.

As for the difference between ska and reggae, they’re both based on Jamaican music, he says. Ska combined American R&B, and Jamaican rhythms, and then it became rocksteady, then reggae. 

But it is ska that has become synonymous with dance and the MSO plays ska, rocksteady and a hybrid.

Ska and reggae, he explains, have always represented the voices of the people and, in colonial times, it was one way that they could make public statements with impunity. 

While he agrees that reggae is probably best known for its social commentary, the lyrics to ska’s upbeat music leave no room for ambiguity, although these days names are not so much mentioned.

Brass has always been a mainstay of ska and Bomba favours a 14-piece brass ensemble. In Australia, the orchestra can comprise up to 26 musicians but on tour it’s more like 20.

“We have a big focus on people,” he says. “We are very much interactive instrumentalists and performing for the crowd is an important part of what we do.

“It’s a delight to behold and I’m blown away by the liveliness of our audiences.” 

Last time I spoke to Bomba, he was likening their performances to drinking a piña colada, and he doesn’t resile from that. 

“We are more like a piña colada than a bowl of cereal,” he says.

Melbourne Ska Orchestra, University of Canberra Hub, August 2.