Working with Jazz in an ‘Urban Music’ Project

This year saw ArtsTrain’s 3rd and most successful year so far working in partnership with Serious Event’s London International Jazz Festival. We thought we’d share some of the learning we’ve picked up on the way which covers 2 particular points: 1) Working with guest tutors and particularly busy professional musicians who you only have a short amount of time with… 2) Getting young people (and tutors!) to work ‘outside’ of their musical comfort zones!

To set the context: ArtsTrain is a community music project, lead and core funded by social enterprise Mytime Active. The project was set up in 2008 in the outer London borough of Bromley  to provide new music-making opportunities to young people who did not currently have access to creative opportunities. Bromley’s music education offer has traditionally been served by a very high quality music service, Bromley Youth Music Trust, now the leader for the Bromley Music Education Hub (of which  ArtsTrain is a partner). The music offer from BYMT is almost entirely focused on the Western Classical Tradition; ArtsTrain was initially set up to provide a complementary musical offer, responding to demand from the young people it worked with, many of whom were unlikely to engage in the more classical offer. Unsurprisingly for the first year of ArtsTrain the project focused almost exclusively on ‘urban’ music, particularly ‘grime’.

It was always the vision for ArtsTrain that it would broaden its musical offer over time and with support and funding from both Youth Music and Arts Council England in its second year we began to do so. We were approached by Serious Events, who produce and deliver the London Jazz Festival, in 2010, as part of their agreement with the GLA to bring the LJF to outer London. Through the partnership they provided us with access to two tutors, MOBO award-winning saxophonist, MC and educator Soweto Kinch and hugely experienced music leader and production ‘guru’ Gawain Hewitt. Through one of our tutor consultation events our tutors asked us for a day where they could actually do some musical improvisation and work with live instruments (most of them at that time were only working digitally). Soweto and Gawain delivered this together and it was hugely successful and enjoyable for our tutors who developed new knowledge and skills as a result.

Fast forward 3 years and we are delighted that Gawain Hewitt (who turned out to be Bromley based!) is now a lead tutor with our ‘Academy’ group and that Soweto agreed last year to become our Project Patron!  We have seen the young people really embrace the opportunity to experiment musically across the whole project, with our LJF involvement as a highlight.  This has involved: • bringing new tutors from different musical backgrounds on board, particularly singer/songwriter Abimaro Gunnell who works in both jazz and folk genres. • specifically targeting young people to take part in sessions who are instrumentalists and tasked tutors to get them working with non-instrumentalists/MCs to create new music • challenging our tutors artistically by giving them musical and narrative themes to work with • Inspiring young people on the project  by giving them to chance to work with composers and performers like James Yarde and Soweto Kinch, and incorporating large-scale ensembles (this year it was a 25 piece ‘dance band’  from Langley Park Boys school) into the LJF concert as the headline act. • encouraging all of our tutors and young people to move outside their musical ‘comfort zones’ – for young people from an ‘urban’ background without formal training, this might mean working with structured ‘songs’ and instrumentalists, for young trained instrumentalists facilitating their composition and improvisational skills, for our tutors, pairing them up with colleagues from a different musical background…

We found a way to work really meaningfully with our patron Soweto. Given his limited availability (he works and performs internationally with a pretty crazy schedule) we started planning for his involvement right at the beginning of the year. He told us he was planning a new project based on his forthcoming album ‘The Legend of Mike Smith’ based around the themes of the notion of ‘sin’ in this day and age – e.g. the cultural relevance now of the 7 Deadly Sins, Dante’s Inferno etc. We decided to tie our project into this too and asked Soweto would keep in touch with our tutors as it progressed. Before the project started we asked Soweto to make a 5 minute film of himself talking about the concept of the album and project. James and Gawain played this film to the young people at Langley Park school dance band at the start of the workshop, so they immediately understood the concept of what they were doing and how it fitted into a bigger picture. Over the next 2 sessions facilitated by James and Gawain they came up with ideas through improvisation (which most of the young musicians were new to) to illustrate the different ‘sins’ e.g. ‘what would ‘greed’ sound like on the cello’. Over the summer holidays James took the musical ideas and created a piece around them. He kept in contact with Soweto and discussed the development of the piece with him. Following the holidays James worked with the school’s Head of Music (and band leader) Ian Rowe who was fantastically supportive and put a lot of his own time into the project, to realise his ideas and to produce the parts, which took a significant amount of time. We had asked all of our tutors at the other ArtsTrain sessions to support their young people to come up with jazz influenced tracks and if possible use the theme of the 7 deadly sins.  Through Serious, we also had a workshop from vocal star Brendan Reilly the week before the performance. Soweto came back to Bromley for the weekend before the 12 November London Jazz Festival performance. He attended the last rehearsal of the dance band on 9 Nov so was able to input into the young people’s performance and improvisation as part of the piece. On the 10 November he lead a day workshop in Bromley where he worked with young people from our Academy programme and Monday night sessions and helped them to prepare for their performance on the 12th. The Langley School piece came together perfectly and was the ‘headliner’ of the night. Soweto also performed one of the forthcoming tracks from the new album with 2 of our Academy students, so the whole evening had a real musical coherence to it, the diversity of music created was really wide and the standard of performance was the highest we’ve seen it yet. Please see a link here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvw2XHl_dPU&feature=g-upl

Soweto was also really impressed, stating at the event ‘“ It is a genuine pleasure to come back to this project each year and see the development of these young people. The previous young artists have taken huge steps forward and it is great to see so many new faces in this show”

We asked James for his own feedback on the process and the piece which is attached here. The young people really enjoyed performing something that they’d helped to cerate and said that they felt a real ownership of the work. The band will be performing it for a second time next year and Ian hopes to do more of this sort of work in the future. We hope to continue our association with  

1. Can you briefly explain the creative process from start to finish - Gawain Hewitt and I lead a series of improvisation workshops in which we introduced the 'seven deadly sins' as the subject matter for the creation of musical ideas. - For part of the workshops we split the orchestra into groups and through improvisation the young people generated a number of small ideas for each sin. - I recorded audio snippets with my phone. - It then became my job, over the summer break, to compose, and score, a piece using some of the concepts and ideas generated by the young people where possible along with my own ideas. - The early rehearsals upon my return provided a feedback point that enabled me to make adjustments to the score based on issues and challenges flagged by the musicians. 2. How were the young people involved in the process? As well as creating musical ideas they were asked to express their thoughts on the topics, and think of narratives. i.e how particular sins affect individuals and wider society. They also provided valuable feedback in relation to the score's readability and the practicalities of playing the parts on their particular instruments. For some pieces of the composition I actually used audio samples from recordings of the workshop sessions as building blocks during the composition process. 3. How do you feel this project developed the young people (both musically and otherwise)? The majority of the musicians were very good readers of music and less experienced at improvising to create a piece. For many this presented a new way of thinking about composition. The workshops represented a escape from the comfort zone of playing from sheet music to create a performance. Working in this way raised awareness of the idea of listening to the other musicians and creating a fluid understanding of how instruments can talk to each other within a piece. I hope that the young people have taken pride in the fact that the piece was born with small ideas either from their process or inspired by their process. They have also risen to the challenge of playing some relatively complicated, and brand new, music. Both of these are noteworthy achievements. 4. What were some of the unexpected successes of the project? At the outset, I didn't expect that the piece would end up being as ambitious as it turned out. The magnitude of the piece was an unexpected success for me as the composer. I actually had to scale it back somewhat to make it fit for purpose. This can be attributed to the number of great ideas that were born from the improvisation sessions that created wonderful sparks in my head. 5. What were some of the challenges of the project? Scoring the piece without a copyist was a big challenge for me personally. i did learn a great deal about scoring though and my Sibelius chops have very much improved. One of the musical challenges was to effectively communicate a sense of groove, to the rhythm section, where necessary within the piece. It's often tricky to do with scores, and would have required particular focus that would have been impractical within the rehearsal space and time, in the presence of the whole ensemble. We did do one separate session to this end, but could have done with more like this, had we more time, to get things tighter. 6. If you were to do the project again what would you do differently? Budget for and hire a copyist!!! - The process of producing the actual scores would have been much more efficient had this been the case and would have meant that less feedback, from the orchestra, would have been necessary. Have more rehearsal time to enable the separation of instrument groups, in different rooms, for some sessions to work in a more focussed way with them in turn. Working with the whole orchestra, in the same space, all but one time minimised opportunities to fine tune key areas, i.e. rhythm section, strings, brass etc. This I think could produce an even more confident and dynamic performance. I'd also seek to plan in more workshop like activity in the middle and towards the end of the rehearsal period rather than it being strictly front loaded. These would be tailored to improve particular aspects of the performance. i.e. timing, playing particular grooves, improvising over particular sections. Once we were in rehearsal mode, we were pretty much in 'familiar' rehearsal mode. I think there was scope to push further with some more trips away from the comfort zone of the sheet music. Especially when the standard of musicianship was so high within the ensemble.