I am thrilled to announce our forthcoming concerts ‘Finding my voice’ Friday, September 30th King’s Place Hall 2 and ‘New Accents’ Art Workers’ Guild Thursday October 20th.
NW Live Arts’ projects and concerts are inspired by innovative collaboration and we are absolutely delighted to be bringing together four such inventive and dynamic musicians with four astonishing writers from Write to Life, the creative writing and performance group of Freedom from Torture.
Writers and musicians meet to share music and stories
ABOUT THE PROGRAMME
In these concert programmes we share new writing, spoken and sung, and celebrate the power of improvisation as a vibrant link between different genres of instrumental and vocal music. The wider context is King’s Place’s own series – Voices Unwrapped – a massive hurrah for being able to sing again after having our singing voices silenced during lockdown – hopefully now a distant memory!
I have the happy task of curating the programme. Firstly, I invite the musicians to put forward repertoire ideas reflecting their particular character and take on the theme of ‘finding a voice’ and then together we construct a well-paced programme with different moments of drama, stillness, humour and reflection. It is a careful balancing act, bringing together different voices, different genres and ensuring it all sits together well, but also allowing it to naturally evolve during rehearsals and workshops as the performers try out new ideas. Alongside this, musicians and writers will collaborate on improvisations that enhance and highlight the meaning of the words, incorporating singing, playing and speaking. All this is brought into the mix of the final programme.
What makes it so special is the incredible diversity of styles and ideas that everyone brings and the trust and willingness to work together that evolves during the rehearsals and collaborative workshops.
We are honoured, therefore, to be working with four such amazing talents who are putting together a programme including instrumental music by composers from Bach to Imogen Holst, improvisation and compositions by Kuljit Bhamra, Sidiki Dembele and Alice Zawadzki and a wide range of European songs from Sephardic ballads to folk to jazz.
MEET THE MUSICIANS
Sidiki Dembele is a master musician from an ancient line of Malian Griot musicians, who are diplomats and oral historians, and he was raised in the cultural traditions of his ancestors. He brings fabulous traditional and contemporary music for djembe, kamelan n’goni and calabash to the programme. Now resident in the UK, he has worked with BBC Concert Orchestra, Welsh National Orchestra and Manchester Collective and in 2021 made his BBC proms debut in an unforgettable programme together with cellist Abel Selacoe in ‘Africa meet Europe’, which brought together the music and traditions of two worlds and spaces in time.
Sidiki Dembele
Find out more about Sidiki on his website: https://sidikidjembe.org/
Kuljit Bhamra MBE is a force of nature with a mission to demystify Indian music. He brings influences from both his Punjabi background and his wide ranging experience of western music to our concert. He is an inspiring mould-breaker who has worked diversely in musical theatre (Bombay Dreams) with Andrew Lloyd Webber, brought Bhangra music to the pop scene in the 1990s, performed with and composed music for leading ensembles – Britten Sinfonia, Red Note Ensemble and celebrated classical musicians such as pianist Joanna Macgregor and violinist Jacqueline Shave. Most recently, together with his team at Keda Music he has developed an electronic tabla and a tabla notation system enabling anyone to learn and write for the instrument.
Kuljit Bhamra © Hugh Schulte
See more at keda.co.uk
Laura van der Heijden was winner of the BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2015 when she was only 15. She is a cellist and also now a singer and brings breath-taking talent as a performer and inspiring improvisation skills to this collaboration. Her 2018 debut album 1948, featuring Russian music for cello and piano with pianist Petr Limonov, won the 2018 Edison Klassiek Award (broadcast live on Dutch television) and the 2019 BBC Music Magazine Newcomer Award. The CD has been hailed as a “dazzling, imaginative and impressive” debut recording. She is an Ambassador for both the Prince’s Foundation for Children & the Arts, and Brighton Youth Orchestra.
Laura van der Heijden
Find out more about Laura on her website: https://www.lauravanderheijden.uk/en/bio
Vocalist, violinist, songwriter and composer based in London, Alice Zawadzki has exceptional power as a performer. Hearing and seeing her live is quite wonderful and unforgettable. She has considerable repute as “a genuine original” (The Guardian), and as a distinctive and individual presence on the creative European music scene. She performs extensively as both a soloist and as a collaborator, with headline performances at major UK venues and festivals, including the Royal Albert Hall, Ronnie Scott’s, the London Jazz Festival, the Vortex, Celtic Connections, and internationally at festivals from Taipei International Jazz Festival (Taiwan) to Coventry Calling (Massachusetts, USA) to Sűdtirol Jazz Festival (Italy), Ottawa Chamber Music Festival (Canada), Musicá Impopular (Brazil), Usina Del Arte (Argentina) and many more.
Alice Zawadzki © Monika Jakubowska
Find out more about Alice on her website: https://www.alicezmusic.com/
OUR CREATIVE PARTNERSHIP – WRITE TO LIFE
Write to Life is a group that has been working with torture survivors from around the world for over 20 years. Being part of Write to Life helps people who have been through something that – to many people from the UK – is unimaginable, process their experiences and express their emotions in a safe space – some are experienced writers and others may not have written much since they were at school. The group also supports them to recover their confidence and create connections with others.
An informal meeting between the writers and musicians in July 2022 before the start of the workshops.
NW Live Arts’ link with writing is very special indeed. Collaborating with Write to Life on three different projects since 2019 has given us the chance to work with wonderful creative writers and to see first-hand how – as a community – we can welcome newcomers (in this case, refugees who have survived torture) to the UK through creative collaboration. Lead coordinator and facilitator, Sheila Hayman, in her own right an award winning writer and filmmaker has developed an extraordinarily successful creative writing programme over several years.
The collaboration between the four writers and musicians forms a central part of the concert programme. The audience can expect to hear remarkable readings morphing into solo and harmony singing with instrumental support which has evolved from a series of writing workshops and workshops with the musicians. The writers will trace a journey from a voice that has been silenced to finding a new voice that can both speak and sing in a new language in a new country with new rhythms, cadence and inflexion. Sheila has found that there is a lot of research that seems to demonstrate that song is older, in evolutionary terms, than speech. As humans, did we find our voices by singing before we learned to speak? Singing is such a powerful tool for communication, and I think these concerts will demonstrate that.
This particular project means a lot to me because it is now four years since I founded NW Live to ‘reimagine classical and world music in neighbourhood venues’ and to bring more people closer to the power of live classical music in all its beauty. I am as proud as ever to be working with such inspiring creative talents and I look forward to sharing this with as wide a community as possible.
Caroline Heslop, Artistic Director NW Live Arts
You can join us for these very special events this autumn:
Finding my Voice: King’s Place Hall 2, 30 September, 8pm Book tickets
New Accents: Bloomsbury Festival at the Art Workers’ Guild, 20 October, 7.30pm Book tickets
Performers:
Alice Zawadzki voice/violin
Laura van der Heijden voice/cello
Sidiki Dembele djembe, kamelen n’goni, calabash
Kuljit Bhamra MBE, tabla
Writers Shahab, Tanya, Nalougo, Yamikani Tracy
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