Archive for May, 2008

Here’s an MP3 of me jamming on my new ‘hernia rig’* (2 loopstations and a kaoss pad) at the QEH last month. It’s from my solo set, before I collaborated with Mad Professor.

I’m calling it ‘Kernia’. Check it out here: Kernia.

the hernia rig

*it was named the hernia rig by Tony Birch (my right hand man, best production manager in world) after he nearly killed himself trying to lift it!

Today I was at Southbank.. met with one of the other resident artists called Rafael Bonachela who is a contemporary choreographer, and is top of his field.

When he creates a new work he tours it around the world for year or more, and he wanted to chat about the idea of creating a new piece of contempary dance based around some of my beatboxing. This sounds really interesting to me as there is a lot of movement when I am onstage… it’s just totally disorganised.

I really look up to his way of working.. he spends a year getting the most out of all his ideas and collaborators. Suddenly my recent projects and collaborations feel like I have just been playing with a toy for 5 minutes before spitting it out and playing with a new one.

I consider myself to be in development right now. I would like to lock myself away for 6 months to work on some new music but I am too obsessed with out-doing myself onstage. Maybe I’ll calm down a bit as I become more musically mature. Right now I am having too much fun to change a thing.

looks like i’m going to play on the pyramid stage this year guesting with martha… this is something i vowed i would do 3 years ago first time i went to glastonbury. yay!

…continued from here

We started the BAC Beatbox Academy with some outreach workshops in schools and youth clubs. One teacher responded to our follow up call with: “No, no you don’t want to bother contacting him, he’s a nightmare. He is disruptive, noisy, sometimes violent and cannot concentrate on anything for more than 5 seconds. He’s been excluded from this school.”

Eventually we got hold of him through his mates. He is one of the most dedicated, focused and fast-learning students I have ever worked with.

During the Academy’s term, a group of kids come together for two hours every Saturday. Some of them are from difficult backgrounds, with little going on at school that they care about. When they are with us, they work together to develop their own music, experiment with their voices and improvise in a group situation. At the end of the course, each young beatboxer records a video for a DVD which they can take home and show to their mates, and the course ends with a show for family and friends.

The next big step is to teach some of the older kids how to be leaders themselves, so that the movement can keep on developing.

Bringing all these young beatboxers onstage at the QEH earlier this month has proved to me that beatboxing is a way of bringing people together. In the past year I’ve seen grannies beatboxing side by side with “hoodies”, and I’ve seen parents amazed by the talent they never realised their child had.

Group beatbox teaching is a unique technique for encouraging people to connect with others in a positive, musical way, without looking un-cool.

I think these ideas have the potential to change the attitudes of certain young people. Attitudes which are currently leading to a downward spiral of post-code wars, drugs, knife crime and in some areas gun crime. It gives young people an excuse to take an interest in learning, applying themselves, and taking some positive steps out of the vicious chain of events in their lives.

For the first time, Colette McWilliams’ feature length documentary ‘The Beatbox Choir’ is now available to buy on DVD from the AFTM Shop.

Watch as Shlomo and The Vocal Orchestra create the world’s only 13-piece beatboxing choir in only 6 weeks.

Watch the trailer here:

The recent outreach work we’ve been doing has led me to bring up some issues I have with the way musical education is approached in this country. I believe that music needs to be inspiration-led. Without inspiration, there is no music. My own drive to make music was born directly out of my obsession with my heroes, starting out with watching Michael Jackson on TV, when I was 6, and going on from there. All I wanted to do was learn how to be like that.

I don’t believe that turning up at a school and handing a kid an oboe or a violin and a sheet of music and saying ‘learn this’ is ever going to be appealing, let alone inspiring. Music teachers do a great job but are constantly up against the constraints of time, class sizes, a narrow curriculum, and the fact that a lot of teachers I’ve met feel that they are just ‘babysitting’ the class and stopping them from throwing chairs at each other for 30 minutes, rather than imparting actual knowledge.

Even singing, which I see the government announcing millions of funding for, is hard to present in a way that is cool to young people.

Me teaching

But beatboxing is different. You can turn up anywhere: at school, at a youth club, or on the street, with a sound system and a beatboxer, and you can amaze people. They are immediately into it. They are intrigued and want to know more. And the thing is: anyone can do it, anywhere. It doesn’t matter what language you speak, what age, sex or colour you are, or what music you like. Everybody has a voice, and because the basics of beatboxing consist of simple phonetic sounds which we all use in day to day speech, it doesn’t take long to get started.

To be continued… (see rest of post here)

Saturday was an amazing concert, and one of the proudest moments of my career. It was great to perform again with my Vocal Orchestra, but the highlight for me was our ‘Beatbox Chorus’ – 25 kids from a range of backgrounds in South London. Jes and Zani, two beatboxers from my choir, have been working with these young people since the beginning of the year, firstly at the Beatbox Academy that we set up at BAC, and then at Southbank for the weeks before the show.

It was incredible to see these youngsters get up and beatbox in front of a sold-out QEH (about 1,000 people). Some of them had no musical experience whatsoever, and performing on a stage of that scale was a first for all of them. Someone said to me after the show that they loved the performance, but that maybe we should have got some kids who couldn’t already beatbox. I was exasperated: the kids had learnt their skills from scratch, in an amazingly short time. Maybe people didn’t understand how much work had gone into the project, and that drive came mostly from the kids themselves.

The “Beatbox Chorus” looking as mean they can!

People have been asking me this for years. It’s difficult because I’ve never really seen what I do as a recorded art – it’s something you have to witness live to really understand.

When I first started out, I spent some time in the studio, but was always getting too hung up on whether or not the listener could tell that it was all done with my mouth, with no cheating.

A few people have attempted to make a ‘beatbox album’ but have often struggled with this exact same problem. It wasn’t until I worked with Björk that I felt I had done a true musical collaboration featuring my beatboxing: she was not remotely bothered about conveying the fact that it was all from my mouth, she just wanted to make some music.

Since then I have been using beatboxing as a tool to collaborate and to make original music, and despite doing a lot of appearances on other people’s records, and occasional music for film or tv, I have not done much in the studio with my own music.

The main problem is this: I personally think that since the birth of the internet, the idea of releasing music for commercial profit is a dead one.

So right now I am planning to give away all my content for free, using this website. This means live tracks, videos, podcasts and anything else I create. That way anyone in the world can hear my stuff, enjoy it, and send it to their friends without it having to sit on a major label record exec’s desk for two months while they work on their ‘marketing strategy’ and search to find its ‘natural home within the marketplace’.

The only temptation now to make a recorded album is with the Vocal Orchestra. All I need is a budget and I can fly them all out to Iceland for a month to shut out the world, and make some incredible recorded art. Any rich readers get in touch !

I think John Humprhies must have chickened out - when I got to the BBC studios he wasn’t there. Still did a great little interview with Evan Davis, myself and jestar* from the Vocal Orchestra… have a listen: Shlomo and jestar* on BBC Radio 4.

i seem to have done no end of press interviews for the show on Saturday - it’s nearly sold out so get in quick if you still want to come…

In the past few days I’ve been working with Gospel singers and a Brazillian choir for the commission I am doing with Brent Respect Festival, and been busy rehearsing the new line up of the Vocal Orchestra. We did a gig at the Guildhall School of Music last Friday to big up Sir George Martin who was a student there many years ago. We performed a medley of Beatles songs, some of which may make it into the setlist on Saturday! I meant to invite Sir George but totally forgot. Him and John Humphries - I missed the opportunity to get two legends beatboxing in one week !

Tomorrow (Monday 11th May at about 8.45am) I’ll be going on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 to talk about beatboxing and choirs. My sole aim of this exersize is to get Mr John Humphries to beatbox. Wish me luck. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/