Something different for greenbelt

This weekend was Greenbelt festival in Cheltenham. Originally they were interested in booking the Vocal Orchestra, but some the choir weren’t about so Greenbelt commissioned me to create something different.

In the build up to Glastonbury I jammed with tabla virtuoso Pete Lockett, bassist Jon Cox and Pavan Mukhi – aka Orifice Vulgatron, the front man of the hip hop group Foreign Beggars. I decided to get this lineup together again and play around with some ideas.

It was a real pleasure to collaborate with Pavan again – he was one of the first people to believe in my skills and to get me up onstage. We first bumped into one another when I was a fresh faced fresher in Leeds. I was frantically beatboxing full blast outside a drum n bass rave where he was MCing, back in 2002. I was 18 and Foreign Beggars were doing their first shows together at the time. I quit Uni to go on tour with Foreign Beggars all over the world, and I learnt so much about stagemanship from performing with Pavan.

Pavan all smiles

Foreign Beggars are massive in the West Country and there were loads of fans going mad for Pav!

Pete Lockett is one of the world’s leading percussionists and a tabla wizard. I met Pete a few months ago at a development weekend for a percussion project we are both involved in, and earlier this summer he performed at Glastonbury with us. We had toyed with the idea of combining beatbox with Konnakol, the South Indian discipline of vocal percussion. This was a great excuse to develop some ideas a little further.

Pete and Shlo

We booked in a warm-up gig at the Big Chill House in King’s Cross a few days before the festival. This way we could rehearse all day, and run through the show in front of an enthusiastic audience that evening.

A few days before the rehearsal, Pete sent over some notation for some tabla vocals. It looked impossible. I didn’t get a chance to look at it properly until the day before the gig, and spent the whole afternoon trying to get my head round it.

Pete’s Konnakol notation

This was the first time that I have sat down and properly studied a musical exercise in years! It was difficult to get right but it felt really good to be challenged. After about three hours of going over and over the rhythms I was starting to feel a bit more confident. I called Pav and asked if he wanted to have a look at it too. He said he only had about an hour to spare that evening but he’d take a look, so I sent him the notation.

Next day we got together in the morning to rehearse. Pav had nailed the whole thing! In one hour!! I could not believe it. The piece sounded really good with Pav and Pete doing the tabla vocals, and me doing the same rhythms but using beatbox sounds.

Here’s a tiny snippet of us performing it…

It was such a pleasure to play some quite subtle and challenging material on a festival main stage, and to feel like the crowd really got it.

Lastly here is a picture of the delicious organic burger that I deleted just before the show.

Tags: festival, foreignbeggars, greenbelt, joncox, pavan, petelockett

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Gigs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.