For this project I got to work closely with composer/producer Michael “Mikey J” Asante, together with the dance company Boy Blue Entertainment, formed by himself and choreographer Kenrick Sandy. Mikey and Kenrick have collaborated on many productions together, but this was the first using live musicians, and so really putting the musical element of Mikey’s compositions at the forefront. With Boy Blue as artists in residence at the Barbican, it was the Barbican who approached me to be involved and commissioned the entire project and I cannot thank them enough.

For this project, myself and Mikey assembled a “mini-orchestra”, an ensemble featuring 5 string players, three “jazz specialist” players including a flautist, saxophonist and pianist, and finally the special talents of Adam Betts playing a drum kit that included the ability to trigger and layer hip hop samples live. Mikey had written a series of pieces which I then went away and worked on. Part of the joy of this particular project was that Mikey really encouraged me to be creative, so I got to not only adapt his sketches for the live ensemble, but also to enrich them where appropriate, adding new orchestral textures and in some cases writing completely new melodic layers. The result was a live performance which blended the live ensemble, Mikey’s samples, some of my own orchestral sample programming, video, poetry, and dance. I cannot tell you how incredible it was when us musicians got to see the Boy Blue dancers performing infront of the ensemble for the first time. The actual performance went down a storm. Considering we had just 10 musicians on stage it felt like we had the power of 60+ and the standing ovation the project received (and a hell of a lot of whooping and cheering) will stay with me for a long time.

Boy Blue describe the piece…

“Michael ‘Mikey J’ Asante, composer and co-founder of Boy Blue, combines hip hop and video for his piece Outliers, a multimedia meditation on social, public and political consciousness. Dedicated to the ‘outliers’ that give the composition its title – those that inadvertently change other people’s points of view by standing up for what they believe in – Outliers is at least in part inspired by Asante’s own life experience.  It’s a piece that combines music and video, as Asante is joined by an ensemble of musicians.”