Exploration of improvisation
“Playing music was a thing I would do when I was supposed to be doing other things like studying for an exam,” she laughs. “So it made sense that if I was to do something with my life, it would have to involve music.”
Timothy O’ Dwyer
Leila Adu, Brooklyn-based singer, multi-instrumentalist, composer and improviser (featured on our cover) is in Sri Lanka as one of this year’s featured artists at the Musicmatters Festival that unfolds this week. Unlike most teenagers who just listen to a lot of music, Leila was writing her own pieces well before she started college.
She didn’t even know that studying composition was an option until her music teacher suggested it. That was years ago. These days, while hanging out in Sri Lanka, Leila is in the final dissertation writing phase of her Princeton-funded PhD in Composition based on hip-hop and electronic music in Ghana.
The songstress has a multi-cultural history and a special link with Ghana because that’s where her father – a London-based poet, playwright and musician – hails from. Leila was born in London and raised mostly in New Zealand. She spent some time in Italy, where she recorded her last album “Ode to the Unknown Factory Worker,” before she moved to the US where she now lives and works mostly out of.
There are musicians and musicians around the globe, but Leila is one of the smaller numbers of contemporary improvisers who push the boundaries of what is familiar by mix-matching and experimenting across genre, style and even medium. Her music isn’t too far out on the edge, suspended in a comfortable yet fluid space between some blues, jazz, pop, contemporary classical and experimental, and theme-wise she explores the gamut of topics from emotional longing to social and climate change.
Xu Fengxia
“There are lots of young musicians playing new music in America,” she says, pointing out that this opens up avenues for her music to be heard and appreciated. Otherwise, she and a lot of the artists billed to play at the Musicmatters Festival starting Thursday, August 13, don’t have life too easy. The non-conventional nature of their music “makes it hard to channel to traditional media, to make them understand”.
At the festival this weekend she will play a number of sets, mostly her familiar works, but some new ones including “Fields of Joy” which she says is “totally new”. Festival directors and familiar faces from the Colombo fringe music scene, Sumudi Suraweera and Isaac Smith (also seen on the cover with Leila) will accompany her vocal and keyboard work with drum and bass.
Of the festival itself, she expects “the kind of thing that might be in New York all the time. It’s experimental but not so far out that people will find it is something they’ve not heard.”Leila has performed on stages across the globe including locations in the US, Europe, New Zealand and Japan, appeared on MTV VH1 and Late Night with David Letterman and got her break working with once Nirvana producer Steve Albini. Despite her achievements and presence in the global music scene, she finds meaning in “the simple joy of playing music”.
“For me and my friends for whom it’s a job, we forget what it means to just play,” she says.This is precisely why an informal, explorative and mutually supportive environment like the Musicmatters Festival is crucial not just to the growth of individual artists but the musical community as a whole, as another international artist at the festival, Timothy O’Dwyer points out.
Shangyin Trio
O’Dwyer is called a “grassroots organizer” of the Australian improvised music scene. He worked successfully from 1993 as Secretary of the Melbourne Improvisers’ Association to increase the audience for improvised music. He then moved on to establishing the ‘Make It Up Club’ in 1998 securing state funding to continue promoting improvised music. O’Dwyer is big on the details and on keeping his audience going, but he is also adamant about not compromising on the musical content of each performance.
Looking at the Musicmatters Festival he will be playing at in a few days’ time, he believes it is possible for this collective too to achieve what he and his colleagues in Melbourne have been able to.“The biggest mistake people make about presenting improvised/experimental music is that they do not take into consideration who their audience is,” he says. “I think you have to remember and believe absolutely that everyone on the planet would be interested in this music.”
At the Musicmatters Festival, O’Dwyer will play saxophone alongside Darren Moore’s drumkit, with Xu Fengxia on vocals and traditional Chinese instruments, as part of the Shangyin Trio. Xu Fengxia, a Berlin-based Chinese musician will introduce a number of new stringed instruments including guzheng and shamisen to the festival audience. She has performed extensively and to critical acclaim as a solo artist and with a number of traditional Chinese-music inspired ensembles before discovering and diving into improvisation with Peter Kowald in the mid-1990s.
While the Shangyin Trio will perform pre-formed compositions, including some traditional Chinese songs adapted by Fengxia as well as original compositions, Moore points out that there is always a strong improvisation dynamic in the group’s performance.
“We are all energetic and passionate performers,” O’Dwyer says. This is no exaggeration of Fengxia’s powerful vocals and spirited stage presence which she possibly gets from her days playing bass for Shanghai’s first all-female rock band in the 80s.
Clayton Thomas
Another performer that the Musicmatters Festival is proud to present at this year’s festival is Clayton Thomas – a highly sought-after double bassist on a mission to build the instrument’s credibility on a solo stage. Thomas’ work experiments not simply on but also with the double bass. He never just plays the instrument, but works it in an unimaginable fashion creating sometimes the most graceful and sometimes the most disturbing sounds and effects one does not expect from the awkward giant of the string family. His musical journey is one of exploring not simply sound, but also the intersection between music, other media (including electronic art, theatre and dance), and his own existence.
Other international artists featured at this years’ Musicmatters Festival include Austrian pianist/composer/improviser David Six, whose contemporary-heavy works are healthily influenced by jazz and classical traditions, and Berlin-based recorder player, violinist, performer and improviser Miako Klein. These well-known artists from the small but fast growing global progressive music scene will bring familiar and unfamiliar instruments together in familiar and unfamiliar sounds to one platform over three consecutive nights at this year’s Musicmatters Festival.
Local artists
As always, our own experimental and progressive musicians will also be featured alongside international artists, on all three nights. Musicmatters Transcoastal Collective is Musicmatters’ three-month-old baby project which brings artists from Colombo and Batticaloa together in an exploration of the boundaries between traditional and contemporary music. Isaac Smith leads the Brahminy Kites in creating original compositions for banjo, percussion, voice, viola, double bass and electronics. Newer on the scene is Larry T. Hill, live vocal looper, alongside the more familiar troops of progressive rock players Sakvala Chakraya and Amila Sandaruwan, well known classical/fusion pianist Eshantha Peiris, the Prasantha Ru drum ensemble, Baliphonics, Colombo 00800 Kinesthetics and well known fusion band Thriloka.
Musicmatters Festival 2015 runs from Thursday, August 13 through Saturday, August 15. Tickets are available at takas.lk and Musicmatters. Call 0112686615 for more info.
Festival at a glance
Thursday, August 13
7.30 p.m. – Fringe Event: “Experimental Music Night” with most of the festival artists.
Goethe Institut Hall
Friday, August 14
7.30 p.m. – Main Stage Day 1
Racecourse Pavilion
Leila Adu, Shangyin Trio, Clayton Thomas, Musicmatters Transcoastal Collective, Brahminy Kites, Larry T. Hill, Sakvala Chakraya, Amila Sandaruwan.
Saturday, August 15
7.30 p.m. – Main Stage Day 2
Racecourse Pavilion
Leila Adu, Shangyin Trio, Clayton Thomas, David Six, Eshantha Peiris, Prasantha Ru drum ensemble, Baliphonics, Colombo 00800 Kinesthetics, Thriloka