[STRING INSTRUMENTS TUNING UP]
[♪ POIGNANT MELODY]
Small Island
who came from Jamaica and the Caribbean, in the UK.
To me it's super interesting because it's, basically, the story of my family.
My grandmother came over here from Jamaica,
part of that
This is not a historical play, this is a play about people.
You kind of start from the time period, the era it's set. It's set in the '40s.
And so it was really great, actually, to start looking at music from that time.
You get a lot of stuff from the '50s onwards.
So, everybody knows about ska, and then everybody knows about dub and reggae.
I sort of decided that we would, after looking into it,
we would focus on the mento music.
So, mento music is a Jamaican traditional folk music.
And you kind of start to build a world where you can start to picture
what instrumentation and orchestration and sound you're gonna start to have.
So, we have Shiloh, who plays Celia,
but she also leads the music on-stage, with the banjo and her fantastic voice.
♪ Long time gal mi neva see you
♪ Come make mi hole yuh hand
♪ Long time gal mi neva see you Come make mi hole yuh hand
♪ Peel head John Crow sit pan the tree top Pick out the blossom
♪ Make mi hole yuh han, girl Make mi hole yuh hand
♪ Make mi hole yuh han, girl Make mi hole yuh hand ♪
During the music rehearsals,
I just had my music associate hat on.
I mean, in that time we just learnt loads of different songs
and tried to get the feel of them,
and how can we get that feel, whilst still listening to the text,
the everyday working person who would have sung those songs.
♪ Wheel an' turn me
♪ A weh yuh dah Wheel an' turn me
♪ Yuh wan' me fe fall dung... ♪
Ben has composed some really beautiful tracks.
It would've been a very different show
without the music that had been selected and created.
♪ ..Yuh wan' me fe fall dung
♪ Knock me belly pon tambourine ♪
The story is very cinematic, you know, it's quite...
The book itself is epic, you know.
It spans across years and years, across continents, across oceans.
It's a big undertaking to kind of encompass the whole story musically
because you'd like to try and match that scale musically.
And so, this cinematic element was something that we wanted to bring in,
and, you know, strings and the orchestra
is a part of that whole cinematic sound.
[♪ DRAMATIC, TENSE]
The second half of the play would be quite starkly realistic.
So, that was quite fun to try and start thinking about how we can use the strings
to kind of bring a more gritty reality to the score.
[♪ POIGNANT CHORDS]
So, the London String Group are playing the main theme of the play.
So, that cinematic sound, orchestral sound was something
that was really gonna fit in with lots of different aspects of the show.
[♪ POIGNANT CHORDS]
One of the things music helps to do is to kind of give it that emotional weight,
through the story.
As well as, at places, kind of injecting a lot of life and a lot of colour.
And so, the third element would be Jazz Jamaica.
Jazz Jamaica!
(♪ UPBEAT JAZZ)
They're kind of representing Jamaican music in the UK.
It's like a kind of a family to me.
I say, "Can you do it a bit like this?" and they go for it,
and they really bring a lot of important flavour to the score.
MAN: Could you introduce yourself?
Yeah! (LAUGHS)
I'm Gary Crosby, leader of Jazz Jamaica,
and the music consultant for
What we've never witnessed until the Windrush,
was that the influence of the Caribbean was coming back to the mother country.
There were African and Caribbean musicians here, in England,
from — and active — from the 17th, 18th century.
But that particular style that we call calypso,
which was really developed in the early 20th century,
came here, I believe, with Windrush.
It just made people happy. Not to say the music before didn't!
I think, on a political level, obviously, it has an even deeper meaning,
because people from different cultures, as the play says,
would be mixing in the dance halls, in the clubs.
So, when I saw the play,
I felt like, you know, I'd seen or I'd heard this before.
[♪ UPBEAT JAZZ]
I mean, we started off in youth centres.
Now, we're doing the Proms,
we're celebrated in quite a few countries around the world.
It's developed,
and I've seen at least two or three different generations of young people
come through the band and perfect it, take it to another level.
[♪ UPBEAT JAZZ]
I got my first saxophone at school, when I was 11.
And the first concert that I went to, actually, was Jazz Jamaica.
It definitely means a lot to me to play with a band
that was the kind of inspiration for when I'd first got a saxophone.
The way that we're playing together,
it's a matter of listening to the other musicians
and listening to what's going around you.
And that's kind of what Jazz Jamaica does.
It gives us a platform to be playing music which is not only danceable,
but is also kind of interesting, from an intellectual standpoint as well,
because there's a jazz part there.
It's not often you do a jazz gig where people are dancing, which is quite nice.
[♪ UPBEAT JAZZ]
We're here to continue a tradition and pass it on to others.
When you say "satisfied", I'm happy, but the journey, the job, is not finished.
Figuring out the process of how to write a score for a play,
in some ways, you just have to put to the back of your mind
that you're doing it for the first time — just do it and see what happens
[♪ UPBEAT JAZZ CONTINUING]
(LAUGHTER)
— You were reaching for that one, right? — Yeah! I was, like...