I’m a musician from Northern Ireland,
I’m going to be visiting Suzhou later in the year, in September,
and collaborating with some local musicians,
writing some music, learning a little bit about traditional
Chinese music and trying to immerse myself in the community
and trying to learn something and trying to, hopefully,
trying to give something as well.
I mean my background is in folk music.
Back home in Ireland I grew up playing traditional music
with my family and then I got interested in electronic music
as a teenager and then I got interested in jazz music
later in my teens and worked a lot as a jazz drummer.
Still primarily I’m a jazz musician but also I’m working
in hip-hop music as well and collaborating with lots
of different types of artists from different types of music.
So, my music is very much based in jazz but certainly coming
out of other types of music, folk music and hip-hop,
and I’m just really trying to make interesting good music.
So I’ve collaborated with a lot of rappers,
I’ve collaborated with Talib Kweli on my last album,
Soweto Kinch who’s from here, some really good people
and just trying to kind of do something interesting,
trying to put all the influences together and not trying to make
a hit track or anything like that,
but just trying to do something that’s unusual and sounds unique.
It’s been kind of coming up with sort of a basic idea,
sending it to rappers, you know I really enjoy the process
of, you know before I worked with Talib Kweli,
he was one of my heroes, you know,
I’ve been listening to him for a long time,
he worked with you know the icons of hip-hop.
You know he worked with one of my favourite hip-hop producers,
J Dilla, he’s really just part of the exact era of hip-hop
that I really like you know, working with Mos Def,
and you know, Q-Tip, and that whole scene.
The last album, I was nominated for a MOBO Award
in the Best Jazz category.
The MOBO Awards are the biggest UK award for jazz music
but also celebrating R&B, hip-hop,
really any music of black origin and that was a big deal for me.
I’m really interested in learning about traditional
Chinese music: the guzheng, which is a zither-type instrument
and very meditative sounding,
there are elements of improvisation,
the strings traditionally were made of silk
and so the instrument is strongly connected with Suzhou.
So my plan really is to learn a lot about that,
not exclusively that instrument, but very much
learn about that type of culture,
hang out in some of the tea bars, listen to music,
learn, and then start to write and try to kind of incorporate
that sound and that style into my own music,
as well as do some collaborations with some
of the artists there, you know, see how open they are
to kind of being part of my sound
and me being part of their sound.