This week, a group of artists including Jacob Banks, Maverick Sabre, Laura Mvula, Lady Leshurr, Wretch32 is working in Studio 3 at Maida Vale, preparing for the Urban Classic Prom on Saturday 10th August. Proms and BBC Symphony Orchestra learning manager Zoe Keers explains what’s going on …
For this season’s Urban Classic Prom we’re working with conductor and arranger Jules Buckley. ‘The concept behind Urban Classic,’ Jules explains, ‘is to re-imagine and essentially remix the works of some of the UK's most prominent contemporary Urban artists in collaboration with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. It's about the clash of worlds and doing something different. We are looking to smash the ‘orchestral backing band’ cliché – and, instead, present a concept which has both artists and orchestra working in harmony to create a new sound. In this case – the Urban Classic sound. We are including some fantastic contemporary compositions through the programme and also short segues linking the pieces to give the whole show a broad and continuing narrative over two halves.’
The way we’re realising Jules’s vision is that the artists have all had the opportunity to send a selection of three to five song choices to him, from which he’s picked three to balance the whole Prom up, with some slow numbers and some faster; Jules then divided them up amongst a group of five arrangers, including himself. They've come back with ‘lead sheets’, with their initial ideas on what they wanted to do. The workshops are where we introduce these lead sheets and get the Symphony Orchestra musicians to play them: we have Claire Hinton on cello, Jeremy Martin on violin, Mike Leaver on viola, Alison Teale on cor anglais, Joe Atkins on trumpet and Beverley Jones on bass – they will all be there, together with a rhythm section, to show the artists what Jules and the other arrangers intend to do with their track; the artists then have a chance to make their input – after that, the arrangers will take all these ideas away and finalise them.
The other part of the Prom is that Fazer is mentoring seven young musicians, so we have three young singers, two MCs, a beatboxer, and a young guitarist, selected by him – they have already done their workshops, organised on similar lines to what we're doing here. They've written a song with Fazer, Jules and Jason Yarde (one of the arrangers), and again, the orchestral musicians have given them a flavour of how their song could sound on concert day.
You can watch a short video extract from this morning’s workshop with Lady Leshurr and the BBC SO musicians, conducted by Jules Buckley, here:
Jules Buckley leads an Urban Classic Prom rehearsal with Lady Leshurr and BBC SO members.
