Commissioned by live music promoters/producers Serious as part of the 2018 EFG London Jazz Festival, “Windrush a Celebration” was a concert that would both celebrate the contribution of Afro-Caribbean peoples to shaping contemporary British culture and trace their experiences over 70 years.
This project was conceived and titled by its artistic director, the author and spoken word artist Anthony Joseph, before the explosion of the “Windrush Scandal”, which saw thousands of British citizens deprived their livelihoods, essential services, including healthcare and housing, and left them facing deportation. The artists didn’t need reminding that you can’t ‘celebrate’ Windrush without being “aware of the need to address certain dark themes” [Anthony Joseph], but this provided an additional impetus to fulfil our duty to be as agitational as celebratory.
In bringing colour and a rich and globally influential diversity to British culture, migrants of the Windrush generation and their descendants have endured the manifestations of racism in all of its implicit and explicit forms. Three storytellers would combine music, image and the written and spoken word to deliver a mixed media performance that would trace that experience and become more than the original title suggested.
Composer, arranger and saxophonist, Jason Yarde created new arrangements for a 12 piece band of titles by a line-up of Caribbean music legends spanning three generations and the seven decades since the HMT Windrush first docked in Tilbury, England in 1948. These included, from Trinidad, ‘the King of Calypso’ Mighty Sparrow and Calypso Rose, the British-Jamaican jazz pioneer Cleveland Watkiss and 21st century pioneer of dancehall electronica, GAIKA.
Derek Richards’ contribution would be to work with Yarde to shape the narrative and then to create its canvas – a stage set, consisting of two screens that cast the musicians as passengers on the famous vessel.
Complimentary, unified and sometimes dialectically opposed images were mapped to the two surfaces. The still and moving images were sourced from archive and originally shot material, prepared and animated using a combination of Adobe Photoshop, Premier and After Effect. They would form a palette from which Derek would work with the musicians and performers to paint the canvas working with Isadora and Resolume to map, trigger, animate and manipulate the images and sequences live as part of the performance.
The final 20minutes of the show featured a new composition by Jason Yarde – The Windrush Suite. For this section Derek combined previous imagery with real time generative imagery, created in the moment, reflecting the significant improvisation that featured within Jason’s jazz suite.