Read on to find out the Concert Heaven and Concert Hell performances of cellist Abel Selaocoe...
Abel Selaocoe... Concert Heaven
Works by JS Bach, Abel Selaocoe et al
Abel Selaocoe & The Bantu Ensemble
Koko (London, November 2023)
Playing at a club in London called Koko was really beautiful. Often when you play classical music it’s to a certain demographic – people of a certain age and background – so it was really important that everybody from everywhere was there. There was definitely a younger audience, which is amazing. The more I’ve written my own music and created programmes that weave classical in with improvised music, the more that younger and older people come together in one space. These programmes initially felt unusual, but they now feel extremely natural.
That day it was a sold-out show with so many different people from so many different walks of life, and I thought, ‘This really encompasses my music.’ That made me really happy. We sang together, very spontaneously; the whole room reverberated and it was all out of my control, in a very beautiful way.
Abel Selaocoe Concert Heaven & Hell...
A melding of Western and African traditions
I was playing with my Bantu Ensemble, which is almost like a jazz quartet but in an African sense. We have electric bass, African percussion – including this huge gourd called the Calabash, which is a dried half-pumpkin that creates a beautiful bass sound – and a pianist. We also played loads of whirly tubes and water and created very different soundworlds. That was the unlikely combo, with my voice and cello.
We played a lot of my own music, all the way from deep throat-singing and music where people could really dance to Bach. We played the Sarabande from the Sixth Suite, and in an environment like that you might expect people to lose focus, but the entire room was very focused and quiet; they were all there to take the music in. So that was a very memorable moment.
Abel Selaocoe... Concert Hell
Works by JS Bach, Giovanni Sollima et al
Abel Selaocoe (cello, vocals), Luke Daniels (guitar)
The Music Room, Philharmonic Hall (Liverpool, May 2019)
I remember this was bittersweet! I was a little bit younger, still at college, and just two people showed up to my concert. It was in quite a big room, and it was just me and them; one person was a promoter for another festival, so that meant that only one person had bought a ticket. Some of the music was really heart-on-sleeve, so I had to properly go for it. It ended up becoming a conversation, which worked fine, but it’s still scary to play for just a few people – it can be really intimidating to play for just four eyes. When it’s a lot of people, you can disassociate yourself from the individual personalities, but this became much more personal and a little frightening, to be honest.
Abel Selaocoe Concert Heaven & Hell...
'I told them to sing and dance like nobody is watching... because nobody else was in the room!'
I was playing some Giovanni Sollima, the Bach Suite in C major and then I had brought a Scottish guitarist to play some folk tunes; we thought that would work really well as a surprise for the audience. And I think we finished with the Solo Sonata by Ligeti. In between we were doing improvisations and singing together. When you find a melody to sing, and you make the audience sing, it’s like the audience is giving back to the artist. So I thought, ‘Okay, it’s just the three of us, but we’re gonna do this.’ And they did it! I told them to sing and dance like nobody is watching, because there was nobody else in the room!
I had to try and make the best of it. Things were already starting to go well for me, except for this one concert where maybe the promotion didn’t go so well – perhaps Paul McCartney was back in town that same night! It was a humbling lesson, though; you should still play the same way, even if there’s nobody there.
Abel Selaocoe’s new album ‘Hymns of Bantu’ is out on 21 Feb on Warner Classics