Wharf Life Jul 17-31, 2019 wharf-life.com38

Years since Tony co-founded the Grand Union Orchestra 37

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One of my problems is that my youthful enthusiasm and activism is as strong as it ever was,” said Tony Haynes during our interview at Trinity Buoy

Wharf. The warm purr of the Grand Union Orchestra’s artistic director and co-founder is predominantly upbeat warmth but, like his music, there are hidden depths and an urgency to create, untrammelled by decades of composing, touring and performing.

The location for our chat is appro-priate. Trinity is where the waters of the Lea finally mix with the Thames, having rolled around the Leamouth and Limmo peninsulas.

In many ways, it’s a geographical allegory for the work Grand Union has been doing since the 1980s – blending and combining the sounds and skills of players from all over the world in what Tony considers the true spirit of jazz.

On August 7, the group’s All Stars iteration is set for a second gig at Trinity having recently played the launch of the venue’s live music evenings. Aimed at drawing people to the area after-hours, these consist of drinks by the river followed by a subterranean performance.

“We were absolutely delighted about the first gig in every way,” said Tony. “Not just by the music and the atmosphere, but by the audience – it’s what you might call a cabaret atmosphere.

“That intimacy particularly suits the combination of instruments, because you’re using cello and violin – albeit electric – and a Chinese harp, so you’ve got extraordinary textures alongside the likes of trumpet and saxophone that don’t really need any amplification, so it’s a very good sound.

“Inspired by the first performance, we thought we’d do something very similar, mostly with the same musi-cians, so it will be a similar mixture – not necessarily the same repertoire, because there are actually quite a lot of different pieces that explore south Asian and Chinese music in different ways. Very little of it is purist – we might play a Bengali folk song with a reggae bass line, or take a Chinese ballad and delight in harmonising it with rich, chromatic Broadway lines.”

This willingness to bring together and mix music from different places gives Grand Union its identity while delivering a singular expression of the many cultures and influences felt in the United Kingdom.

Tony said: “For me, jazz is a spirit with a history of a hundred years, and it comes about from the port city of New Orleans, which was colonised at different times by the British, the Spanish and the French.

“Then you have the slaves and the freed slaves and the Creole popu-lation. It’s an extraordinary racial mixture to start with, so it wouldn’t

by Jon Massey

meetswhere music

Tony says Trinity Buoy Wharfis his Mississippi Delta, where

the rivers Lea and Thames meet before flowing out

into the estuary

Wharf Life Jul 17-31, 2019 wharf-life.com 39

Isle Of Dogs - Poplar - Blackwall

Come to the cabaret: The Grand Union Orchestra at Trinity Buoy Wharf

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be surprising if there was a cultural mixture and then astonishing, natural musicians can come out.

“Louis Armstrong was the arche-typal one – how does a boy from a poor background such as his pick up a trumpet and play quite complex harmonies and extraordinarily complex solos, only matched by Charlie Parker and John Coltrane a generation later? My particular hero is Jelly Roll Morton for his arrogance and bravado. The main thing about jazz, fi rst of all, is to be able to absorb whatever instruments or styles of music you have available. Of course, it didn’t only happen in New Orleans, it happened in other places, but jazz is specifi c to there.

“Secondly, it’s the creative impor-tance of the individual musician. Duke Ellington, for example, wrote the music, but he couldn’t have written it without having those musicians to express it.

“So you get trumpeter Cootie Williams or alto player Johnny Hodges and he writes the sort of music where they shine.

“It’s completely diff erent from the classical tradition, where you have musicians who are required to play, with extraordinary virtuosity, music that’s written by somebody else.

“There’s no sort of engagement or ownership between the composer and the performer. And that is the essence of jazz. It’s not whether it sounds like Charlie Parker or Bix Beiderbecke, it’s the attitude behind the music.

“What I say, fancifully is that Grand Union brings the same spirit here. It’s no diff erent in London a hundred years later, where you have musicians from every conceivable background, fi rst and second generation immi-grants, so you’re able to learn a whole range of musics or approaches to music from them that you wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to experience.

“I always think jazz is the most liberated of musics, because it was both a reaction to slavery and also a creative liberation and it can’t exist without that. Grand Union exempli-fi es that principle, although many people say: ‘You’re not really playing jazz, are you?’ Actually, we are the only ones who are – well, not quite, but you’ve got to have that attitude and very few musicians qualify for that.”

Started in 1982 as a group of actors and musicians, formed to create and tour theatre pieces, Grand Union has always sought to include people with connections to the topics its work is inspired by or responds to.

“One of our fi rst pieces was called Strange Migration,” said Tony. “I wanted to do something about exile and migration, so I thought it would be dishonest if I assembled a company

of people who hadn’t experienced that. So we had a drummer from Ghana, and a Chilean who had been in prison for 10 years under Pinochet, and played all the folk instruments and Tenuqua, a photographer for the civil rights movement, and they formed the core.”

A commission from the GLC followed two years of touring and its result – an anti-apartheid work celebrating the mixing of cultures in cities called The Song Of Many Tongues, set the tone for further compositions and the direction of Grand Union.

While Tony continues to compose the majority of the orchestra’s music, he’s at pains to point out that the players he works with are an essential ingredient.

“People often have a rather naive idea about what composers are,” he said. “A lot of the writing is that you are creating material for performers – it can’t exist without the performers and then you’ve got to imagine their personality or characteristics. That’s how it works and it’s very much a two-way process.

“We have singers from many musical cultures performing in a wide range of languages and there is an historical and moral purpose to that. We live in a society that is shaped by migration, and this is very much a political issue at the moment, which you can’t not get involved in.

“The positive thing is that it gives us such richness. Those musics and musicians are there – why not explore them and bring them together?

“People go on and on about English or British identity, but this is it, really, it’s an amalgam of diff erent things, a blend. I fi nd it exciting, because I am a creative artist whose main skill happens to be as composer.

“I can’t imagine doing it without having people who represent the society in which we live.

“Of course, it creates tremendous opposition, because you’re accused of cultural appropriation, of dumbing down other musical cultures – but it’s quite obvious that audiences are responding enthusiastically to it.”

With a burgeoning youth coun-terpart and performances across east London, Tony said almost as impor-tant as who was playing and listening was where Grand Union pitched up.

“That’s absolutely critical,” he said. “We have been very lucky in east London and we don’t tour very much any more, which is a shame, because I really miss it – but we have diff erent venues to do diff erent things.

“Hackney Empire is where you do your large-scale participatory shows, St John’s in Bethnal Green is where you can do the small community projects, Rich Mix has the Bengali stuff and the youth orchestra, Shoreditch Town Hall is an ideal venue for the old Orchestra proper, Poplar Union is great as a spotlight for experimental things and Trinity Buoy Wharf is for the cabaret.

“We’re sitting at the junction of the Lea and the Thames, which is my Mississippi Delta.

“In the future, we would like to do a show at Trinity about climate change, which could be called Rising Tides with workshops leading up to it and the involvement of the whole community – you could imagine the whole site animated. It would really come alive.”

But, funding pending, that’s for the future. Until then there’s the August 7 show to look forward to. Tickets cost £12.50, doors at 6pm.Go to trinitybuoywharf.com for more information or to make a booking

composer and musician Tony Hayneson music, culture and Trinity Buoy Wharf

“People go on and on about English or British identity, but this is it, really. It’s an amalgam of di� erent things, a blendTony Haynes, Grand Union Orchestra