Beatbox as art

One of my goals in traveling and studying beatbox is to find people who are creating art with beatbox, creating music that actually has substance and carries a message. Beatbox music encompasses an incredibly diverse set of styles, and I'm interested in the styles that are exploring furthest away from the basics of hiphop rhythms.

Last night, I saw exactly what this exploration could look like. I went to a show at London's Southbank Centre that featured collaborations between beatboxer Shlomo and several Indian musicians, some from the kathak tradition and some from a sort of contemporary Tamil-pop fusion angle.

There's no video up on the internet yet, but you can hear an example of some of the collaborative stuff that Shlomo and Gauri Sharma Tripathi were putting together on Shlomo's site. I enjoyed the Shlomo-Gauri collaborative stuff a lot, especially since it reminded me of what I had been experimenting with in Chennai, replacing the syllables of konnakol vocal percussion patterns with beatbox sounds.

The centerpiece of the evening, however, was a massive, 15 minute long, all-vocal kathak-beatbox piece that incorporated a 35 person choir. I watched it being rehearsed for much of the afternoon, and was floored by the sheer ambition and scale of the piece. It was worlds away from a normal beatbox routine, worlds away from a normal choir piece, and worlds away from a normal kathak performance. The piece started with the choir dispersed in small groups throughout the hall. One group started with a simple, repeated 'ta' and other groups slowly joined in with other syllabic patterns to build a surround-sound rhythmic tapestry of voices.

The piece really crossed the line from musical experimentation into serious art, which was a powerful thing to witness. One of the two most memorable parts of the piece saw the 35 young British girls, nearly all of Indian heritage, all dressed in colorful Indian robes, break away from the Kathak rhythms and join Shlomo and Bellatrix in a staged beatbox battle, complete with hiphop attitude. Watching the girls giggle and strut as they tried to seem as hiphop as possible for this part of the piece, I couldn't help but think of the whole thing as a staged version of the experience of Indian communities throughout the west.

Indian parents move from Mumbai to London, and raise their kids to speak Hindi and appreciate the cultural traditions of their parents (in Mumbai girls learn kathak, in Chennai it would be bharatanatyam). But their kids are also fully British, and listen to R&B and hiphop music, which excited them in ways that kathak doesn't. You end up with this group of kids that move fluently between the two worlds, a cultural group that is something completely new.

This lesson was driven home in the last element of the piece. Gauri's 7 year old daughter Isha walked confidently out from backstage, clutching a wireless microphone as long as her forearm. She was dressed in a white hooded sweatshirt and took her place right in the middle of the stage, between Shlomo and Bellatrix, and between the two halves of the kathak choir. The choir finished its last pattern and Isha took over, confidently reciting a couple lines of poetry in Hindi that flowed right into a couple bars of her beatboxing. It was the perfect ending.

The concert itself ended in similar style, with Susheela Raman wailing out a cover of Dolly Parton's Jolene, accompanied by guitar, tabla, sarod, cajon, two beatboxers, and kathak rhythms. It was a rollicking, improvised jam (two of the musicians had to be pulled out of the audience and sent backstage to unpack their instruments for it) that went on for at least 10 minutes, and left the audience still wanting more.

All in all, the evening was incredible to witness. Not everything was polished, and you could see the performers feeling out the music as they went along. However, it was completely fresh. As an audience, we were taken along with musicians who said to us, "We don't know if this will work, but let's give it a shot." The fact that it worked so well in so many places was icing on the cake.