MH: How did you come to learn the tuba?
AG: I started by learning the piano. One of my uncles was returning to the West Indies and couldn’t take his piano with him, so my parents decided I should learn. They all rolled the piano to our house (five doors away)! I practised religiously for five minutes before every lesson and made very little progress, but could read music. Later, in the UK, a new music teacher at my secondary school in the Midlands wanted to start a brass band – something I’d never really come across. My brother wanted to join it, and because I was asthmatic, my mum said ‘You have to go along, because blowing might help you’. I spent a year learning the baritone [horn], then moved on to euphonium and then Double B flat Bass [tuba], the biggest of the instruments – I had to sit on books in order to reach the leadpipe. Because I could already read music, I made quite rapid progress. I joined the Sandwell youth band and occasionally I would go to Midland Youth Jazz Orchestra (MYJO) rehearsals at Cannon Hill Park [in Birmingham], because I was interested in that and my dad really liked jazz. So I had experience of playing the tuba in different genres – brass band, jazz, big band, and the borough orchestra. A lot of the tuba players my age hadn’t had that breadth of experience.
MH: Do you think it’s important for tuba players today to have that degree of versatility?
AG: Absolutely. I now see many more young players exploring the tuba in lots of different ways, and I’m in awe of some of them. Some may have been taught at college; but when I was at college, the music we did was largely classical. I went to college thinking, ‘I’m going to be an orchestral tuba player’. But when I came to do my postgrad at the National Centre for Orchestral Studies at Goldsmiths, as the tuba in the orchestra, I realised it wasn’t what I really wanted to do. I started to take advantage of as many opportunities as came by, playing world music with the Grand Union Orchestra, doing street bands, reminiscent of street bands that you would find in the US, and doing largely American music. I also played folk music. I played for ten years in Chicago in the West End, and continued doing session, pop, jazz and folk work, exploring the different genres of tuba playing. I also played with the LSO, BBCSO and other London orchestras, and really enjoyed this because the breadth of classical music throws up a whole lot of other challenges. I guess my motto was: if it was different, I would try and engage with it.
MH: You have an incredible enthusiasm not just for the instrument, but also for sharing it. Was that what kickstarted the First Access tuba project at Woolwich Works?
AG: I’d always been involved in teaching, and after I left Chicago I started doing more workshops. [Thanks to a donation of tubas and euphoniums from Trevor James,] NYJO suddenly had all these tubas. The challenge for me was how to make the tuba something that people engage with. When they first see it, most people think, ‘Oh, isn’t it beautiful, with all that plumbing? And isn’t it heavy?’ They imagine you need a lot more air to play it than for the trumpet or the flute. I wanted to demystify the tuba, so my approach was to let people be really tactile with it, touch it, press the valves, make funny sounds, sing down the bell, put your mouth on the mouthpiece and blow air through. So instead of trying to make a sound straight away, making a sound was like a byproduct of engaging with it as an instrument. It needs to be fun, and almost scaffolded in how you approach it, having ideas about what you can do with your face, what you can do with your lips, what you can do with your hands, how you actually keep the sound going. This summer we had some three- and four-year-olds; the tuba was way too big for them, but they saw this thing happening around them, people breathing in, a couple holding the mouthpiece up. In a sense, you’re not teaching them, but they’re learning from you. You can lead them to where you want them to be without pushing them in that direction. Children are much more engaged with what they’re doing, and if they’re doing it in a sort of communal space with other children, that’s really important; you’re not just doing this thing by yourself, you have a community around you.
And it’s not just tubas. For me, that lends another area of engagement for NYJO with the wider population. I think NYJO as an organisation is becoming much more integrated. I’m working with their young and emerging professionals who are going into schools and teaching, and some of them are doing some really wonderful work. Their approach isn’t didactic, and I’m asking them to engage with the children on a level that is not just about the instrument, it’s about the joy of making music.
MH: Is this the approach you also have at Southwark Music Centre?
AG: Yes. It’s hard to organise the players, as they’re all at different ages and schools, but we encourage a sense of community. For example, a trumpet player will maybe start with a lesson, then a group lesson, then go off to a gamelan lesson, then go to choir and then end up playing in the samba band, or the brass band, or going to a songwriting session. So all the barriers are broken down as we’re teaching them to be not just one kind of musician. Most of them won’t become professional, but they’ll have had a really good musical grounding and much wider musical experience that they can take with them for their lives. If we give them a wider palette, we can help them to become young musicians who enjoy music, who make music – of whatever genre – for the community and for the joy of it.
MH: What was the thinking behind your flexible performance piece JAMation (commissioned by Music for Youth)?
AG: Jason Yarde and I were asked to write a piece that could be played by as many people as possible. We realised that in order to do so we’d need a group of modular themes. We decided on 15, which we could divide up in any way we wanted. We crafted it in such a way that a lot of the harmonic structure was the same, but you could explore that harmonic structure from a classical viewpoint, or from maybe a funk bass. We didn’t know who would end up playing the piece – an orchestra, a New Orleans-style brass band, a concert band. When workshopping it, while we were aware of certain combinations you could have, other things came out of the woodwork. Things that are sometimes seen as a mistake can actually take you onto another creative path, and I’m fond of pursuing this – watching young people engage with the rhythmic elements, then asking them to be as inventive as they can within a stylistic structure. So, somebody could bring in a bassline that works well with something classical and incorporate the ideas of a fugue, incorporating improvisation. All these things are inherent within the piece; if you deconstruct it, it can be very, very simple, which means it is accessible to very young children, even if they are just playing the chord structures. There’s the space for them to develop little riffs as we go along. It breaks down barriers such as ‘I’ve got to be able to read music’, or being fearful of improvisation. I think the latter’s a necessary skill for all musicians, and it doesn’t have to be jazz improvisation. We’re often blinded by the technical mastery of people who can improvise, when actually two notes can sometimes take you a long way.
MH: How would you like to see NYJO developing?
AG: I’d like to see it become more diverse. I think one of the dangers of being a national institution is that people see you in a certain way. Things have changed a lot since NYJO was launched, with so many genres of jazz and non-jazz influences. There are many more grassroots organisations starting to meet the needs of people who want a kind of creative jazz. NYJO is engaging on a much wider basis now, starting to reach out to be more in partnership with these organisations; and I think that’s where it will find its strength. It would be good for it to be leading with as many diverse voices as possible. It’s starting to put in place the people that can contribute to that dream of a much more open and truly national organisation.
MH: What changes would you like to see happen in music education?
AG: The arts have been so decimated over the past 15 years or so. If a child doesn’t get the experience of playing an instrument, playing in a band, playing in a community, they get to their GCSE years and everybody tells them, ‘Oh, you’ve got to have a language.’ Music is a language. And there is the attitude that if you’re not going to be a musician, why are you taking a qualification in music? For me that’s quite criminal. In this country, we try to focus people down, and we’re so exam-driven and job-driven that we forget about the whole human being. Education becomes about collecting degrees and PhDs, when actually it should be about living and art.
