Working in genres from folk, jazz and soul to electronic club and improvisation and rooted in traditional music from across Africa and Asia, five young artists have been awarded an Opera North Resonance residency.
The award offers time, space and resources to professional music-makers from the Global Majority, working in any genre and based in the north of England. It seeks to develop talent by enabling them to take their work in new directions, to experiment with collaborators and to try out the results in front of audiences.
This year’s artists are set to use their musical talents to explore issues such as social justice, race, identity, gender, migration and how the past continues to impact the present.
The five are Ellen Beth Abdi, a graduate of the Royal Northern College of Music, singer and multi-instrumentalist; Balraj Samrai, musician, DJ, facilitator and co-founder of Swing Ting and SEEN Magazine;
Rory A Green, a guitarist and songwriter born in Ghana and raised in Manchester: Jonas Jones, who was discovered online by the Dirty Hit record label when he was just 18, and Satnam Galsian, a British Asian folk singer based in Leeds.
From January-April, each of them will be given free rehearsal space for a week in Leeds, with a grant to cover fees, costs and support and advice from technicians, producers and other specialists. They will also be given the option to give a work-in-progress performance at the end of their residency. The Resonance scheme has been made possible by Opera North’s membership of the PRS Foundation’s network of talent development partners. The UK’s leading funder of new music and talent development, PRS Foundation supports organisations working at the front line of talent development, with a broad range of individual music creators.
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