During the pandemic I was selected as one of Making Tracks’ fellows, an Arts Council funded programme that supports musicians working in traditional music. Making Tracks brings together emerging artists from the UK and around the world to showcase diverse music, initiate new collaborations and explore strategies for music-based environmental engagement. Out of this project formed my ongoing collaboration with Lemon Guo, a vocalist, composer, and interdisciplinary sound artist from China, whose work focuses on the power and subtleties of the human voice, creating performances and installations that connect people to the complex environmental and cultural realities of modern life. Building on our initial work at Making Tracks, and supporting by the 'Developing Your Creative Practice' fund at Arts Council England we’re working on finishing an album together in late 2021/early 2022, an innovative meditation on Chinese-Jewish relations, centred around the story of the Shanghai Ghetto where thousands of Jews escaped during the Holocaust. It incorporates traditional music, original composition, archival research, and A/V techniques to create a range of outputs including recordings and streamed/in-person performances. Our music brings together the sacred and the secular, the rural and the urban, and the ancient and contemporary, in ways that create a profoundly new and vivid musical practice at the intersection of Ashkenazi Jewish and Chinese diaspora culture, radically reimagining a shared history in a time when such acts of cultural solidarity are vital in a fractured political landscape.

Alongside the album we’ve also been working on a number of commissions such as a piece with the amazing Kunlin He for the 2021 Asian Art Biennial in Taichung, Taiwan, alongside commissions for other artists such as Tianzhen Chen. Additionally, in 2022 we will be scoring a film by innovative filmmaker/producer Eris Qian (Mother Tongue (Official Selection 2020 - CAAMFEST, AFF (LA), Diaspora Film Festival(Korea)) and Little Sky (Winner of HBO APA Visionaries Competition).

Thanks always to Asylum Arts for their continued support.

Additionally, here’s a little clip of from my streamed solo performance during Making Tracks that brings together a variety of different clarinet styles from the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe alongside some more ‘out’ Jazz language and driving electronics…