Episode 14 — Eliza, a cello made of U-boats and Igbo flow
This episode threads together three very different but weirdly connected worlds: a candid chat with Eliza about announcing pregnancy live on stage and navigating motherhood as an artist; an Entertaining Noises deep-dive into the cello with session legend and podcaster Verity Simmons, whose instrument features a spike allegedly made from a German U-boat; and a Genre Tombola plunge into Igbo rap, tracking political storytelling, trap-influenced production and West African rhythmic lineage via transcription and djembe.
Across the episode Steve pokes holes in the tortured-artist myth, celebrates instruments as characters with histories, and uses Igbo rap as a case study in how call-and-response, polyrhythm and social context travel from drum circles to YouTube videos — all while nudging listeners toward a more curious, less lazy way of hearing so-called “niche” styles.
What we cover
Eliza on stage & off: Live pregnancy reveal at the Forum, fan reactions, motherhood, timing, and rejecting the idea that creativity requires suffering.
Entertaining Noises — cello: Verity Simmons on range, resonance, pizzicato, Bartók pizz, vibrato, tuning, projection and why aesthetics and feel matter.
U-boat spike: The cello's carbon-fibre spike with alleged U-boat origins — reframing dark history into something generative.
Intonation & ensemble: Fretless nuance, orchestral blend, micro-variation and why sampled strings rarely feel alive.
Genre Tombola — Igbo rap: Brief Igbo context, political and social themes, hi-life influence, trap sonics and dense, rapid-fire flows.
Rhythm & call-and-response: Transcribing Igbo rap verses, mapping them onto djembe patterns and linking to West African drum traditions.
Curiosity as method: Why digging into any genre — structurally, historically, sonically — multiplies its beauty.
Further listening & links
Full Transcript
Verbatim transcript, reflowed for readability only. No wording edits.
Hello, my name is Steve Pretty. I'm a musician, composer and performer from London, and welcome to my podcast, Steve Pretty On The Origin Of The Pieces. This is the show that helps you to hear and understand music in new ways. Welcome back, musically curious people. I hope you've had a good couple of weeks. Slightly longer than a couple of weeks, actually. Sorry, this episode is a little bit later than planned, a few days late, because Easter holidays, young family, all of that stuff. But also, to be honest, I've been absolutely flat out working on future interviews for this show. Lots of really interesting stuff coming up, both today and for the next few episodes. So yes, hopefully the wait will be worth it. Thank you very much for all the brilliant feedback about the last episode. We talked about music and autism, and of course, the musical washboard. Really great feedback and chats I've had with people off the back of that episode. Typically varied, I think you'll agree. And of course, you can get in touch at any time through social media. I'm at Steve Pretty on most of the platforms. And originofthepieces.com, you'll find links to all of the social media and also to my Patreon, which you can pay either one or $5 a month to help support the show. And for that, you get all sorts of extra resources. You get the full unedited interviews. You get some extra bonus PDFs, which I'm gonna be talking about later and lots more. So do sign up there. Originofthepieces.com's got all your links. Coming up on today's show, I have a really nice little chat with my friend Eliza, fantastic R&B vocalist and artist about what it's like to have a baby and announce the pregnancy live on stage while you're already quite heavily pregnant. It's a really interesting little chat about playing the forum and revealing your pregnancy to your fan base live on stage. It's quite fun and her baby Rex is in attendance. So it's a sort of little dual interview with Eliza and her baby. And then I've got a really interesting entertaining noises section today. And that's of course where I talk to musicians, bring musicians often into my studio and get them to explain how their instrument works and some different techniques and stuff just so you get a bit of an insight into different instruments. Today is the turn of Verity Simmons, who is a fantastic cellist and both very knowledgeable and very eloquent about how that instrument works and demonstrates some beautiful cello playing. And then to finish the show off, I'm finally dealing with Ebo Rap. That's right, I've spent the last few weeks researching and listening to Ebo Rap from Nigeria. So I'm gonna report my findings and have a little bit of musical fun with that towards the end of the show. So, on with the show. But first, here is the little chat that I had with Eliza. Now, if you don't know Eliza, I do suggest you go and check out her work. She's an absolutely fantastic soul and R&B singer from London. Fantastic record she's put out. Two brilliant albums and great live shows as well. I've seen her live lots of times and I've known her for a very long time.
And what she's been doing, she's sort of transitioned. She had a former pop career and has sort of transitioned from that into doing this incredible soul and R&B stuff that she's doing now. And it's, yeah, it's been quite something to witness over the years. Anyway, here's my chat with Eliza and of course, little baby Rex, who you can hear throughout. Do you mind introducing yourself? Sure, I'm Eliza and I'm a musician, just like you. I use my voice more than anything. So does little Rex here and I write music and perform and try to entertain as much as I can. Well, I thought it would be fun to have a chat because obviously we've known each other for ages and you've just had a baby as we can hear. And the main thing I wanted to talk to you about was just the way you announced it, the moment that you announced it and all of that. So maybe you should start by talking about that. Yeah, well, I'm not someone who would just, I'm quite a private person, so I wouldn't just post something online about it for no reason, but I did have a show in the diary. So I guess the first time people were going to see that I was pregnant was at the show. The dance routine I've always done was with my back to the audience for the first 30 seconds or whatever. So it just so happened that it was a perfect reveal moment, which was just a really thrilling way to do it, I guess, or to share the news. I was really sad I couldn't be at that show, because I was at your show before, the one before that. But I think that was a way for the one way you revealed. But it was amazing, I've seen the footage where you just spin round, and everyone goes nuts, because you're very visibly pregnant, right, but you hadn't announced it or anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was fun. Where was the show? It was at the Forum, right? Yeah. Forum, good place for a reveal. Yeah, it was really fun. Also, my hometown, so it felt quite personal in a way. Yeah, of course. Yeah, a venue you know really well. And what was the reaction from your family? From the reveal and from the news and everything, did you get much of your fever? Yeah, it was lovely. It was so lovely. Yeah, heartwarming, and there was a lot of like, kind of a powerful response, a sort of female power vibe. I was getting a lot of messages about that, and it definitely made me feel very like, supported. Yeah, I guess there was always a slight fear for me, like how is this gonna disrupt my path, the path I'm on with music. But then at the same time, it's like, I'm gonna learn so much, much more, and have such a deeper understanding of life with a child and it becoming a mother and all of this stuff. And I think that's what art is all about really. So it's the only, it wasn't the only path for me really, but then you see the fans are just going with you for the ride. Yeah, of course. So happy for you and it just gives you that extra support, it's lovely.
That's great. And you've been, cause you've been on quite a ride over the last, well, however long it is, like 15 years or so, has been pretty varied, right? Cause your stuff in the last few years is incredible, but it's really different from your stuff in your sort of previous incarnation, which is really sort of amazing to see. Does this feel like another sort of chapter? Who knows? Right now I feel quite like I'm just going with the flow. I don't know where the flow is gonna lead yet, but I hope so, cause I like evolution. I like kind of kicking myself out of my patterns and formulas that sometimes you find yourself falling into. So yeah, I really hope it takes the music I'm making into a whole nother realm. Are you feeling inspired by having a baby, or are you still in the middle of, really? Yeah. That's great. I mean, I'm obviously not able to like go to the studio and make a lot of stuff, and I wouldn't really want to. I'm just in motherhood right now. But I am writing things down and like got ideas. I'm just seeing the world in a whole new way. It's just, and I think even when I was in love in the past, obviously not with my own child, but just feeling that feeling of love, I'd always be so inspired. And now it's like a whole nother different love. And it's just, it makes everything look beautiful, doesn't it? But it's also a big time sink and stuff, obviously, you know, having a family is a big, did you feel like you had to kind of think about when the right time was? Or did you do any of that? Or was that conscious or? I think I just kept putting it off, thinking, oh, it's not the right time, it's not the right time. And even now, it's probably not the right time, but it's just... It's never the right time, though, it's the... Yeah, so we just went for it and we'll just, yeah, we'll just do what we can. Yeah, just roll with it. We'll do what we need to do in our own individual lives, but also, he's just a person. Just bring him along. Yeah, well, that's... Well, that's what I did quite a lot in the early days, especially once they go to school and things is a little bit trickier, but like, when they're babies, I found that, you know, we took my daughter to Glastow when she was baby, quite early and on tour around the place. And yeah, it's in a weird way, even though there are a lot of work, obviously, especially as the mother in those early days, but they are kind of amazingly adaptable, if you're prepared to jump through those hoops to get them. Yeah, I think there's a slight fear, even of just getting in the car and going somewhere at this stage. Yeah. But I think as soon as you do it, you get over the fear and then you just, yeah, the world opens up a bit more. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. You'll be good backstage, won't you, mate? Yeah, I just need those headphones. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it was one of the first things we bought was
those. I should have them all, they were really... We've probably got some. Please do. But just going back to what you were saying about the sort of being inspired by being in love or having a kid and things. I think it's interesting because a lot of the rhetoric, the kind of romanticized ideas that people have about, oh, you know, art comes from tension and all these things. I think that's... It can come from anywhere, right? It can come from either side of that. It can come from sort of stress or... Yeah, I think that it's a myth that you need to be in pain or suffering to create. It's one way of getting there, but I've written from euphoric places and from... And actually, probably my favorite stuff is from that, because it's more aspirational to live in that place rather than to live in a place of pain. I think you can just get it from anything. I try to. I just try and get right from wherever I'm at in that way. If your job is as a songwriter and a musician and performer, I think it's almost like a lazy myth or stereotype to think, I need to wait till the inspiration strikes and I have this huge heartache or whatever. Obviously, it can come from that, but sometimes, you're just like, I want to write an album, so off we go. I'm going to be inspired by whatever, this flower in front of me, or traveling or having a baby or being in love or not being in love or whatever. Sometimes, it can feel like you're not going to some depths, to the deepest depths, and it feels shallow, but actually, there's depth in it that you're not really even realizing until you listen a year later or something. You're just letting it reel out of you and you're not analyzing it so much. Did you say you took him into the studio? Yes, everything took a lot longer than what he usually does, but we jumped into that hurdle, I guess, of just at least getting there. That's amazing because he's less than two months old, isn't he? Yeah, but I finished an album just a month before he was born. I say finished, there's things I still want to tweak about it, so I'm trying to just get it out of time. Good timing, though. That's amazing. Yeah, that was the aim, but here I am tweaking away at it, so we'll see when it's really done. You're looking forward to the album? Bye bye, Rex. Bye, Eliza. Thank you so much to Baby Rex and Eliza for that chat. It was really lovely to catch up with Eliza and meet little Baby Rex. It's always so nice talking to Eliza. She's always so positive, and it's great to hear such a kind of inspiration coming from, you know, from those early days of motherhood, and I can't wait to hear what the next record is going to sound like off the back of that. So it's time to change gear and go into the entertaining noises section of the show, courtesy of Verity Simmons. Now Verity is a brilliant cellist, but also a podcaster, and in fact on the day that I did this interview, I also did an interview for her podcast, which she runs with Seb Philpott, the trumpet player, and their show is called Three In A Bar, and I guess it's slightly more geared towards, you know, professional musicians, people who work in the
music industry, but it's a really fantastic show, I urge you to check that out, and it's going to be quite a long interview that I did with them on their show coming up, I think over the next few weeks. But anyway, while Verity was in, she very kindly brought her cello down, and I had her do this little kind of breakdown of how the cello works, and what it sounds like for this section that I call entertaining noises. So over to Verity. My name is Verity Simmons, and I'm a cellist and podcaster, I say with question in my voice, but I do do those things. You do do those things. You have a cello right there. I've got a cello and a microphone. And a microphone. So that's fine. Yeah, and you have just interviewed me for your podcast. Oh, that's true. That's true. I'm a freelancer. I found myself doing quite a lot of West End sort of shows in the last few years, and I play in a string quartet. It's called the Estilo String Quartet, and we originally used to do kind of functions and gigs, and more recently we've been doing some more interesting projects. We're working with a composer and arranger called Michelle Taylor-Cohen, and we're just doing a Muse project. Yeah, doing The Second Lord. Do you know that album? I don't really know Muse very well, but OK. It's so great. It's really fun. It's sort of looking at effects and loop pedals and different sounds. So it's all slightly moving into a new world. Oh, good for you. With the quartet now. That's awesome. And we're here to talk about the cello. You very kindly brought your cello along. So before we hear it, could you tell me about the instrument, in other words, this specific instrument? I feel like I've been very lucky with this cello. I've tried quite a few before. And I just loved it because basically it's quite small in the body. It does look smaller than a... Yeah, but it's full size, but it's just a very slim one. But it's got a really good amount of projection. It's really loud. So what you find often is you have to pay quite a lot of money to get a kind of good sound in the middle or at the top or at the bottom. And this one's kind of evenly spread across it. So it's a Bohemian cello, I gather. It's sort of 19th... turn of the century, 19th century instrument. Yeah, I love it. Yes, it's got a lovely, warm, rich sound at the bottom. But then this is the bit that really got me around here. And you don't have to work too hard, which is lovely. So I don't think I've had a cello in here before, which is embarrassing. I don't think I've ever recorded a cello in here. I love the cello, it's just such a beautiful instrument. Something about where it sits, the range of it as well. Could you demonstrate how low it can go versus how high? So the bottom note is C, it's too below middle C. You can actually
tune it down sometimes. I've played a few pieces where you can tune it down and get to a B just about. It's not going to sound as good. Because the tension of the string is not as right. Occasionally you can do that. Then you can go right up. So middle C is here, you can go up, C above it, then C above it. There's a run at the end of the first page of the Elgar cello concerto which goes up too. Right up there. That was a lovely delivery, wasn't it? So your finger was right at the very, very end of the... The fingerboard, just off the edge of the fingerboard. Yeah, that's right. So, yeah, if you take us through top to bottom. Yep, let's do that. So at the top, I've got this scroll. The scroll is quite intricate, really. It's curled around, really beautiful. But they all look like this, which is funny, isn't it? Because it seems like it's just for aesthetic purposes. Yeah, but it would also look weird because we're so used to seeing it would look weird if we didn't have that. Totally. And we've got the four tuning pegs here for each of my strings. These strings, so we've got an A string, a D string, G and C. So they're set a fifth apart. So five notes between each string. Come down to the bridge, which holds up the strings. Again, this is really intricate. It's hollowed out, which I think is absolutely necessary. It's hollowed out from underneath. Yeah, you can see there. But then there's also these sort of little bits of decorative little sort of heart in there as well, which is quite nice. Where is that? Yeah, and that's presumably just for aesthetics. I believe it is. Yeah, I think so. That's all right. I mean, I think it feels like sometimes with instruments, when you say just for aesthetics, but an instrument is something that you do and that you need to feel a connection with. And so it needs to, like how something looks is not, you know, obviously it's how about how it sounds, but it's also how it feels and your relationship with it and all of those things which are hard to quantify. And they're like, does this effect sound? No, but it affects how I feel about it. Yeah, totally, totally. And so exactly the same with these. These are called the F holes where the sound comes out very beautifully designed. Same on every cello. As we come down, this is this circular plastic thing I've got here is called a mute and mine is a bejeweled. It really is, the Beyonce mute. I know exactly. I am like the Katie Price of the cello world in my head. Also right, here's Without The Mute. Here's with the mute. So you see you get a slightly different kind of sound. It's like muffled, but softer, and it just takes the bright edge off it, I
think. Well, it kills some of that resonance in a really good way, doesn't it? Yeah, it just dulls some of those resonances and kind of reflections inside the instrument, I guess, because it's putting a bit of rubber on the bridge that stops transmission of the vibrations, I guess. So I just pop that on the bridge if I want to play quieter. It doesn't make a massive difference. Tonally, it makes a difference, but in terms of volume, it's not huge. You can get big practice mutes as well if you really want to block the sound. But yeah, it's more of a different timbre, I guess, when you play. Coming down here, we have got, these are the fine tuners. So if it's just marginally out of tune, any of the strings, I'll use these rather than the pegs. Because they're big wooden pegs at the top, right? Which are quite big adjustments. Yeah, they are, they are. And like I've had horrible moments with these where they really don't want to stick. Or the string snaps, which is a joy. I mean, that must be scary because they're under a lot of tension, right? Yeah, they are, yeah, they are. And so if they're close to going, I try and, you can sort of tell because they'll start going out of tune a bit more. But also you can see, you can see a bit of fraying going on at the top. And that's the point to whip it off before it smacks up in your face. Yeah, because it could really hurt yourself potentially, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a great video from the Berlin Phil where one of the cellists has it like explode. They very calmly change it again. That wouldn't be me. Mid-key. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazing. And then, so this is the tail piece here. Again, holding up the strings, connecting it to the bottom of the cello, just holding the tension of the strings. And at the bottom here, we've got the spike. Mine is carbon fiber. Very fancy. Like a four-year-old car. I know, that's what I think, yeah. I changed it, it used to be a metal one on there. This one, I think it apparently affects the sound, maybe opens out the sound, but I'm taken in by whatever I'm told by the guy who fixes things for me. So he could be spinning me a lie. And I know that. But you just, you told me before we started that this has another backstory to it. Oh yeah, yeah. Which is quite something. I know, exactly. So yeah, when I replaced the metal spike with this carbon fiber one, I was told by the man that I bought it from, that it was originally part of a German U-boat. That's quite nuts. I know. I mean, it's kind of good that it's been re-appropriated for something positive, right? I think so, I think so. I hope it doesn't lend an air of evil to it,
do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, people might say it does, but. So we can't go any further without hearing it. Okay, yeah. I think we should hear it. So would you mind just, maybe you could just give it, pluck the four strings for us before we- Okay, so I'm gonna start from the lowest note. This is the low C. This is two octaves below middle C. Uh-huh, okay. And so it's, here we go. This is the G. This is the D. And the A. Beautiful. It's already really nice and resonant. And that technique you've just done, plucking them is called- Yes, that's right, yeah. So useful, such a useful technique. And really interesting is you can do different kinds of pizzicato, so you can do something like that, just quite gentle, and I might use the thumb if I've got a bit of time, or you can go a bit. Or but then also there's something called Bartok Pitz, which is where you get your finger right underneath it, like a big snap pitch. Would you mind trying that again? Absolutely. It's really aggressive, that, isn't it? Really banging against the finger. And of course you've got to get the bow involved. Do you want to talk us through the bow? Yeah, sure. So, my bow I've had since I was 18, yeah. It's like six years, you've had this amazing. I know, it's amazing. God, it's done well. A little longer than that. Yeah, so basically this is where I put my hand. My thumb sits on, this is like a thumb piece here. It's also called the frog. I don't know why, it doesn't look at all like a frog, does it? But there we are. This is where I tighten up and loosen the bow. So I loosen the bow when I finish playing and then tighten it up again like that. It's to tighten the horse hair, which is on the bow, which we still use. Yeah, because this is real horse hair, right? Yeah, it is. And the strings are metal, but they were made from cat gut or gut of some sort. Yeah, I know, lovely, isn't it? Lovely. Yeah, we've moved on a bit from that. Although people do, purists, will play on gut strings. Play on period orchestras. Yeah, absolutely. I've had a gut string on the A before. Quite a different feeling. Is it? Yeah, it is. I mean, because obviously these projected with the metal on the, I've got, that's called Spirochor and there's like tungsten and. Okay, okay. Yeah, I mean, you can really project a lot more. It gives you a brighter sound. Right, okay. So with the bow, you know, I find most of the stuff I'm doing, obviously, is with the bow. Oh, my cello doesn't like Bartok Fitz.
It's immediately gone out of tune. I'm not surprised because you're really yanking. You really are. And there's one show that you have to do where it happens a lot. But in terms of, when we're talking about tuning, it's a fretless instrument. Yeah. And so that means, as opposed to most guitars, where you've got, you know, you know where to put your fingers because there's little bits of metal there. Can you, that gives us some different options, right? Yeah. How you can play it. Absolutely. And it's really interesting, especially because I do quite a lot of quartet stuff. Like I was saying that you're tuning, everyone's perception of tuning could be quite slightly different. So it's interesting. Some things I find that I'm playing slightly flatter. So for example, if I'm playing a C on the A string, I probably pitch it about there. Some people plays ever so slightly flatter. Some shows are a bit brighter. Some orchestras are a bit brighter. So it gives you, there's a bit of room for negotiation on tuning. I think that's, people don't, I think a lot of non-musicians don't necessarily get that tuning is all relative. And it's all, and also there's not even a standard agreement across the world now, let alone across historical time as to what an A is. It's just, it's essentially wherever you want to put it. I mean, so we, A 440 is what we call it, which is 440 hertz, 440 vibrations per second. But 432 is another one that was used. And then different orchestras even today, that's the case, right? Absolutely, yeah, yeah. And so that's the whole tuning of the instrument. So there's something more vocal about it somehow. Absolutely, and it's the same with vibrato. So the vibrato, so if I was playing without vibrato, it's just basically a straight note. Vibrato's like this little wobble of the finger, but you can really, again, work with that for different, to give different effects, so. Depending on the character that you want to create. And actually, it's a really nice point where you start using that to your advantage rather than thinking, I just have to vibrato and everything. But taking it right away again, then putting it back in for color. In a way that a voice does as well, right? Yeah, totally, yeah. I mean, obviously some opera singers, there's vibrato throughout, but a lot of the time, I mean, pop or jazz or even a lot of classical singing as well, you sing a very clean note and then add vibrato at the end to kind of emphasize the end, right? Yeah, exactly, exactly. And a lot of baroque music will do the same thing, where you'll start a note really clean and just to warm up the sound, really. And it's those little pitch fluctuations that make it more human, more interesting, right? And it's why it's quite hard to recreate an instrument like the cello on the computer, I think, isn't it?
Thank God. Keep us in work, please. But the variations, it's not just playing a note, you're playing a note and then you've got this ability to kind of lean into it, pull and push away, and that's partly through the bow as well? Yes, absolutely, absolutely. So you can do, well, I mean, depending on what you want. So there might be something which has got a very long, lyrical line, so I play lots of notes in one bow called a slur, what do you mean? But there's all kinds of, you can lift the bow. Or then bury on the string. And then, and then there's this technique called spiccato. It's very cool that. It is really cool. It's really cool when you're in control of it. It's a flipping terrifying experience when that control goes. Yeah, but that's again, there's something about that unpredictability that can be, again, it keeps it kind of organic and human really. And I think that, again, when you're playing in an orchestra or in a bigger ensemble or string orchestra or whatever, you've got those slight fluctuations in tuning are really important, I think. I mean, obviously you want to be playing in tune, but when you've got that's what makes a whole violin section or whole cello section sound really lush and full is the fact that they're in tune, but there's like there's micro variations in tone and pitch that make it sound really. And again, if it's why in a computer if you're trying to recreate it without thinking about those things, if you're just putting like cello, cello, cello, cello, it never sounds the same as you say, because you haven't got that variation, you haven't got that subtle shift. Yeah, and actually I spoke to a cellist recently who's done an album of pieces where he's multi-tracked himself and he played like an ensemble piece, a string orchestra piece that he'd arranged just for him playing on the cello. And he said that he was even thinking of himself as different characters for each of the cello parts so that, you know, bringing that exactly what you just said, so that thing of keeping the intonation the same, but with different quirks of personality, different slight different techniques of bow and... So if I'm ever trying to do, I sometimes need to do some sort of mock-ups and brass parts or whatever, or sometimes for the real thing, if there's not much budget, I'll have to multi-track myself and the same thing, I might use a different mouthpiece or a different trumpet sometimes, but also just thinking slightly differently. Even like being slightly out of tune on one take, just because then it gives it that sort of thicker sound, whereas if you're just trying to get everything absolutely perfectly matched in every way, it just somehow doesn't sound like a computer's doing it rather than, you know. Yeah, absolutely. And that's one of the reasons that like an orchestra is this sort of living, breathing thing. Well, so is a string quartet. Yeah, totally. And yes, and I love the thing of getting, listening to how other people play and starting to become like a unit. Those things, it's such an interesting dynamic, isn't it? You know, it's really fun and you do become, it becomes, you really
mould to the way other people play and so it's, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a really, yeah, it's a really special sort of thing as a musician to be honest. It's a sort of way of communicating with other musicians, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. We'd better hear a bit more if you don't mind. Go on. Do you want a bit of Bach maybe? Yeah, absolutely. I just wanted to let that note ring out. We were talking about that in my chat with you, weren't we, about trumpet chops and holiday fingers, is that the similar thing? Yeah, coming off Easter. But just letting that note ring at the end, it's, you know, the resonance. And that's why the body's hollow, right? Yeah, absolutely. The great thing about Bach, so the cello suites, is that they're written so much round the open strings and letting things ring, and it's like a real understanding of the instrument. Right. You know, because so many, this can be really awkward chords and things, you like fourths are horrible. They're really hard, and it's very hard to make them resonate nicely, but if you've got like open fifths or open strings, it's just so satisfying, it's such a joy to play that, to make that kind of resonant sound. Yeah, and again, it's just, you're working with the instrument only to sort of let the instrument do as much of that work as possible. We talked a bit in the show about resonance of spaces and things like that and how, and that must be a big part of the sound for when you're playing in beautiful concert halls or whatever. That's certainly my point of view. You really play with the space, right? To some extent, and it must be even more so for cello. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's really interesting. So when you're in recording studios often as well, it can sound quite deadened and stuff. So yeah, sometimes it's a total choice. It's pretty deadened in this room, which is very small room full of stuff. But yeah, if you're playing in a big, it's one of the reasons classical music is often presented in big halls and things. Yeah, it's an amazing thing. It's really interesting as well because of the way that they sort of set up different halls. Like, if you go into Cadogan Hall and you're playing in an orchestra, it can often feel like you're playing by yourself. It's a really weird sensation. And the barbeque in places in it, it can feel like you can really hear yourself. And then you'll go into other ones, like someone like St. John Smith Square in it. It's like a wash of sound and you just become, so it's funny, those ones where you can hear yourself, it's great in many ways, but also could be quite terrifying at times. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, thanks so much, that was amazing. Ah, great. Thanks again to Verity for that really interesting look at the cello and listen to the cello, more importantly, do check out her work, Three In A Bar podcast, and of course lots of brilliant music as well.
So, we get to the genre tombola section of the show. Now, if you're new to the show, what this is, is I take the list of about 1300 musical genres as listed on Wikipedia. I feed that into a random list picker that chooses a genre for me, and then I examine that genre. I spend the next couple of weeks listening to that genre, researching it, maybe trying to speak to some people who make music in that genre, and yeah, sort of present my findings. And the genre that was chosen for me for this episode was Igbo rap, and for those of you who heard it at the time, you may remember that I wasn't quite sure how to pronounce it. Was it Igbo, was it Oogbo? It wasn't clear from the genre picker what it was, and of course, I quickly realised to my shame that it is of course Igbo, as in the Igbo people of Nigeria, so I-G-B-O Igbo. Now, before we go any further with this section, I should say that I've reached out to quite a lot of Igbo producers and rappers for this segment, and weirdly, none of them have got back to me. I don't know why they wouldn't want to speak to a kind of white middle-class bloke in London who just does this random genre thing on his podcast, but there we are, they haven't got back to me. So, I should say, even more than usual, this section is gonna be a kind of personal take on this. It's always personal to me, but it's also often I have someone on to give their personal take on whichever genre we're looking at. So we had Frank Turner on a couple of episodes ago, for example, to talk about UK hardcore. And I'm sure he would have left out loads of bands and loads of history and things that people who are into that genre might notice. That's gonna be true whenever we do this segment, but especially today because it is just purely from my own research. So yes, please take that in the spirit in which it's intended, which is just as a kind of look at a genre that I don't know anything about. And with me presenting what I found interesting about that genre in a very personal way to me, and with hopefully me as acting as some sort of conduit to you exploring the genre yourself, because again, I should stress once again, I am no expert, I am just a kind of newbie looking at these genres. So with that in mind, it's probably just worth talking about the kind of brief history of the Igbo people. So Igbo people in Nigeria are a minority, but a very important minority, quite a large minority, if that makes sense. And of course, politically very important, because in the late 60s and early 70s, there was the Biafra War. My understanding of it is pretty much between the Igbo people and the ruling classes of Nigeria. So I think that's an important backdrop for this genre, because we're looking at Igbo rap. And as with a lot of rap music from wherever you find it across the world, often rap deals with politics, or it deals with quite difficult subjects. And indeed, that's certainly the case here, given my research, there's a lot of music that references guns, drugs, politics, and all sorts of things like that. But of course, as we've often talked about in the podcast, genre is in many ways a kind of limited way of thinking about music. So you have Igbo rap that is quite upbeat, quite uplifting, quite sort of happy sounding and deals with, I think, less difficult subjects. But then you've also got the slightly more edgy, kind of
more hardcore end of things, which is dealing with politics and that kind of stuff. And that's actually what we're gonna be looking at today, more of the latter. But just to give you a little bit of an overview of the former, some of the slightly more upbeat stuff, the slightly, I guess, happier sounding stuff, for want of a less simplistic term, comes from Hi Life, this beautiful West African sound, led by guitar, kind of major sounding guitar and percussion. And if you go onto the show notes, as I mentioned earlier, there's lots of links to different Ebo rap that you can go and check out. But I wanted to look at one track in particular because as I was researching and listening to a lot of different rappers and producers, there are a couple of things that really stood out to me. And in fact, this one track in particular stood out to me. Now it's a track that I found on YouTube actually. It's a kind of storytelling video. In fact, I think it's one of a series. There's a whole series of these with some of the same rappers. And there's a link in the show notes. So do click through and have a look at the video if you can, because it's really nicely made video. You know, it's a slightly bleak situation where you've got a car full of people who are stopped by some blokes with guns, big scary blokes with guns, who pull them over, get them out of the car, and kind of search their car, plant some drugs in their car, and it's, yeah, there's a bit of a confrontation in shoes. And so it's kind of an interesting, like a lot of rap from around the world, this deals with gun violence, it deals with gangs, and it deals, of course, in Nigeria, as again, with a lot of places in the world, it deals with sort of ethnic violence, political confrontation, and that kind of stuff. So do go and check out the video. And the production, I guess, the music production is, if you know anything about trap, it sounds a bit like that, so that means drum machines, quite a fast tempo, samples. So we looked at samples in previous episode about UK hardcore, where you're basically manipulating, in this case, a piano sample, basically, a little loop of piano music that's kind of warbly and sounds like it's been run through a tape machine. That kind of underlies this track. And then over the top, you've got a really interesting drum beats made by a drum machine, some bass played on a synthesizer. And then pretty much you've got that and then the wrapping, right? That's pretty much the makeup of the track production-wise. But it's the wrapping that I really want to talk about because that's what really caught my attention with this track. It's frankly incredibly impressive. It's really fast. It's really, really rhythmically complex and interesting. As far as I can tell, again, please, I'm no expert. So do correct me if I've got this wrong. But the wrapping is done in a mixture of the Igbo language and pidgin. So there's the odd word that's distinguishable to a British English speaker like myself. But yeah, a lot of it, the lyrics kind of go over my head. If you look at the video, there is a translation there so you can kind of see what's going on, which is very interesting. But it's not the lyrics that I'm so interested in.
It's the rhythm to the rap because frankly, it's really, really impressive and extremely fast, very rhythmically complex. And so I wanted to kind of break that down. So what I've done is to transcribe some of the rapping that's going on here. Now what that is, is where you listen to a piece of music very, very closely and you either translate that onto your voice or your instrument, or you can write it down as a kind of a memoir, which is what I've done here. I've literally taken a pencil and a piece of manuscript paper, listened over and over again on loop to some little sections and just very slowly, piece by piece transcribed the rhythms. And it was very interesting as I was listening to this, there's four rappers on here. Now, apologies, I'm gonna probably butcher the pronunciation of some of these, but it's Chucky P, Khenyzee, Space and Chumzy from Nigeria. And there's this kind of musical conversation going on with them, right? So there's the people in the car and then there's the people who stop them. And so you can see on the video, there's this confrontation that happens, but it happens through rap. But what it reminded me of a lot was some of this call and response stuff that you find a lot in rap. Also of course in jazz and other music of African origin. And I think there's an argument you could make for that going right back to things like drum circles, particularly in West Africa, which is of course where Nigeria is. So again, this is just my interpretation of it, but certainly what I was hearing as I was transcribing these rhythms is that this musical conversation reminded me a lot of a kind of drum circle of one person playing a question part and the next person playing their response to it. And here there's quite an aggressive cordon response going on. But because these rhythms are so complex in some cases and so fast and they're really in dialogue with one another. So let me show you what I mean. So here comes the second voice. So you can really hear the dialogue between those voices, the opening kind of call and then the second voice responding. And again, that really reminded me of these drum circles where you have one person playing a sort of call and then someone else responding. And so given that, what I thought I would do is because I've transcribed this, I've got it written down, I thought I should try and put this on to a drum. Now I have a small djembe, a West African drum in my studio, and I thought, you know, let's put it on that. I should say a lot of apologies in today's episode, I know, but I'm not much of a djembe player, but I try to do my best to play along. So if I then put that on the drum, it sounds like this. Now, hopefully you can hear what I was hearing there, which was that the connection between the drum, the rhythm being the fundamental driver of what this music is doing, and the voice. You've got these incredible rhythms that perhaps have some sort of history with the Igbo people and some Igbo traditional music or West African drum circles, but then brought right up to date with this American production, British style trap production, that kind of stuff. Yeah, so I found it a fascinating kind of insight into the bridging of those two worlds, and especially then translating it back onto the
drum. I found it a really inspiring process. So I'm gonna play out the first sort of minute or so of this. It gets much more complicated as it goes through. You'll hear some of the rhythms are pretty interesting and unusual, and towards the end, we get into polyrhythms, which is a very big feature of West African music in particular. So do listen out for that. What I'm gonna do is fade the track onto the left hand side if you're wearing headphones, and the drum onto the right hand side if you're wearing headphones or listening on speakers. If you're not, it'll all just come out of your phone or your smart speaker or whatever you're listening on, so don't worry too much. But if you are wearing headphones, this can be the best experience because you'll be able to hear the two going simultaneously. I don't get it bang on, but I give it a damn good go. So here we go. Thank you. So there we go, that is my take on Ebo Rap. I hope you enjoyed that. I have to say that this week, almost more than ever, I found it really fascinating looking at this pretty niche genre that I would have known nothing about, would probably have never listened to if it wasn't for this little segment of the show. And the thing that it really brings home to me is how interesting pretty much any style of music is once you start digging into it. How many different things there are going on, whether it's the social history, whether it's the musical nuts and bolts, whether it's the music production. For me, this section, the Genre Tombola, it allows me to kind of get inside these different styles and then to hopefully find something interesting, find something new and communicate that to you. I really hope that people, when they're listening to the show, aren't just tuning in for the more famous guests I might have or just to listen to a particular genre that they're interested in. But in fact, you're here for whatever the genre is. If you'll indulge me for a second, there's a quote by the physicist Richard Feynman, which I won't do the whole quote, but it's something along the lines of him talking to an artist friend of his and the artist saying to him, oh, it's such a shame you can't see a flower in the way that I can as an artist. As an artist, I can see the flower and I can see its beauty. And Feynman says something along the lines of, that seems quite nutty to me because I can appreciate the flower's aesthetic beauty, but knowing what I do about photosynthesis, knowing what I do about physics, about the movement of fluids through the plant, I can see the different layers of beauty. I have to say that that really resonates with me as a musician because the more I've learnt about music over many, many years, whether it's, you know, learning music theory back in the day or whether it's then learning about how to arrange music and then more recently in the last sort of 15 years, learning how to produce music on a computer, learning about mixing, learning about some of the other things we've talked about in this show over the weeks, reverb, music production, all of this sort of stuff. The more I learn about this stuff, the more endlessly fascinating I
find music. And that is true of basically any genre. So that's what I hope you are here for as well as me because that's certainly what I'm trying to communicate to you that enthusiasm for knowing a bit more and that unlocking new ways of listening, new ways of understanding and new ways of enjoying music. So there we go. That's my little pitch to you. I mean, I'm imagining if you've made it this far, you're already on board with that. But just, I just thought now having dug into this genre totally solo for the last couple of weeks, now would be a good time to re- emphasize that point. Anyway, Ebo rap, there we are. Now I should say that for the next episode in the genre Tombola, I'm actually not going to use the random genre picker on this one because I've already done the interview and I think it's already interesting and left field enough and certainly takes the box of music that I didn't know anything about before. And that is because the next episode, we are going to have quite a detailed interview, fascinating interview, I think, with the creative team behind the stage show of Spirited Away, which is about to open in London in May 2024. If you don't know Spirited Away, it's an Oscar winning anime film from Japan that I think won the Oscar in 2001. A fascinating, very, very unusual film with an incredible score by Joe Hisaishi. And so, yeah, we're gonna have a little dive into that and the music behind that show and that film. So do tune in for that. I'm sorry to cheat you random picker fans, but I reserve the right to do that every now and again if there's something particularly unusual and a particularly good opportunity to talk to people that I wouldn't otherwise be talking to. So there we are, Spirited Away, Studio Ghibli, Joe Hisaishi, that's gonna be on the next episode. Next episode. Okay, Musically Curious People, it's about time to wrap up the show, but not before I give a quick shout out to Nathaniel Dye, who you may remember was a guest a few episodes back. And Nathaniel is an amazing trombone player who was running the London Marathon over the weekend, playing the trombone throughout. And Nat has bowel cancer and ran the thing with a stoma bag the whole way through, and playing the trombone. Absolutely insane, well done, and congratulations to him for that inspirational, sorry, use that I word again, Nat. Anyway, well done, Nat. Meanwhile, thank you to my guests for this episode, Eliza and of course, Verity Simmons on the cello, and then the brilliant artists that put that track together. That is Chucky P, Khenyzee, Space and Chumzy, link in the show notes to the video. I urge you to check that out. The theme tune is of course by me and Hackney Colliery Band and Angelique Kidjo. Lots more Hackney Colliery Band stuff coming up this year, so watch your space for announcements there. Meanwhile, stay musically curious and we'll be back on the, about the 1st of May, something like that, for that little look at Japanese film music and much more, I'm sure. See you then, bye. Bye.