The great Black music symposium with Angel Bat Dawid, Qur'an Shaheed, Dr Adam Zanolini and Ben LaMar Gay

Qur'an Shaheed, Dr Adam Zanolini and Ben LaMar Gay join composer, improviser, clarinetist, and pianist Angel Bat Dawid to discuss the importance of not conforming, the struggle to find money to do what you love doing, recognising what your gifts are, and the experience of being diasporic African and its influence on your music.

Qur'an Shaheed is an experimental pianist, poet, singer and songwriter based in Los Angeles, whose music blends jazz, neo-soul, RnB and neo-classical. She started her musical career with her mother and grandmother at the age of four, has composed for film, and is a member of Jimetta Rose’s gospel choir The Voices of Creation.

Dr Adam Zanolini is a flute player, saxophonist, oboist, percussionist, double bassist, ethnomusicologist, and arts organiser. A pivotal figure in Chicago’s music scene, he’s part of the cross-generational Great Black Music Ensemble, “which fuses the expansive sounds of traditional Black American music with styles from across Africa and its diaspora.”

Composer, multi-instrumentalist, improviser, poet and singer Ben LaMar Gay's latest LP is Open Arms to Open Us, released at the end of last year, which blends jazz, blues, R&B, tropicalia, and hip-hop, and explores thermodynamics, rhythm as an inheritance of information, and the idea that improvisation is “the one freedom that we all have access to”.