Introduction
In this episode, I’m talking with Malaki Patterson, who is Gloucestershire-based music producer, community musician, music manager, and creative director. Malaki has helped to achieve much change in the county, to support young people facing barriers in access to music and progression routes into the industry.
You can listen now below, or on Spotify (search for the name) and iTunes or your favourite podcast app.
Listen to the podcast
What’s in this episode?
We talk about:
- how Malaki wasn’t identified in school as being ‘musical’ because his musical influences weren’t valued.
- how he mixed songs using the radio and a tape recorder, influenced by his Mum, a DJ (in Jamaica, a term for rap); and his Dad, who was part of a soundsystem
- the effect that music technology, and the growth of the garage and grime scene had on his creativity and confidence
- his progression from dropping out of a college course to do factory work, to creating a micro music industry in Gloucester with other garage, hip hop and grime artists
- his first job in a studio and progressing to managing artists
- realising that his ‘practice’ in working with young musicians was in fact ‘community music’
- the barriers facing young people he works with today and the need for decolonisation of music education
- the lack of representation of BAME people in senior positions in music education and music industry
- and we finish with three pieces of advice to help music organisations on their journey to including a more representative range of young people
Links for this episode
DJ Kool Herc (Wikipedia entry)
Dread MC (Mikel Medley)
[VIDEO] Decolonising the music curriculum webinar hosted by Jimmy Rotheram
Upsurge artist development programme
[VIDEO] More about Malaki’s story in this video about routes into creative industries, for Create Gloucestershire
Music for Education & Wellbeing podcast [20] TRANSCRIPT: Malaki Patterson
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