Jazz and poetry unite at the return of Peckham’s Born::Free night

In mid-August, the audience filing into Theatre Peckham for Born::Free’s Verandah evening was met by a quartet. Tjoe Man Cheung (guitar), Ylenia Tilli (double bass), Elias Jordan Atkinson (trumpet), and Daniel Smithson (drums) were seated in a row across the back of the sparse stage. The musicians jammed as the audience settled into their seats, reunited for the first time since Born::Free’s last event in March 2020. Founded by Chima Nsoedo and Belinda Zhawi in 2014, the literary arts platform supports and spotlights emerging and mid-career writers across all genres, predominantly African/Afro-diasporic poetry and experimental writing.

Theatre Peckham’s Associate Director malakaï sargeant and Belinda were the evening’s affable hosts who together cultivated a welcoming, open environment. Open mic poets added their name to a list before the show and were interspersed with the organisers and two headliners, Gabriel Akamo and Ola Elhassan, who respectively anchored the first and second halves. Everyone was primed with applause their entire descent from the darkened stadium-style seating to the stage, with an even warmer send-off on their way back up.

After introducing the evening, Belinda stayed on stage. Ylenia pared down Herbie Hancock’s ‘Chameleon’ bassline, bittersweet funk over which Belinda connected the metaphysical of individual human bodies with collective movement of humanity, linking our most elemental components – “hydrogen, carbon dioxide, clay, and breath” to the injustice and violence forcing mass migration.

bodies that cross borders that risk enslavement to search for the basics, bodies that become ones at the bottom of the Mediterranean, bodies of water that make up a chunk of earth, bodies stuffed in trucks under sacks of grain.
Movement is humanity, movement is youmanity. Bodies that cross borderlines drawn to divide those who share language, gods, and customs.
All our bodies know to do is to remember and move, to align the mental, the physical, the spiritual. Bodies are metaphysical.
Movement is humanity, movement is youmanity.

Some poets had never read their work in front of an audience before, and others had headlined previous Born::Free events. A few described a place or mood to the band for inspiration, but most just requested something downtempo, or said they’d follow the band’s lead. Dan would offer a beat, or Tjoe would pluck a simple, opening line, malleable enough for the rest of the quartet to shape in response to the poets. The musicians listened along with the audience, translating metaphysical imagery and metaphor (often drawn from London’s weather) back into sound.

This was especially satisfying when they waited a verse before joining, as with Toby, who took the stage in a bright blue suit, doffing the jacket before delivering a sensuous, psychedelic meditation conjuring cosmic freedom and consciousness. Toby’s arresting, honeyed voice painted lurid skies and magnolias, suspended in air until Daniel lightly brushed cymbals, and Tjoe added a subtle, faster-paced strumming. (Two attendees I chatted with separately after the show both wondered if everyone was about to have an orgasm.)

Lizmnk delighted the audience by scatting and riffing about what she was doing while scrolling through her phone to find her poem (the open mic performers didn’t know when they would be called). Once she found it, she kept listeners transfixed with a poem about asserting oneself over adversity

what you didn’t premeditate was my rise from the ashes, the phoenix within me arose at the cry of my sanity, begging, screeching for a life other than the present.

During Ku-ro's improvised freestyle, which mulled anxieties both existential and mundane, the band’s riff already held tension, and Ku-ro built on them, repeating and fragmenting lines.

Pull out my keys, open the door, I walk up the steps, walk up the steps, go in my room, and then I lie down and look at the ceiling...play something, Miles Davis....

At this mention, Elias added a wry burst before quickly edging back into the long, angsty groans playing off Ku-ro's rhythmic inner monolgoue. Hearing other artists respond in real time to the sharing of innermost selves and snapshots from life stories deepened the collective appreciation. Regardless the level of experience reading with a band, the four musicians’ anticipated the arc of a poem, setting down the poet and listener alike.

A delicious or devastating line gave extra chills with a good chord or twisting riff. Daniel’s light rimshots would punctuate a satisfying turn of voice, and most poignant lines were made even more heart-rendering by Ylenia’s bone-deep basslines. The poems spanned love and its trials, nature and its effects on our psyches, the humanity and family lineages African diaspora, and how they counter and resist centuries of oppression throughout.

The two poets billed on the event anchored each half with 20-minute sets. Nigerian-British poet, actor, facilitator, and creative producer Gabriel Akamo read selections from his debut poetry pamphlet, At the Speed of Dark. Akamo has a charismatic, dramatic stage presence: he moved around the stage in a waistcoat and long jacket befitting a literary creative. The band matched his energy, subtly keeping tempo with understated Afrobeat as he read poems chronicling scenes from his upbringing and its ecclesiastical influences.

His most impactful poem, ‘on trying to write about blackness and being black as a black male author who doesn’t know what blackness is but feels it needs to be fire and relatable’ offered a sort of meta-window into his creative process, interrogating how to represent his own Blackness when his interpretation diverged from popular depictions, artistic torment compounded by the iciest, most hostile parts of winter. His reading of it conveyed the turmoil of poetry itself - stuttering, repeating, and hesitating as one would when grappling with a feeling difficult to convey, to describe concepts beyond categorisation.

at 3 am you’re looking for something deep or heavy or sublime to say

about the night and growing in your skin.

you have nothing.

spent so long trying to compare the dark to your skin, eyes

and tangling hair

that it turned blue on you

like the irish term for an african

a white man’s bruised eye

the beginning of a bad joke

a link as tenuous as your links to chains or windrush,

or the music you’re told you listen to: rap, bob marley, or grime

or the ones you want to start to love but fear you don’t know how to

the yórùba you taught yourself to speak in church

your need to reference death, bullets, and blades

estates you forgot you grew up on

or your non-violence, the weakness of british sun, your bones, babylon.

you notice the hue of the bleeding ink and think

maybe this is a good enough metaphor: i can’t escape

the colour of my text, the coltan in my phone,

the horror of blank sheets

or

i studied philosophy and found

all the textbook pages were white as my notebook.

now you’re thinking too much

and this faux-quirky, false irony is white too.

this is what paper and pressure does

when you have to speak of something you are but never felt was yours

from day one

when trying to draw yourself

the black crayon never felt right

and you’d reach for the brown one every time.

Ola Elhassan (pictured above) closed the show. I’ve heard her at a few jams around London (where she and Elias have built a friendly musical rapport). It was a pleasure to hear the full complexities and expression of her poetry in the spotlight, gently and assuredly breaking everyone’s hearts. Her lines inspired some of Elias’s best melodies of the night. Ola places herself in the haqeeba lineage of poetry, inspired by the romantic, popular music from Sudan. She read her poems with a beguiling, calm remove, stirring emotion not from force nor flourish but even-keeled restraint.  In ‘Accord,’ she describes holding oneself alone in bed,

meanwhile last night I dreamt up fifteen sonnets to describe an ex lover’s smell my fingers itching to paint his dimples onto a canvas to let muscle memory archive before the memory fades before the memory of another one fades.

In her penultimate poem, “on the relationship between moon & river & bass,” Ola drew lyrics from fellow Sudanese poet Mohammad Bashir Ateeq’s “you & me & the Nile & the Moon” (as sung by Abdalaziz Daoud). In a transcontinental layering, the band provided a Bossa Nova groove, she began with a sublime “tonight:”

tonight, I notice your skin in faint moonlight // your arm moves slow to the ripple of the bass

each percussive thud a different side of skin // brought to life // a new dimension // now apparent

at the viscosity of blue light the rhythm changes form // it’s buoyant

catching my heart mid-step it falters it stumbles      it regains composure so the lyric can speak

ana wa enta wal neel wal gamar                                            you & me & the nile & the moon

ana wa enta wal neel wal gamar                                            you & me & the nile & the moon

This event was part of Peckham Previews, a two-week, multidisciplinary festival hosted by Theatre Peckham featuring new writing, performance art, participatory activities, poetry, comedy, music, film screenings, theatre, and dance with a theme of roots and reflection.

Born::Free can be seen next on 29 October at 6:30 pm in the Queen Elizabeth Foyer of the Southbank Centre (followed by the print launch of Jade the LB’s Keisha the Sket). Before then, they can be heard on their bimonthly Threads Radio show at threadsradio.com/