Steel Masters 20

In 1924 there occurred an extraordinary coincidence: George Gershwin composed his Rhapsody in Blue and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote his third novel The Great Gatsby. Gershwin’s score was bright, tuneful and optimistic. Fitzgerald’s novel was brilliant, funny and sad. Both defined the 1920’s as what Fitzgerald dubbed “The Jazz Age”. I knew and loved both book and music from a very early age. I had an opportunity to express this when in 2019 the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre commissioned a new score for a ballet based on the novel. I wanted this ballet to sound like an expensive Broadway musical of the period: a small group of strings but plenty of saxes, pinging brass and holding it together that jazz beat and the throb of the Blues, but I also had a story to tell and characters to delineate.

Debuting in 2018 as the UK's new angry young men, Shame was at once a breath of fresh air and a kick in the teeth: an awesome guitar band that didn't care a whit about the winking irony of Britpop and railed against Brexit, Teresa May, selling out and more. The group's second outing, 2021's Drunk Tank Pink, was incredibly ambitious—and, at times, overly complicated.