London-based Irish clarinettist and presenter Jessie Grimes has just been announced as the National Concert Hall's first Learning and Participation Artist-in-Residence, as part of their newly announced Concert Season for 2024/2025.
Featuring a suite of family friendly concerts including popular screenings with live orchestra such as Stick Man, The Snail and The Whale and Revolting Rhymes with the National Symphony Orchestra, Jessie will lead and present classical favourites in Symphony Shorts' Peter and Wolf, The Young Persons Guide to the Orchestra and Our Precious Planet as well as number of Music in the Classroom schools concerts and programmes.
A dynamic and colourful presenter, Jessie is intent on making classical music appealing to the widest possible audience.
The cat's out of the bag & plastered all over the walls! Delighted to be a @NCH_Music Artist In Residence 24-25 alongside titans @TaraErraught& @bryce_dessner. I’ll be lepping around in some more loud suits with @NSOrchestraIRL, banging on about how music is for EVERYONE! ✨ pic.twitter.com/kwnvqdwb8f
— Jessie Grimes (@Jessie_Grimes) May 27, 2024
We asked Jessie for her choice cultural picks...
FILM
All of Us Strangers. Andrew Haigh’s film moved me deeply. I spent many hours unpacking it with Brogen (my spouse) – the nuanced, profound portrayal of newfound love, how it explored ways we navigate past trauma and particularly how beautifully and devastatingly it dealt with the pain and difficulties so many queer people had (and have) in sharing their identities with family. In fact, Brogen’s therapist joked that tickets to All of Us Strangers should come with an automatic sick note from work to allow viewers to take time to absorb it and recover! Both Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal delivered Oscar-worthy performances of such depth and sensitivity. The film also speaks to the loneliness and isolation that so many people feel, even when surrounded by many other humans living in a big city like London. It was a beautiful experience to see it in the cinema, surrounded by strangers but everyone gently sobbing and sharing a collective experience together. I don’t think it got the credit it deserved at awards season this year!
MUSIC
I still can’t get enough of Raye’s now BRIT award record-breaking album My 21st Century Blues and indeed the live version, My 21st Century Symphony (Live at the Royal Albert Hall) with the Heritage Orchestra. Holy moly is she some talent. She won six awards at the BRITs this year– the record for most awards in a single year, and I think she deserved every one of them.
The album is a masterclass in songwriting, arranging and production, effortlessly dancing between house, pop, R&B, blues and dancehall and that’s before talking about what an incredible voice she has too. I love her story, of working hard to placate the industry head honchos, and it wasn’t till she split from a major record label and went independent – doing things her own way – that she could finally be free to create this masterpiece. Her prowess as a performer is so clear in the live album, which has brilliant, colourful orchestral arrangements and her performance soars and fills the entirety of that massive Albert Hall. From the masterfully punchy Escapism, to the devastatingly raw Ice Cream Man to the scorching Hard Out There - I just keep coming back to it.
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BOOK
Manda Scott's Dreaming the Eagle and the whole Boudica series. I never thought I’d be publicly shouting about great nerdy historical fiction, but Manda Scott’s four-part Boudica series has had a huge impact on the way think about my own identity and my relationship to the place I live (Suffolk, UK) and my Irishness. They’re simultaneously impeccably researched, and also beautifully dreamt up. Scott has spent many years researching and practicing shamanic practices, and every part of the book that wasn’t researched was literally dreamt up. It explores pre-Roman, Celtic Britain in captivating detail: how different tribes were co-lead by ‘dreamers’ (druids/shamans) and warriors with no gendered hierarchy, how our ancestors were deeply connected with the land and the rhythms of the seasons and nature, and the important role of ritual in society. The four books chronicle both captivating fictional personal and family relationships and the very real history of the Roman conquest and destruction of ancient Celtic society, rituals and identity. It was striking for me to realise that British colonialism was proceeded by its own native people being originally colonised by Rome!
THEATRE
It’s been a very long time since I’ve been to a play, I have to admit…
I saw the Abbey’s excellent production of Behan’s The Quare Fellow earlier this year and loved the subversion of using a full cast of female/non-binary actors to play Behan’s all male cast. It worked so so well, and gave an extra layer of absurdity and wit to Behan’s brilliant play.
More recently I’ve been getting really into improv comedy, both watching and performing it so last night I went to a lovely short-form Theatresports show in Ipswich run by Here & Now, and next week I’ll be going to shows at the Free Association in London, where I do their improv courses. I love the spontaneity, freedom and silliness of improv – it feels like a really helpful, creative contrast to the more serious elements of my performing career within classical music.
TV
I was going to pick something trendy and hard hitting like Slow Horses or The Morning Show (both brilliant, and I devoured them both this winter) but I’m going to take the liberty to get nerdy about a cult absurdist comedy classic called Arrested Development from the early 2000s. Specifically the first three seasons, which were originally aired and then cancelled by Fox. There still isn’t a day that goes by that a silly quote or moment doesn’t pop into my head. Lucille’s clueless "I mean it’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?" or Buster’s yawning "We are just blowing through nap time!" I live in hope for a moment on tour or travelling around that someone I’m making small talk with will reference this obscure series and oh how we will laugh together! It hasn’t happened yet...
GIG
I’ve gotten pretty bad at going to concerts or gigs lately. I listen to music constantly, but am not great at getting out there and going to live music. I could blame covid but that was ages ago… or say that since moving out of London it’s logistically trickier, but I think that’s not a great excuse, because in London I felt oversaturated by choices so often panicked and didn’t go either!
I’ve had some transcendent experiences with live music over the years though. Two standouts are weeping until my tshirt was drenched at Quartet for The End of Time with Jörg Widmann (clarinet), the Capuçon brothers (violin and cello) and Denis Kozhukhin (piano) at the Southbank Centre, and in contrast dancing till my feet hurt and singing till I was hoarse along to Vulfpeck at the Shepherds Bush Empire.
This has been a wake-up. I’ve decided I’m going to go to see The Staves in London next week!
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ART
It’s been even embarrassingly ages since I’ve been to an exhibition. Whilst visiting my sister in Utrecht last year we went to the IMPAKT Exhibition’s OUT OF OFFICE This isn’t working for us. It was a collection of responses to the question of today’s nonstop technology-driven work culture, which revealed, rethought and rejected the capitalist model of a constant drive towards exploitative productivity, and ultimately burnout. I’m still thinking about it a year later. I particularly enjoyed Mario Santamaria’s playful installation of an ‘out of office’ email apologising that the sender was sleeping and "will have limited access to my email during this period".
TECH
I’ve had to ban social media from my phone! So aside from apps to check the weather or the tides for swimming, my most used app is called Waking Up it’s an incredible library of content about all things related to mindfulness, meditation and consciousness exploration. I found it during lockdown, when things for musicians were very tough and they offered it for free for those who couldn’t afford it. I think they still do. I’m now a lifetime subscriber and use it pretty much daily, both as a source of guided meditations, a meditation timer and for the library full of talks by everyone from Alan Watts, to the poet David Whyte, to an amazing Australian Buddhist nun called Jayasara who reads extracts of texts from all sorts of wisdom traditions.
Imagine what it would be like to be truly satisfied with what you have. pic.twitter.com/h4tJxATECA
— Waking Up (@wakingup) April 14, 2024
THE NEXT BIG THING...
Humanity reconnecting with the natural world?! Can that be the next big thing? Aside from music, connecting with the ‘more than human’ world is one of the most important things in my life.
It may be the small echo chamber I’m in, but I think there is a resurgence of interest in foraging, rewilding, forest bathing and general nature connection. As a society, I think we’ve largely forgotten that we are part of nature and the only hope for ourselves and our poor ailing planet is more and more of us realising that we are we are deeply connected on a cellular level to all living beings – every blade of grass, animal and tree. That we are animals after all and if we connect, listen and give nature the space it needs, it can heal both itself and us!
Jessie Grimes is the National Concert Hall’s first Learning and Participation Artist-in-Residence, announced as part of the NCH’s new Concert Season for 2024/2025, featuring 60+ concerts from September ’24 to May ’25, including a suite of family orchestral concerts and screenings. Full details of all concerts taking place are available here.
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