Ross Grant: Around the world in 80 plays: 29 down, 51 to go
Ross Grant is putting together – pure lockdown creativity at its best – an amazing series called Around The World in 80 Plays, collaborating at distance with musicians worldwide to produce some compelling joint work. Normally I tend to court some of our more senior music citizens as guests in this series, on the grounds that the more you've done, the more you're likely to have seen and done amazing things. This episode's guest is slightly different. In this shot, Ross is playing with a colleague... in Johannesburg Ross Grant is still ridiculously young, but he has packed all kinds of music making and some massively diverse experiences into his life. He is a director of the legendary and long-established Bromyard music festival; he has worked with the extraordinary Sistema music organisation; he grew up in a musical family with deep roots, and kicked around Moseley in Birmingham in his teens with the likes of Toyah and Oscar Harrison; he teaches and runs Zoom workshops... and more. There's a sample coming up in this episode, and if you want to know more, I have put links on the companion blog post: 'A Life in Music: Ross Grant', which you can find on the Radio To Go Blog at radiotogo.com. A footnote: the intro and outro flourishes I'm using in this series of Lives in Music podcast come from Vo Fletcher who is featured in this series, along with Loz Kingsley, here. I asked him for a bit of live impro, and this was the result. The Lives in Music Podcast series has been running for about two years now. These are interviews with local musicians, looking at how music has shaped them throughout their lives. Series 3 also looks hard at how lockdown has had an impact. There are some lovely stories. To see all the artists, here's a link to every episode.