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YouTube celebs: PROJECT Trio melds hip-hop, jazz and improv with beatboxing
The flute has come a long way since its days portraying a mischievous bird or a pre-pubescent virgin in heat. Prokofiev made its quirky melodies cute. Ravel and Debussy made it sultry sexy.
And flutist Greg Pattillo morphs the metal into rough, street madness, beyond the dreams of Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson. He's one of the voices of PROJECT Trio, a chamber group that's kicking ass and taking names, made up of Pattillo, cellist Eric Stephenson and Shepherd School graduate, bassist Peter Seymour.
The feisty ensemble is here to perform 8 p.m. Saturday as part of the 39th Annual Jewish Book & Arts Fair — a schmorgersborg of concerts, film screenings and readings, which end this weekend — hosted by the Everlyn Rubenstein Jewish Community Center.
"You can practice beatboxing anytime of the day," he jokes. "You don't have to take your mouth out of its case, you know what I am saying? So on the subway, during the commute, anyway I was walking to, beatboxing ensued."
"PROJECT Trio is all about versatility," Seymour says. "It's the most important thing. With the new way music is being presented, you have to be able to play different styles of music, play anywhere, any time. We are ready for anything."
Orchestral jobs don't come easy. Often, classical musicians travel form city to city, performing blind auditions — some of them are rigged — in hopes of landing a spot, some are pay-per-service, others include a salary. Benefits are a luxury. Sometimes it happens, other times it takes years, maybe decades.
In the meantime, Pattillo decided he would use his time to develop skills to make other sounds on the flute, including improv work.
"You can practice beatboxing anytime of the day," he jokes. "You don't have to take your mouth out of its case, you know what I am saying? So on the subway, during the commute, anyway I was walking to, beatboxing ensued."
It all began with a fateful YouTube meme in 2006.
While working at a grocery store in New York, Pattillo would frequent corridors of the subway system and try his skills at flute beatboxing. For his repertoire, he deciphered popular tunes later putting them on video. Over 67 million YouTube views later, PROJECT Trio has set a standard for savvy creativity within an otherwise conservative art form.
"I would dabble with different tune that worked with beatboxing," Pattillo says. "Before long I had quite a long number of tunes like Super Mario Brothers, Inspector Gadget, a little Axel F. And this was my subway set."
For cellist Eric Stephenson, classical music and popular genres were completely separate. As he gained confidence as a classical musician, he began to incorporate hip-hop, jazz and improv sounds on his instrument.
"The cello is the perfect instrument because it's so versatile and the range is so big," Stephenson says. "You can do very many things. In orchestra music, you are a very schizophrenic-type musicians where you are playing bass lines to melodies to chordal accompaniment. The music that we play connects all these different ideas."
As the chamber group continues to establish and defining itself, the members are concentrating on developing and implementing strong education programs globally, in addition to composing works for the trio and symphony orchestra in an effort to secure engagements with the larger ensemble.
"In the end I am just happy to play music that other people like, and I am fortunate that I get a voice doing beatbox flute," Pattillo says. "I love to do beatbox flute."
