Shaw’s The Windrush Suite pays tribute to his grandparents’ journey from the Caribbean to Britain, telling a story shaped by love, pain, struggle, resilience and triumph. It also honours the wider generation who arrived in Britain in 1948 and built lives, families, communities and culture against the odds.
Echo in the Bones, presented in the second half of the evening, moves the story forward. It explores what it means to be Black British through the eyes of the Windrush Generation’s children, weaving music, history and storytelling into a portrait of resistance, legacy and belonging.
Renell Shaw grew up in North London, now as Artist-in-Residence at Kings Place, he returns to a part of London he knows so well with one of his most personal bodies of work.
Shaw is an Ivor Novello Award-winning composer, platinum-selling songwriter, producer and performer. His official biography describes an artistic world built around sound, story and live performance, with each element deepening the others.
His composition The Vision They Had, from The Windrush Suite, received an Ivor Novello Award and opened a deeper chapter in his work around memory, heritage and intergenerational storytelling.
Across his career, Shaw has worked with Rudimental, Anne-Marie, Nile Rodgers, Emeli Sandé and Nitin Sawhney. His theatre credits include The Crucible and Othello at Shakespeare’s Globe, Black Power Desk at Brixton House and Is God Is at the Royal Court. He is also developing Yasuke, an opera with Music Theatre Wales, and is one half of 2fox with Max Sinàl, bringing soulful house, Afro rhythm and electronic music into his wider creative world.
RENELL SHAW: THE WINDRUSH SUITE & ECHO IN THE BONES
Thursday 25 June
Start time: 7.30pm
Doors: 7pm
Venue: Hall One, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London, N1 9AG
Tickets: £20 – £25
Approximate running time: 1 hour 40 minutes, including interval
A trilogy of identity, memory and belonging
The June event presents the first two chapters of a wider trilogy. The Windrush Suite looks back towards the generation who crossed oceans, made homes and changed the cultural fabric of Britain. Echo in the Bones asks what those histories mean for the next generation, and how identity forms under the pressure of memory, loss, pride and survival.
Rather than separating music from testimony, Shaw brings them together. The Kings Place description highlights the use of a world-class live ensemble, family recordings and striking visuals. These elements matter because the Windrush story is both personal and national. It sits in archive, in home, in voice, in body and in sound.
The final chapter, Remember Us Tomorrow, will premiere at Kings Place on Friday 9 October. That new commission looks towards the future, asking what it means to be of Afro-Caribbean heritage after three generations in Britain while raising a fourth generation in a divided, hyper-connected world.
Seen together, the trilogy becomes an ambitious act of cultural preservation. It asks what stories need protection, who holds them, and how artists turn inherited memory into work that reaches beyond the family and into public life.
For this live premiere, Shaw has assembled a formidable group of musicians across jazz, classical and contemporary music. The line-up matters because this project needs range, weight and emotional precision.
Renell Shaw leads as composer, musical director, conductor and vocalist. The ensemble includes Orphy Robinson MBE on marimba, Ayanna Witter-Johnson on cello, Romarna Campbell on drums, Charlie Laffer on guitar, Mutale Chashi on bass, Zoe Alexandria on piano, Mark Crown on trumpet, Nathaniel Cross on trombone and Jean Toussaint on tenor saxophone.
The vocal line-up includes Nandi, Afronaut Zu and Rochelle Rose. Across the full ensemble there are links into jazz, theatre, contemporary composition, soul, Afro-punk, Black British music and major live performance.
