Scottish National Jazz Orchestra - Planet Wave

SNJO Artistic Director Tommy Smith has collaborated with much-loved, and first Scots ‘makar’, or national poet of Scotland, Edwin Morgan on 55 poems, encapsulating themes as broad as Beasts of Scotland, Monte Cristo, Sons & Daughters of Alba, Song for Glasgow, Planet Wave, and The Millennium Suite. 

To celebrate and mark Morgan’s centenary year the SNJO take a trip through time as they perform the colossal ‘PLANET WAVE, an extraordinary collaboration between Morgan and composer Tommy Smith, and that will feature actor Niall Fulton in spoken word theatre.

First premiered in 1997 at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival, the work matched Morgan’s revelatory poetry to Smith’s powerful music in an epic depiction marking a stage in the history of the Earth. This journey takes the listener through waves of history from 20 billion years B.C. to 1543 A.D and the Age of Copernicus, re-imagining major events and pivotal moments along the way, as we are enabled to see the end of the dinosaurs the great flood, the construction of the great pyramid and the age of Copernicus 1543 A.D.

Catch this momentous wave with the SNJO and witness a rare, historic and seismic event in words and music.

 “The music carried a powerful emotional charge that mirrored Morgan’s poems to perfection.” - The Scotsman

www.snjo.co.uk/planet-wave

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Tickets for this event will go on sale to Festival Friends on March 16th and to the public on March 23rd and will be available for purchase through the Perth Festival Website. 

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Perth Festival of the Arts is an annual ten day May Festival, founded in 1972, and taking place in Perth and is one of the oldest continuously running arts Festivals in Scotland, Perth Festival of the Arts started as an opera and classical music festival in the early'70s and now covers all artforms.

With performances in Perth Theatre, Perth Concert Hall and other venues across the city, the annual Festival features the best in classical music, opera, theatre, rock, folk, jazz, comedy, dance and contemporary visual art.