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It’s a great delight to announce Chineke! Orchestra’s release of a toe-tapping rendition of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite, arranged and released in the 1960s by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. The work takes themes from Tchaikovsky’s beloved 1892 festive ballet with a jazz twist.

There are very few recordings of this work, and the version performed here is Jeff Tzyik’s adaptation for orchestra of which there are no official recordings.

Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn reinvented Tchaikovsky’s holiday ballet classic as a jazzy, brassy “melting pot of musical styles past and present,” according to The New York Times. The Sugar Plum Fairy becomes the sultry Sugar Rum Cherry, while the Dance of the Reed Pipes becomes Toot Toot Tootie Toot.

The album is a live recording of our performance of the reimagined jazz work from April 2022 at the Royal Festival Hall.

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Florence Price includes Price's Piano Concerto No. 1 with the young piano soloist Jeneba Kanneh-Mason, her award-winning Symphony No. 1, and His Resignation and Faith from Ethiopia's Shadow in America, which is a necessary and long-overdue tribute to the composer's remarkable contributions to classical music.

We are immensely proud to be a part of this important revival of Florence B. Price's work, and this album is a testament to her remarkable contributions to classical music.

Coleridge-Taylor is the first release on Chineke! Records, the newly created partnership between Decca and the Chineke! Orchestra, Europe’s first professional majority Black and ethnically diverse orchestra. The release commemorates the 110th anniversary of the composer’s death (1st September 1912). The album includes the famous Violin Concerto in G minor which was originally written for Minnie “Maud” Powell, a champion of music by African-American and female composers, first performed days after the composer’s death. Another highlight is the 1898 African Suite, based on the ground-breaking poetry of the African-American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, a major influence on Coleridge-Taylor taking inspiration from the ideas of Pan-Africanism.

When Max Richter’s Recomposed first exploded into our collective ears almost a decade ago, a 59-minutes-28-seconds sonic starburst, the effect for so many people was total. We hadn’t heard anything like that, ever. Experiencing it felt as though we were being catapulted onto another plane, reverberated through the cosmos by this epiphanic soundworld. In this “alternative rendering”, Chineke!, the groundbreaking British ensemble consisting of majority Black, Asian and ethnically diverse musicians, and the brilliant soloist, Elena Urioste, are playing on gut strings and period instruments: the sort that Vivaldi would have heard, and played, in his own time.

Bob Marley with the Chineke! Orchestra reimagines some of Bob Marley’s most recognised and listened to songs with contemporary classical orchestration.

The Chineke! Orchestra return to disc on Signum in a new live orchestral recording from the Royal Festival Hall, London. In this live concert recording under conductor Roderick Cox they perform Sibelius’s 2nd Symphony and Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No.3, featuring multi-award-winning pianist Gerard Aimontche.

Signum are proud to present the debut recording from the Chineke! Orchestra, in a new live orchestral recording from The Royal Festival Hall, London. In this first release in a new series, Chineke! orchestra perform two beguiling works – Sibelius’s Finlandia and Dvořák’s much loved Symphony No. 9 ‘From the New World’. Both pieces encompass different aspects of BME influences in Western Classical music: Sibelius’s Finlandia embodied a national sentiment in both the composer’s homeland of Finland as well as for other small nations seeking to free themselves from subjugation from other countries (becoming the national anthem of Biafra during the civil war of 1967-1970), and although underplayed by critics at the time, Dvorak’s work rings with melodies influenced by the folk music and spirituals sung to him by his African- American student and assistant, Harry Burleigh, and with rhythms and pentatonic sections inspired by the music of the Sioux Indians, all wrapped up in the format of a Western Classical symphony.

My Suite for piano and orchestra, aptly enough titled Callaloo, was composed in 2016, two years after my first Carnival in Trinidad. At that festival, I was exposed to gorgeous Calypso music for two weeks straight, riveted every second. The instrumentation of the suite is almost identical to the symphony orchestra version of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, with bongos taking the place of the banjo.

“Chris Beckett’s book of poetry about his upbringing in Ethiopia was brought to my attention by chance by a pianist with whom I was rehearsing. My gaze happened to fall on the book and I picked it up, asking about its author, a friend of my accompanist. As I opened it to rifle through, I happened upon the final poem in the book The goodbye tree, and a sense of music began to play immediately in my head. I knew instinctively that my search for texts for this very special Chineke! commission was over. The dust and the heat, the rhythms, the colours, the infectious joy, the impish cheekiness of Beckett’s poems screamed out to me as being the perfect match for the effervescent spirit of this unique orchestra. I was a little apprehensive in contacting Chris, afraid he might not be that happy to have me play with his poetic creation but his response was just as joyous. I know above all else that setting Chris’ poetry was going to be a great deal of fun.” – Roderick Williams

“When I founded Chineke! in 2015, one of the most important aims, as well as creating a top-class orchestra comprising a majority of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) musicians, was to champion the music of BME composers, both living and from the past. Over these last three years we have given many performances of new commissions and existing works by some of the UK’s leading BME composers and I am delighted that six of these works are now captured in perpetuity on this NMC Recordings album. Chineke! has derived enormous pleasure in performing and recording these works, which represent such a variety of instrumentation and mood, and I hope that you, the listener, will gain as much enjoyment from hearing them.” – Chi-chi Nwanoku