Mellow Baku

  • Role:Associate Artist
  • Location:Leicester
  • Introduction:Sound, word and visual artist Mellow Baku has performed throughout UK and internationally for over 10 years, including at London Southbank, Warwick Arts, as well as gigs in Switzerland, Denmark and New York. Associate Artist with both WORD! and the Spark Arts for Children, her work is regularly commissioned for plays, storytelling, poetry and music, at Curve Leicester and Attenborough Arts. Prior to the pandemic she toured Manchester theatres, Leicester schools and Nottingham Libraries. Her work has received airplay on BBC Radio.

    Mellow facilitates workshops for creativity and wellbeing in the community and for the NHS, with gender-specific and inclusive groups. She sings with Ka Safar, a 5-13-piece Egyptian & otherworldly inspired transcendental improvisation ensemble based in Leicester and features with jazz bands. She is currently devising a free-jazz inspired immersive theatre piece ‘Mmm Ahh Whoosh’ for early years, co-produced by The Spark Arts for Children, co-commissioned by Attenborough Arts and Warwick Arts Centre.

    Born in London to a Blues singing hippie and Trinidadian Rastafarian activist writer and actor, Mellow Baku was moved to the Midlands as a child and raised in a cultic religious organisation from age 5–19. She escaped to study Fine Art in Leicester, and has been exploring ways of healing, finding, shedding identity and sharing through writing and creativity ever since.

    "A must for all - the best kept secret in British Jazz" - Courtney Pine OBE