Keith Waithe

Keith Waithe is a Guyana-born musician, composer and teacher who has been based in the United Kingdom since 1977. He is best known as a flautist and founder of the Macusi Players — a world music jazz band whose name derives from the indigenous Guyanese Macushi people — and has been "acknowledged as the best flute player that Guyana has ever produced". His musical style explores a fusion of jazz, classical, African, Caribbean, Asian and Western influences, and he has also developed a technique he calls "vocal gymnastics", in which he uses the voice to reproduce percussive sounds. Music critic Kevin Le Gendre notes that Waithe "has single-mindedly pursued his own artistic agenda, developing a songbook that draws heavily on African-Caribbean and Asian folk traditions as well as jazz ingenuity in a manner not dissimilar to a large number of his forebears, of which Yusef Lateef is perhaps the most direct reference."

Born in Guyana, the eldest of his parents' four children, Waithe grew up in Kitty, Georgetown. At the age of seven he was taught to play the trumpet by his father (Darnley van Herbert Waithe, who played in big bands at the time). This led to Waithe honing his skills on the instrument by joining the Salvation Army Band and later the Guyana Police Force Band, and he subsequently took up the flute, for which he "developed a passion". In 1973 he was awarded a British Council scholarship, which enabled him to study in England. He attended the University of Surrey and the Royal Military School of Music, Kneller Hall, where he gained an LRSM diploma and PGCE Teaching Certificate.

In the 1990s he set up Essequibo Music, of which he is Director, an organisation that oversees a range of contemporary Black British artists, storytellers, poets and musicians — among them Sandra Agard (storyteller/writer), Jo-Jo Yates (kora player/master drummer/percussionist), Darryl Lee Que (Caribbean drummer and percussionist) and Helen McDonald (vocalist) — who work in educational, cultural and performances arenas, running workshops and undertaking collaborations with teachers and community project workers. Its activities have included a residency at the Eden Project in Cornwall, an education workshop in Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum, a series of African-themed workshops for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, as well as programmes for schools in deprived communities.

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