Tyrone Birkett

Tyrone Birkett is a saxophonist, composer, producer, and speaker with extensive experience partnering art and social consciousness as an "artist for humanity". Focused on creating music that affirms the good and the beautiful, in spite of what we see in our world. As the conceptualist, composer and musical director of the band Tyrone Birkett | Emancipation, he has created Postmodern Spirituals, a project that synthesizes jazz language, black church music, soul music & Negro spirituals. Fronted by his saxophone and the declarative vocals of his wife, Paula Ralph Birkett, lyric and melody are enveloped in a sonic environment of intriguing harmonies, funk and jazz rhythmic underpinnings, shaped by painstakingly constructed arrangements, topped off with virtuosic & soulful improvisation. 

An encounter with an audience member on the street after a performance really pushed Tyrone to present this last edition of the band. “After we played our set, a young woman came up to me stating she ‘needed’ the music but we didn’t have CDs at the location. I told her to wait and I’ll get her one, but when I returned, she was gone. She said she 'needed' the CD, not 'wanted' as I remembered her face of desperation. She was in sort of distress and the music provided something for her”. This experience led to creating music that was “necessary”, purposed to bring the hope of freedom song into the 21st century, to provoke social change through art for the benefit of the disinherited and disenfranchised. And a voice against oppression of the soul by our own inner conflicts. 

“I want the music to be a catharsis for expressing freedom of heart, mind, and soul. A 'lifting' of the atmosphere at least for a little while”, Tyrone remarks. To that purpose, he assembles a core set of musicians with experience in jazz, r&b and black church music. Musicians that have played with diverse acts such as gospel superstars Mary Mary, jazz trendsetter Jason Moran, r&b mainstays Faith Evans and Kelly Price and a cappella African-American music legends Sweet Honey In The Rocks to name a few. This merger of Jazz sensibilities, with Soul and Spirit music with his own conception brings a multi-dimensional experience to the listener. 

For twenty-five years Tyrone has been comfortable in bringing curative and empowering art to concert stages and clubs as well as prisons, hospitals, and schools, what keeps him going? “The joy of abstract creative ideas which then become sonic realities on stage, and the imagining of people feeling free and revived. It is a quest you want to take on over and over again. I want people to be free.”

Next in that mission is continued presentations of “How Can We Sing In A Strange Land” a talk/performances discussing the Freedom Song; the production of “Those Whose Backs Are Against the Wall”; a multi-movement, multi-disciplinary work on hope to the oppressed and forgotten; and ongoing release of new music in video and audio platforms in the months to come.