Location
Wiltshire
Wiltshire
Community choirs, my own arrangements and compositions, songs from everywhere.
Dave King leads two community choirs in Wiltshire (Akabella and Macapello) where the accent is on fun, fulfilment and community as well as giving people an enriching musical experience. He has published 4 books of his SATB arrangements for Community Choirs – The Sumptuous Songbooks 1,2, 3 and 4 – arrangements of various pop and jazz classics which are easy to sing and full of juicy harmonies.
Dave is the original all-round musician – he studied Music in York, where he sang in the renowned Chapter House Choir, played oboe in various ensembles, worked as a keyboard player in several local jazz and rock bands, sang and played various wind instruments in a folk group, as well as being heavily involved in contemporary composition as a singer, composer and performer.
In the 1980s Dave worked for seven years as Musical Director and multi-instrumentalist with Horse + Bamboo Theatre, touring internationally and devising music for fifteen shows and projects. Since 1989 he has run his own instrument-making business, Sound World, making a wide range of instruments from bamboo, running hundreds of making workshops nationwide with children, and making large-scale sound sculptures for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the Oxford Botanical Gardens and Yorkshire Sculpture Park among others; devising and running many instrument-making residencies including the Barbican Centre, London, WOMAD in Las Palmas, Caceres, Reading and Morecambe and the Eden Centre.
Dave was Musical Director and project administrator for the annual Wiltshire and Swindon Special Schools Festival from 2001 to 2010 which involved over 300 children with learning difficulties in an annual festival of song, and a featured composer with the Wiltshire Small Schools Festival in 2011 with a song cycle for primary children about Martin Luther King.
For over ten years Dave was the Baritone with the renowned vocal quartet ‘The B Naturals’ who also ran hugely popular singing workshops around the UK using their great arrangements of pop, soul, rock and jazz classics.
Dave is a familiar face as a pianist/composer on the south-west jazz scene and as bandleader and arranger for the popular soul/ska band Skarper.
Akabella is a small, happy, long-running community choir of about 15 members which has been singing in and around West Wiltshire for 27 years, the first community choir in the area. We sing all kinds of songs from all over the world, often in arrangements by co-leaders Dave King and Lisa Otter-Barry. Akabella is open to anyone when we have a vacancy.
Monday evenings in termtime from 8pm till 9.30pm
Macapello is a 30-strong community choir in Melksham, Wilts., which has been running for 10 years. It’s co-led by Dave King and Lisa Otter-Barry and the choir sings music from all round the world in all kinds of styles, with many of the choral arrangements made by the choirleaders. We are a fun and happy group and welcome new members – no singing experience or musical knowledge required, everything taught by ear (though printed music is available if required). The emphasis is on fun, feeling and fulfilment. The choir aims to do two or three concerts or events every year, often raising money for charities.
Wednesday evenings in termtime 7.30-9.30
