With Sean Shibe you can always expect the unexpected, but there’s nothing frivolous about this boundary-pushing musician, as Michael Beek discovers
It’s quite the mixed crowd at St George’s Bristol, but that’s nothing unusual for a Manchester Collective gig, and even less so for the young man sitting centre-stage, electric guitar in one hand, cello bow in the other. Yes, you read that right. To refer to Sean Shibe just as a guitarist is to do the Scot an injustice, however sublime his skills with the instrument. He’s an artist, plain and simple, with a magnetism and intellect to match. That said, there’s nothing grand about him, his adventurous creative streak being just part and parcel of what drives him as a musician. When we meet by the canal outside Kings Place in London, that driving force is something I’m keen to get to the bottom of, and it seems collaborating with an ensemble like Manchester Collective is a big part of it.
‘I think I’m interested in anyone who wants to engage in a really collegiate and collaborative way,’ he tells me. ‘The atmosphere that Rakhi (Singh) and Adam (Szabo) have fostered through the Collective is absolutely that; they’re fleixible and open minded, and they have a youthful optimism and energy. I think that’s essentially what I’m looking for in all my collaborations.’
And he’s not short of friends who want to join him, from tenor Karim Sulayman – with whom Shibe recently released the album Broken Branches (above left) – to mezzo-soprano Ema Nikolovska (performing Dowland and Britten) and composer-turntablist Shiva Feshareki (with whom Shibe returns to Kings Place on 2 December as part of the venue’s ‘Sound Unwrapped’ series). Then there’s flautist Adam Walker and violist Timothy Ridout, who just recently performed with him at a Shibe-curated night called ‘Utter Filth’ at Snape Maltings. THE GUITAR IS WELL PLACED FOR collaboration, according to Shibe. ‘If I was a violinist, or something else,’ he says, ‘like if I played an instrument with a clearer trajectory, I might be tempted to be less collaborative. But the guitar is an instrument that is probably more suitable for it because there’s less distinct a pathway to a career if you choose to avoid the solo Spanish stuff.’
Not that he avoids core repertoire entirely – he performed Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez with the Hallé in June – but he did decide to branch out beyond it early on in his career. ‘I think when I was
