Maxwell‘s Silent Serenade Ensemble launches Thursday, but it’s nothing like his previous shows or tours. The trek is a moment for him to present his music in a way fans haven’t seen, with an emphasis on the ensemble he’s putting together.
“The ensemble … can be any kind of grouping of instrumentation that you’ve ever seen. It could be reeds, it could be strings, it could harps,” he tells ABC Audio, noting he pushed himself to make his vision come true.
“It’s a challenge for me to make all types of groupings of music and combinations of instrumentation [to] present songs that you’ve already heard before. So this is, like, really ambitious for me,” he shares. “I’m always excited about doing it because it breathes new life into the experience for me.”
While he does enjoy his typical shows where he performs the “songs that people like,” Maxwell says he was eager to tap into the side of him “that needs to have that fun, and needs to explore and needs to take risks.”
“This is my opportunity to do it,” he said of the Silent Serenade Ensemble. “And I think in this time of normalization, commonality, if you will, we need to shake things up.”
He continued, “We need to give people a reason to go, you know, ‘This is some other s*** right here.'”
The Silent Serenade Ensemble currently features four shows: one in Maxwell’s hometown of New York and three in the Washington metropolitan area, his second home.
“I just wanted to start there and let the word get around, and let’s see what happens afterwards,” he tells ABC Audio, teasing the possibility of an expanded trek.
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