If you can name any chamber music composers, chances are most of them are white and male. A chamber music group called Imani Winds wants to change all of that.Imani Winds will be performing at the Bermuda Festival of the Performing Arts tomorrow.This Grammy-nominated wind quintet is known for its dynamic playing, culturally poignant programming and genre-blurring collaborations. With two member composers and a deep commitment to commissioning new work, the group is enriching the traditional wind quintet repertoire while meaningfully bridging European, American, African and Latin traditions.The Royal Gazette recently spoke with the group’s bassoonist, Monica Ellis. Ms Ellis will be also giving special classes at the Menuhin Foundation during her visit here.“Once Imani Winds got this opportunity to come to the Bermuda Festival, I was asked by the Menuhin Foundation to stay on for a couple extra days to do some outreach concerts,” said Ms Ellis. “I think that’s great.”She said in many school music programmes, students don’t get much exposure to wind instruments.“Some students we meet have never seen a bassoon,” she said. “I will be working with Menuhin and doing some collaborative work in four different schools on Friday.“In every city we go to we are always doing outreach concerts,” she said. “We hold young persons’ concerts and concerts in alternative venues such as schools and prisons. We like to bring the music to the people.”Ms Ellis grew up in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania where she was the self-described “classic band kid” although her parents weren’t the kind of people who went to classical music concerts on a regular basis.“I grew up playing in the band, and always had music in my life as far back as I can remember,” she said. “I was in the band since third grade. I played clarinet and saxophone and piano later on.“I finally came to the bassoon when I was in the eighth grade. I had a great teacher who said ‘why don’t you give this [the bassoon] a try?’. I had been playing the other instruments and he thought it would sit with me well.”She said she enjoyed playing the bassoon and never thought it was an unusual instrument to play. “It was different, but I didn’t see it as strange for me,” she said. “I thought, ‘this is cool’. I still played all the other instruments throughout high school. I thought piano was going to be what I would stick with.“I went to some summer schools, studied the bassoon very intensely and I said, ‘I really want to do this’. I liked the power of playing in the orchestra surrounded by the sounds you get. It exhilarated me.”Imani Winds has been playing for 14 years. They launched the Legacy Commissioning Project to mark their tenth anniversary. The idea was to bring new voices into music and hopefully encourage people like Ms Ellis’ parents to come out to classical music concerts.“We have always known our repertoire was quite limited,” said Ms Ellis. “To sustain ourselves we recognised that new music was the way to keep it going. With so many groups that is a vital component of substantiability.“We decided to commission composers, but the type of composer was important to us. We wanted to ask people to write who had never written for quintet, but also wanted to represent African or Latino cultures.“We wanted to try to get at a faction of composers who hadn’t written for the quintet.”In the beginning, Imani Winds had around ten composers in mind to carry over a five-year period, but since then the legacy programme has grown.“That has morphed and changed a bit and it is continuing to grow,” said Ms Ellis. “Now we commission different types of composers including standard contemporary jazz composers, and we have a Palestinian composer. It has allowed for us to have a way to expand our whole language.”Their Palestinian composer is Simon Shaheen.“He has lived in the United States for two decades,” said Ms Ellis. “He plays the Middle Eastern oud as well as the violin. The oud is a lute type instrument.“He specialises in Middle Eastern sound and music of that region with quarter tones and the scale system which is completely different from western classical music.“ We have literally learned a different language. We will premiering that in February.”She said that all of the composers chosen for the legacy project have their own unique sound.“Each composer has definitely brought a completely new approach to the pieces they have brought to us,” she said. “From the jazz point of view we have collaborated with Stephan Harris, a young composer. He had us improvising.“We have done that before but this was in a different way. He had a special music track in back of us while he played with us. That was a different sound.”She said she didn’t necessarily think that composers of colour had difficulty being accepted, but they did sometimes have difficulty gaining notice in the public eye.“The population of classical music is so focused on the western European classic system,” said Ms Ellis. “Let’s face it they are mostly all dead white men. With the voices out there today, it is not a matter of them being less accepted, a lot of listeners and presenters don’t know these voices are out there. It can sometimes take a little bit of work to get your name out there.”And she said having a variety of people playing and composing music drew a wider variety of people to the audience.“It does bring out a more varied audience,” she said. “And our listeners are so into us. The fact that we are fairly young, we do end up getting a different demographic of people who would not necessarily have come to a classical music concert.”She said Imani Winds helps to break the stereotype that the orchestra and opera is only for older, affluent people.“We look like you, we look like young people,” she said. “We are black and Latino. People can say, if that is what they are doing maybe I might enjoy it. Over the years it has been a slow process but it has resulted in us bringing out younger people.”Imani Winds performs at City Hall at 8pm tomorrow. Tickets are $65 for adults and $25 for students.To purchase tickets go to www.bdatix.bm. For more information about the Bermuda Festival visit www.bermudafestival.bm or telephone 295-1291.