"Robe has always been very reliable and offered plenty of creative options," says Thomas. His show for Cullum, for whom he's worked - initially as a dimmer tech - since 2004, is a blend of elegance and cool to match Cullum's dynamic performance which has won him massive popular success amidst great critical acclaim.
Thomas received a basic lighting brief from show designer Mark Silver, who designed an innovative set based on piano strings. These were fabricated by Zig Zag and consist of a series of boxed winch sets with white nylon rope - the bottom sections sit on the floor upstage, while the top sections are raised up to the trussing mother grid, pulling the ropes up with them, and tensioned when at trim height. Integral to the boxes are LED lighting fixtures which point directly upwards, so the sheeny texture of the ropes catches the light beautifully.
The overall look of the show draws inspiration from the jazz record label Blue Note. Silver was very keen on certain colours to be used, and so Thomas also needed to use fixtures with excellent CMY mixing facilities to reproduce these in the perfect hue.
Above the stage on the mother grid are 12 Robe ColorWash 575E ATs and eight ColorSpot 700E ATs, and these are utilised to achieve the saturated cyan, magenta and yellow mixes that are integral to the show, along with classic primaries of blue and red.
Then there are four ColorSpot 575E ATs upstage on the mother grid and six on the floor across the back of the stage, used for heavy back lighting of the whole band and to silhouette Cullum on the projection screen upstage of the strings. They also move out into the audience at times for gobo effects.
On the front truss are four ColorSpot 700E ATs and another six ColorWash 575E ATs. These are for full stage washes and for picking out Cullum at the piano, the Rhodes keyboard and the various other stage positions he used during his energetic performance. Two house follow spots also help pick him out when he is on the move. All the lighting is controlled via an Avo Diamond 4 Elite.
(Jim Evans)
