Since 2017, we have run an annual tour of secondary schools designed to bring jazz and jazz-inspired music to young people who haven’t had the opportunity to experience it live before, performed by a young and diverse group of musicians. The core idea is to be relevant: for young people to hear familiar music creatively reimagined by a jazz ensemble, to meet and jam with the band, and to see themselves in the musicians visiting their school.
First Time Jazz (together with its previous name, Jazz Messengers) has now reached 17,395 young people from over 100 different schools across the country. Last year, the band visited both North Lincolnshire and Thurrock in Essex, having prepared a varied set including arrangements of more contemporary artists like Amy Winehouse, Corrine Bailey Rae, and Gnarls Barkley, as well as jazz tunes by Roy Hargrove, Nina Simone, and Billie Holiday. The repertoire was chosen to be accessible, enjoyable, and to create a relatable social context for the jazz tradition, including opportunities for the audience to sing along. After the visits, we asked young people to describe jazz music in one word:
Free; amazing; exciting; fun; funky; experimental; spectacular; joyful; uniting; important; euphoric; inspiring; expressive; jaw-dropping; soulful; alive; powerful.
One budding young singer at a school in discovered NYJO through First Time Jazz, and now regularly attends our Under 18s Band led by Winston Clifford – travelling into south-east London from Essex on the train every weekend.
This year, First Time Jazz is coming to Lancashire from 8-12 July. Led by the South London singer/songwriter Wolfie (Laura Wolfe), the band will feature NYJO Emerging Professionals Sophie Speed on saxophone, Tamir Smith on bass, and, returning for the second year in a row, Georgia Ayew on drums and Jennie Beard on keyboards (read about Jennie’s NYJO journey here). The band will stay for the week in Lancashire, travelling between two schools each day and bringing the creativity and collective inspiration of jazz to the North-West.
We are also in the midst of our current Widening Access project in partnership with Lancashire Music Hub: the second edition of Jazz Futures (read more about the first edition here). Since October, NYJO Emerging Professionals and Educators have been regularly visiting Lancashire to incubate a focused group of young musicians with an early interest in jazz. Members of the Jazz Futures band will join the First Time Jazz band as special guests – maybe even touring their original composition ‘Lancs Blues’ across the county.
We are grateful to the Victoria Wood Foundation for their continued support of our work in the North-West – including this First Time Jazz project – as well as our generous Friends of NYJO for enabling all of our education work in Lancashire and beyond.