Our multifaceted summer project for young people in King’s Cross, London, gets started on 15 July with a week-long tour of local secondary schools. The tour will be fronted by the singer SHANTÉH, who is one of the lead vocalists of renowned south-east London afro-jazz collective Steam Down and the UK Colombian jazz collective, Mestizo. She will be joined by NYJO Emerging Professionals Miles Pillinger on drums, Emmanuel Oke on piano, Amelia Wilding on bass, and Olivia Cuttill on trumpet. Together, the band will spread the word amongst King’s Cross communities of local opportunities coming up later in the summer with NYJO.
Modelled on our annual First Time Jazz schools tour, the band is designed to be young, diverse, and relatable, enabling young people in this area of inner-city London to see something of themselves in the musicians on stage. Together with SHANTÉH, they will create a set that balances figures in the jazz canon with more familiar and contemporary artists from the wider jazz universe including soul, R’n’B, and subgenres of UK rap. We want the visits to feel fresh, relevant, and inspiring, simultaneously introducing young people to a new musical world and welcoming them into it.
This is especially important for this tour, because it will help get young people involved in our upcoming summer project, taking place in a local community venue across 2 weeks at the end of the month. Again led by SHANTÉH but co-facilitated with spoken word artists Millie-Rose and Nomadic, the project will focus on creating poetry, lyric and rap content with young people on themes of identity and belonging.
This material will then by shaped into a final performance with more members of Steam Down on 25 August, as part of the Summer Sounds festival in Coal Drops Yard. Free to all, this means that the original schools tour is feeding through into a major headline performance. We want to bring young people along for the whole process, and are excited to get it started in local schools from 15 July.
To see the final celebration of the project, join us on 25 August in Coal Drops Yard. The festival is free and unticketed, so just turn up and enjoy the music, and find out more here.