NYJO Learning: King's Cross Summer Project
Posted on 23rd December 2024 at 18:00
Here at the Music Workshop Company, we believe everyone should have the opportunity to make music, regardless of their age or background. But too often, for many, those opportunities can be hard to find - which is why programmes that open up music to wider audiences are so important.
NYJO (also known as the National Youth Jazz Orchestra) exists to do just this, and we were delighted to hear about their successful 2024 King's Cross Summer Project for 14-18-year-olds. This month Beth Ismay, NYJO's Learning Programmes Manager, returns to the blog to tell us about the project and the impact it made for the young people involved.
NYJO Learning: What does first-access mean to us?
In Summer 2024, NYJO Learning delivered a project in King’s Cross exploring first-access music-making for young people aged 14 – 18. There are so many brilliant opportunities out there for children in primary school to engage with music for the first time and to feel inspired by the possibilities of learning an instrument. When young people reach secondary school, however, many feel that it is too late for them to begin this musical journey. At NYJO, we firmly believe that it is never too late to experience the joys of creative music-making for the first-time!
This is where we are really excited by the potential of first-access work – how can we bring together groups of teenagers, many of whom may have reached 15 or 16 years-old without ever being presented with the opportunity to have instrumental lessons, or to join a band, or to engage fully with the process of creative music-making? And once we’ve brought these young people together, how can we engage them in a process that shows them that the opportunity to make dynamic and exciting music is absolutely still open to them? What can happen when you give young people who have previously experienced barriers to accessing music the opportunity to create something new? How will they interpret the music and what will they want to use it in order to say?
We see first-access projects such as these as vital to the work that we do here at NYJO. They enable us to celebrate the joy that music can bring to a young person’s life and the power of challenging the status quo of who has historically been given access to these opportunities. Our first access work is integral to our belief that all young people have the right to access a strong, positive music education.
Laying the groundwork
NYJO were invited to perform at King’s Cross Summer Sounds Festival in 2024, and to provide outreach work that ran alongside this. We knew from the beginning that we wanted to give local young people an opportunity to perform on the same stage, as our NYJO musicians would be playing with Steam Down and Yolanda Brown! We particularly wanted to involve young people with little or no previous experience of music performance, to show them the potential of unlocking their own creativity, and also to help them realise that festivals like this were open and accessible to them. Summer Sounds Festival was held in 2024 at Coal Drops Yard in King’s Cross; many of the young people that we worked with on this project lived very close to this area but had never been in it before.
This felt like a perfect opportunity to use music as a way of opening up an area for young people and welcoming them into new spaces.
From the outset of the project, we knew that we wanted to build towards a 5-day summer school where young people could come together to create brand-new music. To recruit the right group of young people from across King’s Cross, however, it was clear that we would need to lay a strong groundwork of engagement with local schools and community groups.
Between 15 – 18 July, we visited 6 schools and community groups across Camden and Islington performing to over 600 young people. This tour was delivered following our ‘First Time Jazz’ model by a quartet of NYJO musicians and led by bandleader and Steam Down Collective vocalist Shantéh. Shantéh built a set around our NYJO musicians’ interests and experiences; young people in the audience were asked to pick a band member, who then shared their journey to learning an instrument and their love of music. In this way, the audience was able to get a real insight into the passion that our musicians have for their artform, all whilst exploring music from gospel to Brazilian rhythms presented through the lens of their stories.
“Effectively, we're going into these schools and we're sharing with young people something that we're really good at and that we really like. And that's it. You're just saying to the audience, ‘I really like this. I hope you like this too’. And I think the genuine joy on our faces when we’re doing this thing that we love, it should ignite that spark in them to go, ‘Oh, they really love that. So do I!”
Shantéh, First Time Jazz Bandleader
We are incredibly grateful to Shantéh for leading this First Time Jazz Tour for us in King’s Cross, and we learnt so much from her about how we can continue to develop our work in providing performance opportunities to young people that have never seen live jazz music before. Of the young people that attended these school performances, 71% of those surveyed said that this was their first experience of hearing live jazz.
After they had seen our musicians perform, we asked the young people in the audience to describe jazz music in one word; their answers included ‘crazy, amazing, beautiful, FUN, and unique’. For us at NYJO, jazz is all of these things as well as being, crucially, personal. Our musicians devote huge amounts of their time and energy into following this individual connection that they feel with the music and its history. To be able to take this intensely personal link that they hold with jazz as a genre, and translate this into something that can be communicated to young people who are experiencing jazz for the very first time, is a hugely exciting opportunity for us to explore.
Jazz can be extremely specialist and difficult – many of our musicians have devoted years to studying it and developing their skills – but at the essence of jazz is something deeply connective that we wanted to unlock for the young people on this project. How could they use jazz as a vehicle to explore their own creativity, give voice to their own ideas, and speak to their own emotions that the music inspires? For so many, jazz has been a tool of reflection, of protest, and of personal expression; we wanted to find out what would happen if we gave this music to a group of young people who had never created together before, and unpicked with them what they wanted to use it to say.
Creating together
Following this tour, we brought together a group of young people that we had met at these performances for a 5-day summer school. Many of them had never explored their own creativity in this way before – at the start of the project, we asked them to rate their confidence in their own creativity on a scale of 1 to 10. Their mean response was 4.67.
At the end of the project, we asked them this same question and their mean response was 7.71. But how did we get to see such a significant increase in their creative confidence? For us, the key was the time and energy that our project delivery team, led by Shantéh and participative arts practitioner Milli-Rose, gave to bringing patience and safety into the space:
“One of the aims that I have generally when I create with people is for them to find them. For them to find their identity in what they're doing and to really have that identity shining through.”
Shantéh, Summer School Lead Educator
Throughout their creative practice, the young people’s identity and creative expression was woven through everything and held at the core. Because the young people felt so heard and valued throughout the process, the writing that they produced over the 5 days and the words that they shared with us felt so beautifully personal. They spoke of their experiences of youth, London, faith, and difference; it’s a real insight into their hopes for the future and the dreams that they have for themselves.
“I’ve learnt that I can try to do other stuff and not just singing. All I need is to believe in myself.”
Summer School Participant
The bravest, the fearless
It is a total privilege to bring a group of young people together to make music for the first time, and for them to feel comfortable enough to explore their creativity with us. We never take the bravery that they bring into our spaces for granted, and we hope you can get a sense of them from some of these beautiful words that they produced during the project:
“My heaven is being lucky, lucky to be here, be present and presenting myself freely. See and seek heaven in all your days and everything you do.”
“It’s a leap of faith to figure out who I am for my future’s sake.”
“I knew who I wanted to be. The bravest, the fearless, the one that accepted me for me.”
For us, this is the power of first-access music-making. There is nothing more special than helping a young person to find the words to voice an emotion or experience that they may never have unlocked before. All young people have the right to access this joy, regardless of their background or experience, and of the structural inequities that continue to affect access to music education and opportunities. It is essential to us that we play our part in fostering new first-access opportunities and challenging these barriers ingrained in society that prevent young people from reaching their creative potential.
We were truly inspired by the excitement, brilliance, and creativity brought by the young people that we met through this project. We hope that, in turn, they too felt inspired by the power of their own voices. In their own very special words, they were ‘the bravest, the fearless’, and we all feel very lucky to have worked with them, and to continue to be able to provide new first-access opportunities across our programme.
To learn more about NYJO, visit https://nyjo.org.uk/. Find out more about the NYJO Learning programme and how you can get involved here or help support our work with young musicians by donating here.
Tagged as: ACCESSIBLE ARTS, ACCESSIBLE MUSIC LEARNING, JAZZ, JAZZ MUSIC, MUSIC EDUCATION, NATIONAL YOUTH JAZZ ORCHESTRA
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