Yamaha Education News

Yamaha Jazz Experience winner gets Ronnie Scott's gig

Pictured here: Tomorrow's Warriors Biggish Band, who play their Yamaha Jazz Experience winner's gig at Ronnie Scott's on 20 November 2010

The Tomorrow's Warriors Biggish Band, the under-19 category winners of the Yamaha Jazz Experience competition whose finals were held at Cheltenham Jazz Festival in May 2010, are to play the early show at London's Ronnie Scott's jazz club at 7:15pm on Saturday 20 November, as part of the band's prize for the competition, in addition to vouchers for £3,000 worth of Yamaha equipment for Tomorrow's Warriors (TW).

On Friday 24 September the Biggish Band performed in The Front Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London's South Bank Centre to celebrate the band's success in the Yamaha competition. The folks at TW are still on a much deserved high, since the Biggish Band was selected by the Yamaha Jazz Experience Competition's jazz VIP judges as category winners in an event which had produced a very high standard of playing all round. The runners up in the under-19 category were from the London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama Junior Department, and Manchester's Chetham's School of Music, both of which also gave wonderful performances, applauded enthusiastically by the Cheltenham audience and acclaimed by the competition's judges, Liane Carroll, Peter Ind, Julian Joseph, Richard Michael, Andrea Vicari and Jazz FM presenter Helen Mayhew.

TW is an inspiring charity which, for two decades, has worked with talented as well as 'at risk' young people to coach and train them in jazz performance. TW's track record is undeniable, having helped many jazz notables along the way. In TW professionally established TW alumni like Soweto Kinch, Denys Baptise and Abram Wilson, for example rub shoulders with and menotr top emerging new young musicians, like Binker Golding and Peter Edwards, for example.

Peter Edwards, who has been with TW for about six years told us: "I started out as a young Warrior, playing in jam sessions with a couple of other guys in a small band at Spice of Life. I finished off the artist development programme and went on to work with Abram Wilson's Quartet and NuTroop. Since then we've put together the Tomorrow's Warriors Jazz Orchestra which I'm now writing for and MD-ing. So I've been through the whole process with Tomorrow's Warriors."

Musicians from the TW stable are then supported through the TW commercial arm, Dune Music, an established jazz record label, promotion and management company.

The rhythm section of the Tomorrow's Warriors Biggish Band, led by trumpeter and educator Abram Wilson teamed up with Yamaha in September to run an improvisation workshop for the Incorporated Society of Musicians' teacher members at their 'Finding Creativity' conference at King's Place, London in September. Tomorrow's Warriors' CEO, the acclaimed jazz double bassist Gary Crosby OBE also attended and was rightly very proud of the Biggish Band's achievements. Yamaha's UK music education manager, Bill C Martin, said: "At Yamaha we recognise that TW achieves consistently astonishing results with young people and we are delighted their Biggish Band was selected as the under-19 winners of our competition. We are also pleased that we have been able to collaborate on the ISM event and hope this will be the start of a long, successful and high-impact working relationship between our two organisations, which so clearly share a passion for inspiring young people in jazz."

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(Posted: October 2010)