Last weekend, I went up to London’s Southbank Centre for the launch of El Roi, the second album by jazz pianist Sultan Stevenson. Sultan is a musician I came across by chance at a music festival a few years back and have seen him several times since, most recently at Turner Sims in Southampton last autumn. El Roi is the best album I’ve heard this year and a lovely orange colour if you buy the vinyl.
The album launch was one of those warm occasions, with a lot of family, friends and love in the room. The first half of the show was an interview discussion about the album, with Sultan chatting alongside the artist who painted the cover, a film director and photographer who were also involved in the project. It was striking how young the panel was – everyone was in their early twenties, yet clear-eyed and passionate about their artistic vision.
Sultan described how having the launch at the Southbank Centre felt like coming full circle. As a teenager, he would travel there at weekends to take part in Tomorrow’s Warriors. Tomorrow’s Warriors was a project first set up in the early 1990s with the aim of championing diversity and inclusion in jazz, offering young people opportunities they might not otherwise have.
The influence this scheme has had on jazz music in the UK is hard to underestimate. As well as Sultan, other artists to have come through the project include Nubya Garcia, Moses Boyd, Camilla George and Ezra Collective, winner of Best British Group at this year’s Brit Awards.
Giving young people the chance to explore and discover the arts is important in so many ways. Here in Salisbury, schemes like Take Part and Stage 65 do sterling work in creating such opportunities. It is easy to see such projects as a bit of a luxury: with belt tightening and further government cuts in the offing, these can be the sort of projects that find their funding reduced and end up being scaled back.
Yet the value the arts brings to the UK is huge: in 2022, the creative industries contributed £126 billion of Gross Value Added to the UK economy. The arts bring plenty of other benefits, of course, but from a financial viewpoint, that investment in encouraging the young to explore their creativity is always money well spent.