Tomorrow’s Warriors x Decca announce career mentoring scheme

12 September 2023 - Press release

 

Tomorrow’s Warriors announced today it has partnered with Decca (Universal Music) to deliver an innovative Career Mentoring Scheme to 15 emerging Warrior musicians.

This is the second year of a partnership that has seen the award-winning talent development organisation, creative producer and charity collaborate with Decca on a year-long programme to deliver vital one-to-one mentoring support to its 18-25 year old musicians from diverse backgrounds, as part of its Emerging Artist Programme. Under the scheme, each Warrior musician is paired with a Decca member of staff across a variety of departments, such as A&R, Marketing, Commercial & Streaming, Catalogue/Product Management, Press & Promotions and Digital. The mentor and mentee then agree on the areas of development they will focus on, in order to help the emerging artist progress in their music career.

In the first year of the partnership Decca delivered mentoring to 13 Tomorrow’s Warriors artists. This year, Decca has increased their funding support, and 15 artists are receiving mentoring including Akin Soul, Allexa Nava, Anoushka Nanguay, Cara Crosby-Irons, Cassius Cobbson, Francisco Garcia de Paredes, Grifton Forbes-Amos, Harry Ling, Joseph Oti, Kianja Harvey-Elliott, Luke Bacchus, Maddy Coombs, Menelik Claffey, Nadav Schneerson and Sultan Stevenson.

Decca hosted a special event at its headquarters in Kings Cross on 11th September, to mark the second year of the partnership with Tomorrow’s Warriors, which was attended by TW mentees and Decca staff mentors.

Tomorrow’s Warriors has provided a crucial development platform for many of the artists now tearing up the international music scene – including this year’s Mercury Prize winners Ezra Collective. As well as providing mentoring, the Tomorrow’s Warriors Emerging Artist Programme delivers performance opportunities, training, traineeships, talks, masterclasses, and bursaries to support artists into professional careers, many securing paid, often high-profile, opportunities across a broad spectrum of the industry. Across 30 years, since inception, in 1991, Tomorrow’s Warriors has reached over 10,000 young people through its talent development programmes, providing each musician with between 1,000-5,000 hours of free jazz training and development.   

Janine Irons OBE, CEO, Tomorrow’s Warriors said “We are very pleased to continue our exciting partnership with Decca, now in its second year. Decca is one of the most important jazz labels in the world and we are pleased to collaborate with them once again to offer industry-leading mentoring to our Warrior musicians and add significant value to our Emerging Artist Programme. Tomorrow’s Warriors supports the grassroots talent pipeline into the music industry, and Ezra Collective’s epic Mercury Prize win is a testament to this. So it’s wonderful to connect our young artists to the expertise in Decca’s staff team and enrich their journey as professional musicians.”

Tom Lewis, Co-President, Decca Records said “We are delighted to renew this fantastic partnership with Tomorrow’s Warriors. Janine, Gary and the team are an inspiration to work with. Their understanding of the power of music in education and community; their ability to recognise, patiently nurture and encourage talent at the earliest possible opportunity; and their proven ability to change the lives and horizons of the musicians with whom they have worked – and all with kindness at the very heart of what they do. We have learnt so much from this scheme. It really is a reciprocal relationship, and we can’t wait to get going again.”