Music has a unique ability to bring people together, ignite creativity, and inspire personal growth. In this blog series by the Music Education Council, we spotlight organisations making a significant impact in the music education landscape. This week, we delve into the incredible journey of Kinetika Bloco, an organisation that has been a cornerstone for young people in South London to explore, create, and thrive through music.
From its grassroots beginning as a small drumming band in 2000 to becoming a vibrant hub for year-round music education and leadership, Kinetika Bloco has been a trailblazer in celebrating the cultural richness of the African diaspora. Their story is a testament to the transformative power of music, as they continue to empower young musicians, diversify music education, and build a legacy of community-driven artistry.
From CEO, Tamzyn French:
We draw our influences from the Caribbean, Brazil, Africa and New Orleans. Our achievements include: performances at Notting Hill Carnival, The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, London Jazz Festival; performing for Nelson Mandela who called us “enchanting”; representing the UK at Beijing Olympic Festival and leading Team GB in the 2012 Olympic Victory Parade; Collaborating with Mercury Prize Winners Ezra Collective at Glastonbury and The Royal Albert Hall; starring on BBC 1 Xtra and BBC Radio 3; recording our debut album Legacy and performing our own second-line in New Orleans and carnival in Cape Town.
Sadly Mat Fox passed away in 2014 but as CEO I have been running the organisation since then and we have been blessed to have had a great legacy from Mat that he developed a passionate team of inspirational leaders. We continue this leadership work with our Programme which trains 20 young leaders each year in general skills and music leadership. Our HR strategy is to always grow our own leaders and employ alumni and currently 75% of our leadership team – both in the office and freelance are former participants.
We work each year with around 1500 young people regularly through weekly sessions in school and outside of it and both our Junior and Senior Summer School this year were oversubscribed with 160 young people at each of them. We are seeing that young people are passionate about music making and progressing their skills and that they want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. We give our young people the opportunity to perform at local events but also on national and international platforms and this is something that encourages them to keep pursuing their instrument. It’s something that schools are probably not able to offer their students and so we find that more young people may continue with us, whilst they give up music in their school. This is obviously not what we want to see, but we are finding that fewer schools have the resources to deliver exciting music training or opportunities. Some of our best musicians don’t choose to do music GCSE or A-Level.
Whilst this is ok, as long as young people are doing music somewhere things are ok. But our concern is for those younger students who are not getting the chance to have a go in the first place and therefore may not access Kinetika Bloco or one of the many other amazing music organisations in this country. We need to make sure that we get into primary schools, or youth centres, or around the local community so that parents and their young children find out about us and can join.
Another area that we are trying to help with is the diversification of music education. All the music we do within Kinetika Bloco is non-western classical music. It has its roots in the African diaspora by way of the Caribbean, New Orleans or Brazil. Whilst some of these genres are covered in general music education, it is often only light touch and not always authentically. We are definitely not experts in this, but we have many creative musicians from different backgrounds and with links to the genre’s discussion.
So, for the last couple of years with Music Makes Sense, we have been developing some music education resources – Changing Key – to help address this issue. We have 5 schemes of work in Samba, Calypso, Afrobeat, Jazz and UK Jazz which are available. We want to make them as accessible as possible so that young people in school can really benefit from learning about all the amazing music that is out there. We will give one scheme for free to schools and then they can get others on a pay what you can format. We’d love to share these widely and welcome any feedback on them so that we can continue to improve or potentially develop new resources.
To find out more and get in touch please contact Tamzyn at tamzyn@kinetikabloco.co.uk
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