Introducing our 2024 London Jazz Festival theme: Human vs Machine
We will be taking to the stage this November as our London Jazz Festival project returns. We’re excited to have two groups taking part this autumn for our fifteenth festival.
This month our collectives from Bromley and Bexley will start their taster sessions and in the coming weeks they’ll be writing and creating their own original music that will be performed at the festival in November.
Our Jazz Festival collective has been recruited from three schools around Bromley and Bexley. They will start weekly sessions this week in which they’ll be writing and creating their own original music that will be performed at the festival in November.
Our theme for our festival work this year is Human vs Machine. For the next few weeks we’ll be considering how the advance of AI is affecting us all, inspired by suggestions from our music leaders who thought this would be a great topic for our groups to explore. In our songwriting sessions we’ll be considering issues such as:
The use of AI as a tool in songwriting/ creative practice in assisting human creativity - The limitations of AI in creative endeavours
AI as competition to musicians and human creativity
The impact of AI on our futures. Many of us are already using AI tools through education, work and socialising, so we’re looking forward to considering how we interact with these innovations in the years to come.
As our sessions progress, we’ll be sharing behind the scenes footage from our first workshops.
We’re also very excited to have GeeJay onboard as our guest artists this year. Each year our collectives work with music leaders to write and produce their own, original music to be performed at the Royal Festival Hall. Our guest artists are on-hand to support and inspire our young people, sharing guidance and experience from their time in the music industry.
Gee (vocalist and songwriter) and Jay (producer and multi instrumentalist) met in Harringay London when the pair were working as baristas in a music café. They quickly went from jamming on the café’s old piano to crafting their own distinctive style of music. Gee’s strong, soulful and emotionally-charged vocals fit perfectly on top of Jay’s vintage jazzy chords and groovy rhythms, whilst the saxophone adds a further element to the melodic mix. During lockdown, the pair left the capital city and headed to Bournemouth, where they now reside. With two EP releases under their belt, GeeJay have managed to amass over 12 million streams and have garnered widespread critical acclaim from the likes of The Guardian, Fearne Cotton (BBC Radio 2), BBC Radio 1, BBC 1Xtra, Jack Saunders, and CLASH to name but a few. We are huge GeeJay fans and our young people can’t wait to meet them, and speak to artists also performing at the festival.
How ChatGPT responded to the theme of ‘Human vs Machine’ 🎵 🤖 ⚡️
We’ve been part of the festival since 2009, marking 15 years of incredible live performances and original music from the young people that make up our LJF Collectives each year. We’re hugely grateful to our Music Leaders for their encouragement and guidance each year - we couldn’t do this without you!
See us perform our original music live: look out for information on our performance and warm-up shows, to be confirmed!