‘Where do kids get their musical instruments from if mum and dad can’t afford it?’

At just 21, pianist and composer Kyle Osborne has played iconic venues like Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club and been commissioned by the Royal Albert Hall.

He recently graduated from the Trinity Laban conservatoire of music and dance – but just as much as his formal education, it’s time spent at charity Tomorrow’s Warriors he credits for his success. 

“Now having finished at a conservatoire, I can see that I was essentially getting a £9,000 education for free from the age of 14,” he says. “The standard was so impeccably high.”

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Tomorrow’s Warriors provides training, performance opportunities and talent development for aspiring jazz musicians from underrepresented backgrounds. It started, says co-founder Janine Irons OBE, simply because “We live in London – it’s a multicultural city, but when we looked at who was playing this music, we couldn’t see ourselves represented.” 

What began in 1991 as a jam session for young black musicians has since become a crucial pathway to the industry for alumni that includes Brit and Mercury Prize-winning Ezra Collective.

Osborne grew up in a creative household, playing music from a young age. But finding Tomorrow’s Warriors was still “a game changer”, he says, “both in terms of how seriously I took myself and the trajectory of my career, and in how my passion for music and education has formed me as a human being.

“The cultural knowledge, the industry understanding, knowing how to bring somebody into this rich 100-year tradition – for a 14-year-old child, introducing them to something bigger than themselves and saying, ‘you have a place here’ is so important,” he says. 

“My curiosity and ambition were never met with scepticism or worries about resources; there was an expectation that every child had the ability to take their music as far as they were willing to take it.”

Today, alongside writing and performing, Osborne has become an educator with the charity, running a beginners’ Saturday class for teenagers. 

Read more:

• Funding cuts in music education will destroy our cultural landscape
• Ezra Collective star Ife Ogunjobi: ‘People pay too much attention to the noise around them’
• Music in schools delivers an essential pathway out of poverty – here’s how

Tomorrow’s Warriors runs on an ethos of ‘each one teach one’, Irons emphasises: “Everything we do, we do for free, so there’s an understanding that as you succeed and go forward, you help the people coming up behind you – you keep lifting everybody up.”

Things have changed since 1991, says Irons; the industry is gradually becoming less “pale, male and stale”, and there are more opportunities than there once were. But successive funding cuts risk reducing access again. 

“If kids can’t access music in schools, where are they going to access it? Where do they get their instruments from if mum and dad can’t afford it? Those who can access all that are generally the white middle classes,” Irons points out.

“We need to keep our foot on the pedal and keep plugging gaps where we see them. The moment you take away that requirement to be equitable, to be fair, to do things based on merit, it all falls away really quickly. I think we have one generation more of musicians who understand that, but it’s going to take a few more generations before it becomes a natural part of our DNA.”

Thirty-five years on from its humble beginnings, Tomorrow’s Warriors now has a permanent space in the Southbank Centre, multiple Mercury Prize-winners among its alumni, and over 20,000 young people who have participated in its programmes. It also produces over 200 performances each year to more than 30,000 audience members. But that success brings its own challenges. 

“Our alumni are doing incredibly well; they’re going all round the world, making lots of money and being brilliant,” Irons says. “But the risk is that people see Tomorrow’s Warriors everywhere and think we’re completely safe and secure. Our policy will always be that we don’t take anything – it’s all about giving, it’s all free. So we still need people to keep supporting us if they want to see that continue.”

For Osborne, the ultimate aspiration is to take his own music “as far as possible.” But, he says, thanks to Tomorrow’s Warriors he is also committed to advocacy to encourage a new generation into jazz. 

“I want to get out there and sing their praises – to say, I’ve been through this and it really works, and it will keep working as long as you keep supporting it,” he says.

“The best sorts of organisations are those that can promise children not just a sustainable career but a sustainable community and a sense of purpose. The people I’ve met through Warriors and through my musical journey, I will be playing with for the rest of my life.”

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