It was a wonderful experience to play jazz for KS2 of Little Reddings Primary School since educating young people about jazz culture is extremely important and still has many influences on different styles of music. I felt that one piece I performed called ‘Take Five’ was a perfect piece to play as not only is it one of my favourites, it also shows the increasing complexity of jazz music. Despite the piece being decades old and written in the mid 1900’s, it still impacts the majority of musical elements, such as using irregular metre.

From ragtime, to cool jazz, to bebop, ideas of jazz drastically evolved during the 20th century (due to artists like Scott Joplin, Thelonious Monk, etc.) and more people should know about it. I hope that I’ll be able to encourage more people to listen to jazz as it’s a very interesting genre of music with lots of variety and a range of vibes.

by Anton Brown, 11Oak