Yorkshire Youth and Music is delighted to announce our new project with boys from the Roma community in Sheffield.

Beginning in November last year, and continuing into 2022, the project will culminate in a performance and celebration event planned towards Easter. Jess Armstrong and Adam Seymour are the Music Leaders, with Julien Francis and Louis Barclay assisting. We’re working in partnership with Sheffield Youth Service, and one of their team leaders, Shelly Burrell, with sessions taking place at Umix.

The boys are confident and enthusiastic about music and are keen to try lots of different instruments and activities. After the first few weeks of experimenting, they have settled on getting a short set of songs to performance standard, writing songs together, and creating backing music to rap over. There’s a strong focus on working together creatively as musicians, more than on developing individual skills.

We'll be sharing more about the project as 2022 progresses!

You can read about our leader Jess here: https://www.yym.org.uk/blog/jess-armstrong

And we’ve got some brilliant Roma resources (and where to source them) here on our site too: https://www.yym.org.uk/roma-resources

And finally... check out our latest playlist! This month's theme is inclusion and includes a brilliant mini documentary film on Roma musician, Django Reinhardt.