Thursdays at Ninety One Living Room are presented by Jazz Re:freshed. This Thursday, as part of EFG London Jazz Festival, we are delighted to welcome British-born composer and multi-instrumentalist of Nigerian and Jamaican descent, Roella Oloro to the Living Room stage.
Roella first moved to London in 2017 to study at Trinity Laban, and quickly got involved with London’s vibrant scene, performing at venues such as Ronnie’s Scott’s and Pizza Express. As a composer, she has written for a variety of different ensembles. One of her first pieces for big band, Cruisin, was played at the Royal Albert Hall in 2016.
In Summer 2018, she was offered a full scholarship to study at Berklee College of Music after attending the school’s 5- Week Performance Programme. Thanks to a rigorous fundraising campaign and much help from the music education network Tomorrow’s Warriors, she now attends the school. She recently won the International Society of Jazz Arrangers and Composers prize for Emerging Black Composers. In May 2022, she travelled to Austin, Texas to accept her award and perform with the 17-piece jazz orchestra that was provided.
Whilst at Berklee she has received tutelage from exceptional professors such as NEA Jazz masters Terri Lyne Carrington and Joanne Brackeen and Grammy-nominated saxophonist Tia Fuller. This past spring semester, she studied with Esperanza Spalding at Harvard as part of Spalding’s Black Improvisational Music and Dance class.
Over the course of the pandemic, Oloro was a BBC Young Musician 2020 semi-finalist, a Jazz South UK grant recipient, appeared on Decca Records’, Alone Together Jazz piano album, on British TV as part of Jazz 625, the British Jazz Explosion, and released her first single entitled Sacrificial Lamb.