Leonard Cheshire Disability Head To Africa To Help Find Future Disabled Chart Toppers
This press release was circulated on Friday by Leonard Cheshire Disability.
A team of top UK music producers and technicians, who have worked with artists from Sting to Adele, are heading to Zambia next week to help young people with disabilities create and produce their own music.
The internationally renowned team, led by Leonard Cheshire Disability Music Adviser Robin Millar CBE(Sting, Sade), will give exceptional young people an intensive week-long studio training seminar in Lusaka, Zambia. The results will be released globally via Itunes and Amazon, thanks to a partnership with Believe Digital’s Zimbalam label, which will give students industry nous in selling and marketing their music.
The eight students are ‘exceptionally musically talented’ young people with disabilities, who have been picked from Leonard Cheshire Disability’s Young Voices campaigning project, that stretches across thirteen African countries. Young Voices brings young disabled people together and supports them to advocate for their rights, raise the profile of disability issues and influence their governments. It has previously held pan-national filmmaking seminars to train young people to make films about their campaigns.
The music training project has been launched in response to the Young Voices members’ own desire to express themselves and their campaigning messages through music. Many Young Voices groups have already recorded songs and music videos and, if this pilot music project is successful, it will be rolled out across Africa and Asia. The seminar will run from 11–17 December.
Robin Millar, who is blind, says: “The first trip starts this December. In Lusaka we will work with young people from across Africa. I’m thrilled that Adele’s programmer/engineer Ian Dowling and London College of Music Masters student Miguel de Campos have volunteered to come out with me to do the training.”
John Conteh, a Young Voices member from Sierra Leone who has recorded an album and performed in concerts with the group, said: “Since joining Young Voices, I have had hope and freedom after total neglect. Young Voices has sent me to a studio, which I had never expected to visit. At the seminar I hope to give everyone a good image of Sierra Leone Young Voices, and I long to share the experience I will gain from the workshop with the Sierra Leone group when I return. I hope to become an international superstar for Sierra Leone Young Voices.”
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