Inside Orii Jam, the London-based jam session putting Black and queer creatives at the forefront

To celebrate some of the successful shortlisted entrants into a new UK-based music initiative fund Studio Monkey Shoulder - backed by Monkey Shoulder, Gilles Peterson, and Worldwide FM - we sat down with the team behind Orii Jam, London’s inclusive jam session driving a new creative community in Hackney Wick.

Without a single pause in its schedule, Orii Jam has taken place consistently every Monday evening at Colour Factory, a multipurpose venue in Hackney Wick where budding musicians and the likes come together to hang out, jam, and foster a new kind of creative environment. Known as Orii East (or ‘Monday Mass’, as the team call it), the collective’s regular sessions make up just a small part of a sprawling project, now also spreading its wings into South London with similar sessions at listening bar-turned-restaurant JUMBI on Tuesdays, hosting Orii club nights outside of London, and a whole myriad of other projects in the works.

Orii Jam is described by the team as a “spiritual, collective and healing experience for so many”, a place to nurture new talent and bring the spontaneity of jamming into a safe environment where Black and queer creatives are at the forefront. “London can be an intimidating and ego-filled place at times, particularly within the creative scenes,” Orii Jam tell Mixmag. “We do our best to offer an alternative to this.”

We chatted with the team behind the London-based jam collective and discussed the importance of growing a music community from the ground up, creative talent in London, and what the future holds for Orii Jam. Check it out below, and listen to a playlist giving a look inside the Orii Jam community.

How did Orii Jam come to fruition?

Orii was founded by artist Neue Grafik, aka Fred N’Thepe, who, as a working musician during COVID, felt a sense of disconnect with his community and the musicians within London. He launched Orii Community as a remedy for this, hosting weekly jam sessions for London musicians to come together, reconnect and jam.

Orii Jam has run every Monday without fail since its origin in May 2021 at Colour Factory, functioning as a space for musicians of all abilities to come and share in Orii, the Yoruba reflective spark of collective consciousness, our accumulative shared soul. It is believed that when you obtain alignment with Orii, you inhabit your true, divine self. And so, through our weekly jam sessions, we aim to provide safe creative spaces for creatives to perform, develop and celebrate, raising our collective vibration and connecting to our shared soul, Orii.

Who are the main members driving the project forward?

Fred N’Thepe is the founder of Orii Community, acting as the CEO and creative visionary for the project. Charlie Fenemer is the Executive Producer who has worked closely with the founder since the beginning. We joke that Fred is the pessimist and Charlie is the optimist - the ultimate duo to ensure the longevity of the project. As a small team, we work passionately to ensure that Orii stays alive - given the current climate - and continues to evolve and adapt to the needs of the community. Orii is a space for our community - a community of young, emerging musicians across London and the UK jazz scene. Catherine Pockson and Elvis Persaud continue to support our project from afar, supplying us with invaluable advice and connections within the industry. Additionally, we’ve recently taken on two amazing new team members, Dilara Yaka, who heads up our TikTok, and Nia Moore, who has joined as an Event Producer.

What’s the ethos behind Orii Jam? What kind of environment are you trying to foster?

Orii’s entire ethos is centred on the benefits of creative diversity, in all forms. Whether that comes from unexpected collisions of genre or art form at the jams, or from creating a supportive, positive atmosphere for people from underrepresented backgrounds to express themselves. We lead with love: giving love to, and welcoming love from all in attendance. London can be an intimidating and ego-filled place at times, particularly within the creative scenes, and we do our best to offer an alternative to this. We welcome creative talent of all abilities, whether you’re Thundercat or it’s your first time singing on a stage - we aim to be wholly inclusive of all forms of creativity and all types of creatives.

Orii acts as a hub, a home, for so many creatives across London. Through our weekly jam sessions, we’ve been able to build a community of over 100 young rappers, instrumentalists, vocalists, beatboxers, DJs, producers, promoters, graphic designers and videographers who are mainly POC and LGBTQ+, creating and improvising nu-jazz, neo-soul, hip hop and R&B.

Crucially, Orii is a Black-led organisation hosted in Black-owned venues: Colour Factory and JUMBI. We know this is rare within the music industry, and so we continue to prioritise working with venues, festivals and promoters who reflect our community, share our values and will provide a safe space for us to do what we do.

Hackney Wick is a real hotspot for creatives - how does that location inform your project?

Orii Community began, grew and continues to grow in Hackney Wick - this is where we built our community and this will forever be our home. There is such a strong creative community in Hackney Wick - grassroots venues, organisations, and creatives all have a home here. With venues such as Colour Factory, Grow, and All My Friends firmly focused on providing spaces for communities to connect, perform and exist, Hackney Wick is an essential home for grassroots.

With the ongoing development in the area, however, we hope that it will continue to be so. As new builds arise and rent prices increase, such is the story across London, we hope to be able to continue to have a home within Hackney Wick in the future.

How is community tied into your project, and what does it mean to you?

Community is our project. Without our community, there would be no Orii.

We exist for our community, evolve as their needs change, and continue to support the grassroots music scene within London in whatever small or large ways we can. We are working to build Orii from a grassroots community jam into a resilient, sustainable organisation and label supporting young POC and LGBTQ+ creatives, continuing to meet our community of artists exactly where they’re at. Whether they’re just starting off on their journey, or they’re about to perform their first headline show, we want to build the infrastructure within Orii to support artists at any and all moments throughout their careers, continuing to be a creative home for artists of all abilities.

What impact has Orii Jam had on the local music community in London?

We hope that Orii Jam has been a positive force within the local music community, driving collaboration, support and togetherness. We’ve seen artists such as Sunshine The Afrooist, NuAloe, Mar!k, Nayana AB, and Yumé Net develop over the years, from releasing killer tracks to producing debut albums, and playing at Cross The Tracks. We’ve seen collectives like Da Community and bands such as Oreglo, Xambi, and Abeng, who met and formed through Orii Jam, headlining shows. We know that Orii Jam has inspired many musicians from our weekly jams to start their own jam sessions - Mezzo’s Corner (Mezzo), Donut Jam (Charley Flynn), Kolakale Kollective (Asaph Kolakale), and The Five Points Project.

We hope for Orii to continue to be a space for artists to connect to like-minded creatives, and build their own projects outside of the jam space. We launched a new series around a year ago called Orii Takeover to do exactly this, inviting peers, collectives, bands, and communities within the local scene and beyond to come and take over Orii Jam. This allows us to utilise our platform to continue pushing the culture, spotlighting grassroots talent and collaborating within the scene, hosting names such as Colectiva, Da Community and Peng Femme.

Can you tell us about some of the offshoot projects you’ve created alongside your regular jam sessions?

We’ve launched several offshoot projects since our conception, including Orii Cypher, Orii Club, and Orii Presents, which we recently debuted at The Southbank Centre with round two set for October 4, 2024.

Orii is as multifaceted as the artists we welcome week after week at our jam sessions, and so we feel called to give a face to the DJs within our community, to the rappers, to the videographers, etc. We are consistently working on new concepts, new ideas and new projects in order to spotlight the array of talent we have surrounding us.

Our latest concept is Orii Club, which we launched in Paris last year at Djoon, welcoming Shy One, Wakanda and Neue Grafik. Our recent collaboration with Keep Hush invited our favourite London DJs for a day party at The Fox and Firkin - you can watch the full live stream back on Keep Hush’s Youtube. We’ll also be bringing Orii Club to We Out Here this year with Da Metal Messiah, supported by Monkey Shoulder.

We are also working on an album… more to come on that soon.

Essentially, we are working steadily but surely in building an outlet for all creatives to have a space within Orii Community. Stay with us.

How important is Orii Jam for nurturing new talent and platforming emerging artists?

This is the core mission of our organisation - all of the artists we know and love came from the grassroots - and in order to continue pushing culture we have to nurture new talent at the source. In hosting bi-weekly jam sessions, we hope to continue to provide a space for new talent to develop; for artists to figure out who they are musically and what they have to say; for vocalists to connect with producers; for sound engineers to train their ear; for photographers to hone their skills, etc.

We will continue to platform emerging artists through projects such as Orii Presents, showcasing emerging talent and providing them with the opportunity to perform within local institutions, through our performances at festivals, inviting artists to play at the likes of GALA and We Out Here, and our newest concept Orii Iyika, which will allow artists to tell their stories and perform their first headline show.

Can you tell us about some of your favourite memories or rewarding moments at Orii Jam over the years?

One of our favourite memories was Orii Jam at We Out Here - we held a 2.5 hour jam session on the Saturday and saw every young musician from the festival coming through to perform! There was a queue round the back of the stage and musicians lined up with their instruments ready to jump on stage and jam. It was a beautiful moment for us all, and really opened our eyes to the scene beyond London, encouraging us to try and bring Orii Jam to other cities across the UK.

A hugely rewarding moment for us was performing at The Southbank Centre, showcasing the likes of Benji Appiah, Doom Cannon, Zamar Eden, Lizzie Berchie, Blue Lab Beats and so many more incredible artists. That’s when we realised how far we’d come as a community and it hit hard.

Finally, our birthday celebrations are always memorable, our first year celebration at fabric hosted by Rhythm Section, and our recent third year celebration at The Jazz Cafe. It always feels special to celebrate another year of Orii surrounded by so many incredibly kind, loving and talented people. We feel truly grateful for the community we’ve all built together.

Where do you see your project in 5 years?

In 5 years?! We hope for a lot… we’re ambitious! Number one, we hope for Orii to still be jamming every week. Our jam sessions are at the heart of what we do, and we hope Orii will always be an accessible space for all musicians in our scene.

We’d like to be a fully-fledged label, developing, producing and releasing artists, instrumentalists, producers and bands within our community. In building Orii from a grassroots jam into a label supporting POC and LGBTQ+ creatives, we hope through our continued development, Orii will become a sustainable organisation with the capacity to continue to support these young creatives with performance opportunities and work in the future. Our aim is to become a launchpad for their careers, and continue to act as a home for young creatives in London and across the UK.

We hope to have released a couple of albums, have a few national and international tours under our belt, and continue bringing established and emerging artists together in different spaces.

So yeah, nothing major, just your usual 5 year plan, right?

Find out more about Studio Monkey Shoulder here, and listen to Orii Jam's playlist below.