Who: Janine Irons MBE, FRSA, chief executive and co founder, along with her husband Gary Crosby, of Tomorrow’s Warriors, an innovative community of jazz musicians which offers musical education and support for talented players and composers from all walks of life.
The current buzz around the jazz music scene is down to Janine and Gary, who have nurtured and developed some of the UK’s most brilliant young jazz musicians since 1991. We caught up with Janine at Harvey Nichols, where some of Tomorrow’s Warriors musicians were creating festive jazzy vibes with the team from L’Orchestre Parfum and trombonist Nicolas Benedetti at a morning show. Every day should start with a jazz breakfast in our opinion.
Today I’m wearing Chance by Chanel. I love this fragrance because it feels really warm, at night it’s sensuous and in the day its fresh and lovely to wear, it’s a really lovely feminine perfume.
Because of its familiar warmth, it makes me feel calm. And it makes me feel good! I don’t really think that deeply about what perfume to wear, I wear this one every day and it’s absolutely all I need.
I’m very liberal with my application, I spray it all over and I use quite a lot.
I always wear perfume. I absolutely use it to help give me confidence for whatever I have to do, particularly if I’m going to a really important meeting. I find Chance a very empowering scent. I think it also helps with my status as a chief exec, it feels like a mature fragrance, for a grown up woman.
This Harvey Nichols jazz breakfast with L’Orchestre Parfum has been a really creative way to bring music and fragrance together, it’s really exciting what (founder) Pierre Guguen’s done in getting young people to work with more established musicians. This morning our musicians are playing with Nicolas Benedetti, who composed the music for Rose Trombone, one of the perfumes for L’Orchestre Parfum. Pierre said he wanted to work with a small music charity who make a big impact, so thats definitely us! We did a short rehearsal yesterday and already there’s a sense of collaboration and we’re already talking about future collaborations.
I started off as a classical pianist, I was also in a punk band when I was younger! But I love jazz, my parents always listened to it through out my childhood, so it was there really early for me.
I met my partner, Gary Crosby, at a jazz gig, I went to the event just to test my new camera, but I met Gary there, he plays the double base and he wanted to change the way the jazz world worked. He wanted more diversity, more people of colour and more women involved. So together we started Tomorrow’s Warriors, and over a generation – it’s been nearly 30 years now – it has quite literally changed the face of jazz in the UK.
People from more diverse backgrounds are becoming involved, particularly young people. At the Jazz FM Awards this year, 19 of the 39 people nominated for awards were Tomorrow’s Warriors alumni and they won 75% of the awards they were nominated for. It’s now a huge community.