Inspire Artist Conference Day

Nishla Smith

Supporting festival director Lucy Woolley to host the day, Nishla Smith will be guiding you through sessions, facilitating 1:1s and topping and tailing the sessions.

Nishla Smith is an artist/curator, influenced by the musical language of jazz and driven by storytelling across her diverse practice. Her debut album, ‘Friends With Monsters’ was released on Whirlwind Recordings to critical acclaim, with Downbeat USA saying “While Smith’s singing is an entrancing beauty of its own, the true trump cards are her lyrics and melodies.”

Nishla is a Peter Whittingham Jazz Award winner and an alumni of Serious’ Take Five. She played the titular bird in Atri Banerjee’s acclaimed production of ‘Kes’, at Bolton Octagon and Theatre By The Lake in Spring 2022, for which she won a UK Theatre Award for ‘Best Supporting Performer’, and has just finished a run as ‘The Jazz Singer’, a role she originated in Emma Baggott’s Spring 2024 adaptation of ‘A Taste of Honey’ at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester.

She is especially interested in unravelling the divisions of genre and making work that sits at the intersection of music, visual art, dance and spoken word. Collaboration and curation is a distinctive strand of her practice. She programmes the Howard Assembly Room in Leeds, putting together a diverse cultural offering, across classical, jazz, folk and South Asian music, spoken word, and film. As part of her role at the HAR, she recently devised and directed a staged adaptation of Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye for 4-handed piano, contemporary dancers and storyteller.

Mica Sefia

Mica Sefia is a 23 year old singer / singer writer based in London originally from Liverpool.

She is a Leeds Conservatoire alumni student now working for Black Lives in Music as their Project manager after 3 years of ambassador work with them.

Mica uses her experience as a Black woman in the industry to educate others and create safe spaces and opportunities for those who may not always be considered.

Mark Kavuma

Hosting our artist roundtables are artists Mark Kavuma and Charlotte Keefe.

Over the last decade composer, trumpeter, bandleader, and educator Mark Kavuma has established a reputation as an influential figure, equally at home performing at the cutting edge of the vibrant London nu-jazz scene as he is teaching and mentoring emergent talent in the community and in educational establishments. He has released six albums as leader featuring his original compositions: Kavuma (2018, Ubuntu), voted among the best albums of the year by DownBeat magazine, The Banger Factory (2019, Ubuntu) and in 2021, he set up a record label Banger Factory Records and released Arashi No Ato (2021) Back-to-Back (2022, debut piano record), The Banger Factory – Warriors (2022) and Erskine & Kavuma – Ultrasound (2023).

His aspiration for the Banger Factory (a collective curated by Mark and consisting of some of the brightest lights from the current crop of UK jazz musicians) and Banger Factory Records is that they will provide a platform for emergent artists that empowers them to hone and finesse their craft and to innovate, flourish and realise their full artistic potential, ultimately shaping the future of music beyond genres, genders, and borders.

Charlotte Keefe

Musician, trumpeter and flugelhorn player Charlotte Keeffe wears her love for freely improvising, free jazz and abstract music-making on her (brightly coloured) sleeve. Whether performing regularly as a soloist (Sound Brush), or leading a variety of different ensembles, including her RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW Quartet, with Ashley John Long on double bass, Ben Handysides on drums and Moss Freed on guitar, she meticulously carves out spaces for the free movement of ideas and individual expression.
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Inspired by abstract painters, Keeffe refers to her instruments as ‘Sound Brushes’.

Harnessing the power of art for social change is a crucial part of Keeffe’s musical identity: she has served as Assistant Musical Director of the London Gay Big Band, champions gender and diversity equality, as part of the Parliamentary award-winning Women in Jazz Media team, and played in Marin Alsop’s Taki Concordia Orchestra at the World Economic Forum 2019, in front of world leaders and celebrities including Sir David Attenborough.