Camilla George

Biography

Camilla George was born in 1988 in Eket, Nigeria, the only child of a British-Nigerian mother, an occupational psychologist, and a Grenadian father, a tailor who worked on Savile Row. When she was about three years old, the family relocated to England. Growing up, she listened to a wide range of music from her parents' record collection, including highlife, Afrobeat, and jazz by musicians such as Fela Kuti, Jackie McLean, and Charlie Parker. She began to gravitate towards jazz through regular visits with her mother to the Ealing Jazz Festival and her father's huge vinyl collection, which included Sidney Bechet, Stanley Turrentine, and Sonny Stitt. The first album she bought herself was 1957's Sonny Side Up, featuring Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt, and Sonny Rollins.

George began playing the saxophone at age 11 while a pupil at Bishop Ramsey School in Ruislip, after winning a competition that offered free music tuition and an instrument. Not long afterwards, she met Gary Crosby and Janine Irons, founders of Tomorrow's Warriors, after her mother took her to a Jazz Jamaica performance at Harrow Arts Centre. Working with Tomorrow's Warriors since 2004, she joined Crosby's Jazz Jamaica in 2009, and the group was nominated in 2013 for a MOBO Award for Jazz Performance. In 2014, she joined the all-female group Venus Warriors, put together by Courtney Pine, and also formed her own group, the CGQ (Camilla George Quartet). She attended Trinity College of Music, studying with Jean Toussaint, Julian Siegel, and Martin Speake, winning the Archer Scholarship for outstanding performance in 2011, and earning a master's degree in Jazz Performance in 2012.