The twitter post above attracted the attention of Define Your Voice, an organization run by a group of graduates and undergraduates with sole purpose of promoting personal and community development among young Africans. After coming across different stories of youths from across the continent and the need to bring a positive impact to their communities in big and small ways alike the organization has been founded to offer a platform of sharing stories of young Africans taking both big and little strides in developing themselves and their communities.
Back to Jay Extra’s challenges, from our interview with him, he shared that he started from the scratch and on his journey he has managed to work on a song with It’s thafu bwana star, Henry Czar, but the producer didn’t release it due to other challenges.
It takes Jay Extra 1 to 2 months just to release a single song as it is hard for him to pay a producer. He once reached the extent of selling his only musical instrument, a guitar, just to pay for a studio session. This is so because he doesn’t receive support from his parents as they see no profit in music as he is only making losses. Albeit this lack of support, Jay continues to pursue his music career as it gives him happiness.
Jay Extra was asked to give his advice to fellow upcoming artists and this is what he had to say;
“It’s not all established musicians that will help us. l exprienced it myself the time an established artist came to Dzaleka. He had a function and l was doing the back up vocals and he liked the back up vocals and l managed to record [with him]. But when the song was released, my back up vocals were removed and it was painful because l thought it was my time to get on the spotlight. So let’s work to get there.”