The release of The Lion King: The Gift, saw UMPG artists including Burna Boy, Michael Uzowuru and Tierra Whack collaborate with Beyoncé for a soundtrack album that celebrates African music and artists, supported by UMPG A&Rs Sureeta Nayyar and James Supreme. Read an extract below, and click through to read the full article on Rolling Stone. 

Read the full article on Rolling Stone

Word of The Gift started to spread in the music industry at the end of spring. “Mid-may we started hearing rumblings of Beyoncé working on a Lion King project,” says James Supreme, an A&R at Universal Music Publishing Group. “One of our colleagues, Ari Gelaw, has a great relationship with Beyoncé‘s A&R, Mariel Gomerez. We reached out, and Mariel opened her arms.” 

Supreme put Gomerez in touch with a young writer-producer named Michael Uzowuru, a first-generation Nigerian American whose credit list includes Frank Ocean’s Blonde and Jorja Smith’s Lost & Found. “There was a very specific vision [on The Gift], and Michael really knows how to execute a vision,” Supreme says. That vision, according to Salatiel, was to make the album “very African.” “[Beyoncé] insisted on having the African spirit on it,” Salatiel adds.

Sureeta Nayyar — who does international A&R for UMPG and has a keen ear for Nigerian acts — also entered into conversations with Beyoncé‘s team. “As a company, we have a really strong international presence, with Burna Boy [who is signed to UMPG] being the most significant African artist right now,” Nayyar says. “We were jumping on a moving train,” she continues, but Burna Boy ended up being one of the few artists other than Beyoncé to get a solo showcase on The Gift.