Between free jazz, soul, and pop, the English musician traces an elusive trajectory where the influences of Madlib and Miles Davis collide.
The first time we came across Emma-Jean Thackray and Yellow, her debut album released in 2021, we weren’t quite sure what we were listening to, nor how to approach it. Were the fourteen tracks sprouting from a tension-filled, cosmic free jazz, in the wake of a renewal championed by a young English scene in recent years? Did they venture toward post–neo-soul territories marked, for example, by Sault? Or, driven by a Rhodes piano, modular synthesizers and a sousaphone (a tuba with a very distinctive sound), did they tilt toward the immense freedom of Afro-futurism and Sun Ra?
There was a bit of all that, and much more, in this ultra-fluid way of navigating between genres, as the tangible proof of the intention she stated in Yellow: “trying to simulate a life-changing psychedelic experience.”
Experimenting and composing as a self-taught artist
Born in 1989 in Leeds, nurtured by the Santana records that her grandfather adored, Emma-Jean Thackray held a deeply personal conviction early on that her destiny was to become an artist. A student deemed difficult by her teachers, her peers, and even her parents, due to an autism paired with undiagnosed ADHD, she received exceptional permission to teach herself music. She spent hours locked away alone, experimenting and composing as a self-taught approach, the sole remedy to her struggle to concentrate or to adapt to school rules. Her neurodivergence, though a source of difficulty, becomes a creative engine. “Being on stage is my refuge. It’s where my brain works perfectly, where it calms down. I think of nothing else but the music, everything becomes pure,” she confided to NBHAP. “As soon as I leave the stage, I become anxious, overwhelmed by sensory overload.”
Trained as a trumpeter, discovering Miles Davis or Alice Coltrane in the clearance bins of HMV (the counterpart, in proportion, to the old Fnac), she became, as a teenager, the lead trumpeter of the local marching band, a tradition firmly rooted in northern England (one recalls Jeremy Deller’s Acid Brass project). Alongside this, she developed her talents as a multi-instrumentalist, playing everything on her records, and she grew equally passionate about production and mixing. “I need to have total control. The only person capable of translating what’s in my head into tangible sound is me,” she explained in an interview with MusicTech. “Only I can say what I want to say, and how I want to say it. And I think I’ve achieved that with Yellow. In it you see my side as performer, producer, conductor, soloist, sound engineer, singer, orchestral arranger. It’s the most complete and mature presentation of myself I can offer today.”
An album marked by grief
A big band on its own is the wink she gives by embodying six members of an imaginary group in the video for Wanna Die, the lead single from Weirdo, her second album, released last year on Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood label. An album colored by mourning, the loss of her twelve-year partner in 2023, where the musician reclaims the insult of “weird” that had been thrown at her in childhood and opens her universe wide toward pop, citing Parliament as well as Madlib, Herbie Hancock as well as Kurt Cobain, Flying Lotus as well as Brian Wilson.
“My music isn’t jazz in the traditional sense, even if its foundations are rooted there,” she told NBHAP. “There’s soul, there’s grunge, there’s pop, there’s hip-hop. The heart remains a jazz harmony, but always with groove, balancing between things that are completely out there and a clear melodic clarity.” Jonglage virtuose entre les genres et les inspirations, Weirdo extends the singular path of Emma-Jean Thackray, a universe in constant expansion that evokes trailblazing minds like Erykah Badu, Meshell Ndegeocello, or Janelle Monáe. A record she summarizes as “the meeting of Kurt Cobain, Steely Dan and Radiohead in a cabin deep in the woods, listening to Herbie Hancock and Kate Bush”. But more than a confirmation, a revelation. That of a prodigy who has turned her fragilities into a strength, music into a safe place, and her talent, in perpetual question, into a matter of survival.
Weirdo (Brownswood Recordings). On tour on May 17 at Grandes Locos as part of the Nuits Sonores festival.
