BOLD AS BRASS
EMMA-JEAN THACKRAY TELLS SHARON O’CONNELL HOW SHE WANTS TO MOVE MINDS AS WELL AS BODIES
EMMA-JEAN THACKRAY admits she has no clue what she’ll be doing onstage at London’s new arts and cultural centre, Woolwich Works, next Thursday night – and neither do the musicians she’s playing with.
On paper, that might sound a) reckless and b) like a recipe for disaster, but as a multiinstrumentalist trained in jazz (she’s completed two degrees), Emma-Jean enjoys the challenge of a wholly improvised set. She’ll be playing trumpet, alongside keyboardist Ashley Henry, bass player and vocalist Isobella Burnham, drummer Kwake Bass and Saili Katebe, a performance poet who sometimes goes by the name The Blissful Nomad.
Emma-Jean admits they’re not a bunch of complete strangers: ‘We all know each other from being around south London and have heard each other play, so we know what to expect in some ways. I’ve played a little bit with Kwake and some with Ashley but that’s the wonderful thing about what we do – we can turn up and make some magic with people we’ve not rehearsed with. I’m really looking forward to it.’
If anyone was born to do it, to quote Craig David, Emma-Jean was. She grew up in a small town near Leeds and started on her musical journey with the cornet. ‘My friend played one and it was shiny and loud, was the instant thing,’ she says of its appeal. By the age of 13 she was playing in brass bands but then had something of an epiphany, which set her on her current path.
‘I was starting to add the trumpet into what I was doing,’ she explains, ‘but Miles Davis is why I started playing jazz, for sure. That was the moment when I knew it was something I wanted to try and learn. I accidentally downloaded the wrong version of something and came upon Miles Davis by chance, so it was one of those serendipitous moments that changed my life.’
The track that was the 14-year-old Emma-Jean’s lightbulb moment was Concierto de Aranjuez, from Sketches Of Spain, the album Miles Davis made with Gil Evans in 1960. Of its impact, she says: ‘I was really taken by the orchestration as well as Miles Davis’s playing. I had an immediate connection to his tone and the way that he’d phrase something, which was different from what I already knew about the piece. I really liked classical music and had been playing in orchestras and brass bands; I already knew the world of large ensembles but this was something I’d never heard before. Miles Davis flips the script with Gil Evans and makes things his own – that was part of what drew me in, as well. Things are quite odd and weird and magical.’
Fast-forward 18 years and Emma-Jean is now a very bright star in the UK’s jazz firmament, not only a trumpeter who can also play any number of other instruments but a singer, producer, band leader and label boss, too.
In July she released her debut album, the groovy and deeply soulful Yellow, on Warp imprint Movementt. It’s a record that, like many of those made by her peers, stretches the definition of jazz into something clubby and euphoric, in her case, via conscious soul, house and broken beat. ‘I have this mantra
I use that I want everything that I do, or everything that is released on my label to be inspired by,’ says Emma-Jean. ‘It’s “move the body, move the mind, move the soul”.
‘So, it’s got that visceral quality and the grooves, something that’s cerebral or musically forwardthinking and it’s got stuff that’s worth talking about. I have this song, Say Something, and that’s really important to me – I don’t want to just make noise.’
Her name is often mentioned alongside other London jazz stars who also studied at Trinity Laban – Moses Boyd, Cassie Kinoshi, Joe Armon-Jones and Nubya Garcia – but although Emma-Jean has played with some of them and acknowledges the existence of a community, she feels apart from it. ‘I have felt like an outsider my whole life, not just now, in this musical environment,’ she admits, ‘and I don’t think that’s ever going to go away. I grew up in a place that’s quite anti-arts and anti-academia, a very practical place where I felt like I didn’t fit in.
‘Growing up where I did and being on my own quite a lot and not having really found my people [meant] I felt quite isolated in that sense. But I think that’s been a good thing,’ she adds, ‘because I had to have a very strong sense of self from when I was very young.’
By ‘very young’, Emma-Jean means two-years-old. That’s when she decided she wanted to be an artist. ‘It’s a truth I’ve known and believed for my whole life,’ she declares, ‘and it’s never been shaken. There are definitely times when it’s been very difficult but I’ve always known this was the path for me – and my purpose.’
‘I have felt like an outsider my whole life, not just now in this musical environment’