Miriam Balanescu speaks to Emma-Jean Thackray, just one of the many talented artists taking to the stage at We Out Here festival this August
Emma-Jean Thackray is one of the UK’s freshest jazz talents. Winner of multiple awards, a MOBO-nominee and hotly tipped by jazz legend Jools Holland himself, her musical roots stretch far back. “Hearing my family singing along to stuff and seeing the joy that it brings people – that’s what captured my imagination,” she says.
“My mom liked a lot of 80s soul, my dad is into pop-rock and my granddad is obsessed with Santana,” Emma-Jean continues. “He’s got twenty different Santana tee-shirts that he wears every day.”
Emma-Jean’s musical influences are multifarious. “Brass is such a ubiquitous sound in Yorkshire,” she explains. “The community feel that it brings has been something that I’ve taken forward throughout my whole musical life.” Channelling John Coltrane and her Daoist beliefs, her music is spiritually slanted. “If you want to bring meaning to stuff that you’re doing, it has to be about something that you believe in authentically. Tomorrow, I could make a techno record, the day after I could make free jazz. Both are just as much me.”
The positivity of Daoism has seeped into her music. “I hope I can bring people along in a positive way. That would be the ideal world, if we were all aware of our universal oneness – but then again, on paper, I probably look like a bit of a hippie.”
A multi-talented performer, Emma-Jean leaps between playing instruments (among them cornet, trumpet and piano), producing and band-leading. “All these different hats are coming from the same place: I have an idea in my head of a song, the colours are there – I just need to make it happen,” she says. “If I ever have to do the same thing, my attention span starts to wane.”
“If you’re always waiting for a muse, that can be quite naïve,” Emma-Jean adds. “You need to have the stuff in your toolkit to develop ideas. I can wake up in the middle of the night with a song in my head, like you see in books and documentaries, and sometimes it’s a lot of graft.”
Looking forward to the full return of live performance, Emma-Jean has taken to the stage at all We Out Here festivals to date. “It’s got this intimate feeling. It feels very much about the music, which not a lot of festivals are.” Expect the unexpected: “Improvisation is where the jazz is: the language that you have, the way that you’re listening to each other, the way you’re responding – that’s jazz. It has to be in real-time.”
We Out Here festival takes place 25-28 August, tickets available online now. Check out our full festivals guide here and hear from Corinne Bailey Rae (who performs at Cambridge Club Festival in June) here.
