Queer Jazz, founded by Tina Edwards and Arowah, exists to platform, nurture and celebrate the emerging queer jazz scene. For this night they have assembled a very special quartet of exceptional and experimental musicians from the emerging queer jazz scene.
Faye Thompson
Faye Thompson is a saxophone + electronics specialist from the North-East of England, now based in South-East London. As a devotee to interfacing her horn and her effects rig, she tends to have more in common with synthesists and sound designers than with other saxophonists, using her body and lungs as the oscillator at the heart of the whole system. Through her, influences from folk, dub, electronica, and modern classical are all digested to culminate in a taste for performance prioritising colour and space – with her jazz credentials tucked away in her back pocket for when a bit of shredding is called for.
Yumé NET
As our lives move more and more online, the boundaries between the natural and digital world become increasingly blurry. Yumé NET is interested in interrogating these boundaries. Whether it's in her research as a bioelectronics PhD student developing electronics that interface with the human nervous system. Or in her music, where she crafts coruscating and otherworldly musical landscapes that explore what it means to be human in an increasingly online society. Using a meld of modern jazz and experimental electronic music as her framework, Yumé sets out to tell stories about the very personal and very human aspects of her life (platonic love, trans joy, identity, bigotry, community) and how technology has transformed them. Tender but heavy, calculated but full of love, her music invites the listener to join her in exploring what lies between and beyond the 0s and 1s.
Jonathan Enser
Jonathan Enser (Nubiyan Twist), a multi-instrumentalist and composer. MATTERS UNKNOWN is the debut project from Jonathan Enser, multi-instrumentalist and composer, and the brass contributor to Nubiyan Twist. He has put together an ensemble that features some of the best musicians in the UK, including Nerija, Emma Jean Thackray, Nala Sinephro and Noya Rao
Arowah
Arowah sees the role of an artist as a philosopher, community builder and healer, with their work being a meditation on the social and the spiritual. Having danced around many scenes and styles including jazz, punk, experimental, classical, disco and dance, they have always remained uncategorizable, defined only by fluidity.
They move freely from composing for orchestra to performing on line-ups with some of the UK’s most exciting DIY and indie bands, and to playing Afro-Brazilian jazz mainstage at Brazil’s largest Black culture festival. A familiar face across several music scenes, they’ve performed with Angel Bat David, Rebecca Vasmant, Jalen Ngonda and Liv Winter, supported Ishmael Ensemble, Lady Blackbird, Steam Down and Public Service Broadcasting and been label mates with Sports Team, English Teacher, Binker and Moses and Theon Cross. Self-releasing various artist projects including Jelly Cleaver, B.H.A.M. and All Day Breakfast Cafe, they have amassed 17 million streams across all platforms.
