Emma-Jean Thackray

Emma-Jean Thackray is one the U.K.'s genuine musical enigmas. She is a trumpeter and multi-instrumentalist, singer, composer, bandleader, producer, beatmaker, radio host, videographer, and DJ. She is the standard-bearer of a spiritually minded sound that readily channels the inspirations of '70s jazz fusion/jazz-funk and combines them with broken beat and house in a particularly dancefloor-oriented approach to modern jazz. Her earliest recordings include the EPs Walrus (2016), Ley Lines (2018), and Rain Dance (2020). Yellow (2021), her debut long-player, topped the U.K.'s official jazz and blues chart. Four years later, supported by Gilles Peterson's Brownswood label, Thackray released Weirdo, a mostly solitary follow-up on which she reckoned with grief and wrote openly about her neurodivergence.